Our focus for the new edition

We, this book's original team of authors, have joined forces again to write this new edition. While this book and many of its chapters are dedicated to a technical audience, we wanted to ensure that this book also addresses the linkages to business models and structures. As an industry, blockchain has been in a constant state of flux, resulting in shifting priorities and evolving use cases by businesses attempting to leverage the technology and monetize the resulting constructs. When we released the first edition, blockchain was a technology associated with disruptive decentralized financial technologies, such as cryptocurrency technologies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, and many other competing blockchain-related frameworks. Hyperledger is one of the family of frameworks aimed to address the requirements of industry-specific permissioned blockchain business networks.

As blockchain technology matures, the industry itself is shifting, and so is its consumption by businesses, where the conversation has shifted from proofs of concept and experimentation to production-grade deployments and scale. So, in this edition, we will discuss issues such as business models, risk models, consortium structures, and governance to illustrate clearly how the challenges and success criteria go beyond mere technology implementation. Regulated industries are contemplating models of coexistence with current systems as blockchain takes center stage, with a promise to flatten business processes across industries and facilitate huge cost savings for all consortium network members in terms of operations and disintermediation costs.

With this shift in conversation, we have collectively updated our material not only to reflect industry requirements but also technology examples, code samples, and core technical artefacts to ensure you are also up to date with both the blockchain rhetoric and the technology stack needed to implement a viable solution. With blockchain evolving into a mainstream technology, the market for this technology and skilled professionals is growing rapidly. It is our goal to help ensure that our audience is upskilled to meet the challenges of tomorrow, while retaining the historical and evolutionary provenance of Hyperledger Fabric as a building block.

We have added content around business considerations, risk models, and overall blockchain protocol commercialization, with a hope that technical and business audiences alike can have a holistic understanding of using the technology and building a technology platform. We have drawn from our collective experience in an effort to relate how business imperatives are closely tied to technology design choices.

These design choices have direct implications for the cost and scalability of the blockchain network design and solution. The design choices include gathering business requirements, risk controls, risk modeling, compliance risk management, and other business-related functions. Business design considerations have a direct impact on network growth and operations, which are embedded in governance tasks such as network management, onboarding, and technical design elements like data obfuscation, data controls, privacy, key management, and so on. As a result, these are very important considerations when launching a blockchain-powered business network. Our attempt will be to address these in detail, arming our audience with the knowledge and skills to apply the right approaches to blockchain projects.

We sincerely hope you benefit from and enjoy these updates.