Blockchain Usecase - Personal Management Records

Question

I am building a Blockchain with the following objective :

Users should be able to store all personal records in their own channel and share the ledger with various third parties (mostly organisations with users in them) as and when required to read and write to the ledger. For example, me as a user wants to have my marks sheets on the ledger and add my school peer to write or read from it.

The Client application (mobile) should be able to do following:

• As an invidual:

  • create a channel

  • add records

  • grant access to other parties to read and write

• As a school

  • read records of a particular user and read and write

1. Is it true that Hyperledger Fabric is the only platform which lets create multiple channels?

2. How scalable is the architecture if the number of users grow and so does the number of individual channels? 

3. Any sample application i can refer to if i choose to go with composer?

Answer 1

1. Channels is a mechanism by which a set of components within a blockchain network can communicate and transact privately. Conceptually you can think of channels as being like groups of friends (though the members of a channel certainly don’t need to be friends!). A person might have several groups of friends, with each group having activities they do together. These groups might be totally separate (a group of work friends as compared to a group of hobby friends), or there can be crossover between them. Nevertheless, each group is its own entity, with “rules” of a kind. This concept of Channels in Hyperledger Fabric is important when hosting multiple ledgers or multiple chaincodes on a peer.

2. The number of peers required to endorse a transaction is driven by the endorsement policy that is specified at chaincode deployment time. When the population of the endorsing peers is increased and load of endorsing proposals is distributed across the larger set, the Hyperledger Fabric system can satisfy higher requirement. If you have multiple channels executing concurrently, you could consider having separate endorsing peers for the various channels, as that will have a similar affect as the strategy above. Thus, adding more peers to the channel will decrease the number of transactions per second that system can process.

3. These are the sample Composer applications -> https://github.com/hyperledger/composer-sample-applications and the Composer sample networks -> https://github.com/hyperledger/composer-sample-networks