Hyperledger has announced the latest version of Hyperledger Sawtooth - Version 1.1; Sawtooth 1.0 was initially launched in January 2018. The protocol enables the smart contract deployment while separating between the application level and the core system level.
The new version features improved consensus interface, new consensus options, support for WebAssembly smart contracts, and improvements to privacy and performance.
Source: Hyperledger
Improved consensus interface and new consensus options - The team has re-architected the consensus interface to improve the ease of integration. Consensus protocols are now implemented as separate processes called “consensus engines”, which enables more consensus options for Sawtooth.
In the new interface, the team has ported the existing Sawtooth consensus options, and two new classical consensus options have also been added. The state of these consensus options, according to the company, are as below.
Developer Mode - stable
PoET-Simulator - Crash Fault Tolerant, stable
PoET-SGX - under development
Raft - alpha
PBFT - under development
Support for WebAssembly smart contracts, Sawtooth Sabre - The new version features a new smart contract engine 'Sawtooth Sabre' that enables the execution of WebAssembly-based smart contracts, where WebAssembly (WASM) is a new web standard developed at the W3C with participation from major corporations like Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
"The Sawtooth Sabre project leverages an existing open source WASM interpreter from the broader blockchain community. This on-chain interpreter enables developers to write their code in a variety of languages, compile it down to WebAssembly, and then deploy it directly to the Sawtooth blockchain." wrote the company.
To read the full list of new features and improvements, you can visit the official Release Notes
here.
You can read the official announcement
here.