Blockchain databases were designed to improve trust in centralized ecosystems, which dominate the market today, by introducing tamper-evidence features on top of a classical database. Compared to decentralized ledger technologies, blockchain databases are easier to use, and they can significantly reduce the operational and development costs. However, the existing blockchain databases do not equip multiple parties with tools to efficiently control common data written to the ledger. This paper describes Orion, a new open source blockchain database that introduces multi-sig and proof capabilities with extensive key-level access control, which enable parties to mutually control and validate a value written to the database. These unique capabilities, together with additional blockchain properties, provide users with features such as tamper-evidence, provenance, data lineage, authenticity, and non-repudiation, while using a standard data model and transactional APIs. We found our technology to be extremely useful in improving the integrity of a system and reducing mistakes, disputes, and fraud.

Fabric is a modular and extensible open-source system for deploying and operating permissioned blockchains and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by the Linux Foundation (www.hyperledger.org).

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is rapidly emerging as a new paradigm for automating complex business processes in secure and decentralised fashion. Currently, however, its wider adoption is hampered by scalability problems [3] rooted in an inherent tension between stringent consistency, security, and robustness requirements on one hand, and growing application demand coupled with high performance expectations on the other. For example, popular peer-to-peer DLTs based on proof-of-work consensus [4] can only improve the transaction throughput by degrading their security and consistency guarantees, which is unacceptable in the enterprise and mission-critical settings.