Hyperledger Fabric & Symbiont Assembly Comparison

In blockchain world, currently there are number of platforms available both in public and permissioned types. Thus while developing any blockchain solutions, it requires lot of knowledge on what is possible in which platforms, thereby selecting a better platform for the given usecase.

In this article, we will compare 2 permissioned blockchain platforms namely Hyperledger Fabric and Symbiont Assembly. Hyperledger Fabric is an open source platform maintained by Linux Foundation Hyperledger community. There are lot of sample applications and articles available to startwith. Symbiont Assembly is a proprietary to Symbiont and thus to develop applications on it might need support from them.

Now, let us look at the comparison between the 2 platforms based on several parameters.

1. Smart Contract Language

Fabric: Supports general purpose languages like Golang, Java, Javascript etc. Thus it is easy for any developer to start exploring it.

Assembly: It uses a domain specific language called as SymPL which is a Python and Haskell based implementation.

2. Open Source

Fabric: Yes, it is an open source platform which rich developer community

Assembly: No, it is a properitary to Symbiont. So there is a licensing involved when you want to develop an application using it. There is a need to create an account to get access to their documentation and SDK.

3. Data sharing

Fabric: Data is shared with only channel members. Data can be shared only with subset of channel members using private data collections

Symbiont: Data is encrypted and shared with all the nodes. But only secure channel members can decrypt it. Here these channels concept is different and it allows dynamically add, remove members using smart contract. Best thing is you can literally have thousands of channels depending on your node configuration.

4. Orderers/Notary

Fabric: Transactions are ordered by orderers

Assembly: No orderer concept. Every node participate in consesus and data gets stored in each node smart log.

5. Consesus

Fabric: Pluggable Consesus: CFT, BFT

Assembly: Byzantine Fault Tolerance(BFT, a type of PBFT derived from BFT-SMaRt)

6. State DB for smart contract data

Fabric: LevelDB(Default) or CouchDB(NoSQL)

Assembly: Postgres DB(SQL)

7. Targeted Industries

Fabric: A broad range of industry usecaseslike banking, finance, insurance, healthcare, supplychain etc.

Assembly: Focused on Financial Services

8. Document Storage

Fabric: It is recommended to store mainly hash of the document in on-chain rather than document itself.

Assembly: Unlimited on-chain data storage. Allows storing not only metadata. but rather any data or documents

9. TPS

Fabric: TPS lies in the range of few thousands based on network and node configuration

Assembly: TPS is very high, which ranges in 10s of thousands

With this comparison, I think it will be easy for developers and architects to choose a platform for their use-case.

Hope, you liked this article. Thank you