Intel has revealed a new project, called “Sawtooth Lake”, where it is developing a “highly modular” platform for building, deploying and running distributed ledgers.
Intel has also released its code for Sawtooth Lake, also known as IntelLedger , and will be following up with a formal incubation proposal at Hyperledger, the open source blockchain tech project at the Linux Foundation.
In distributed ledgers, consensus is the process of building agreement among a group of mutually distrusting participants. Sawtooth Lake abstracts the core concepts of consensus, isolates consensus from transaction semantics, and provides two consensus protocols, “Proof of Elapses Time” (PoET) and Quorum Voting.
PoET is a lottery protocol that builds on trusted execution environments (TEEs) provided by Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) to address the needs of large populations of participants. Quorum Voting is an adaptation of the Ripple and Stellar consensus protocols and serves to address the needs of applications that require immediate transaction finality.
Sawtooth Lake also provides a data model and transaction language that is implemented in a “transaction family”. Intel describes the utility of the transaction families.
While we expect users to build custom transaction families that reflect the unique requirements of their ledgers, we provide three transaction families that are sufficient for building, testing and deploying a marketplace for digital assets:
EndPointRegistry - A transaction family for registering ledger services.
IntegerKey - A transaction family used for testing deployed ledgers.
MarketPlace - A transaction family for buying, selling and trading digital assets.This set of transaction families provides an “out of the box” ledger that implements a fully functional marketplace for digital assets.
The Sawtooth Lake platform is distributed in source code form with an Apache license, and is available for usage in setting up a distributed ledger.
