  Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a flexible permissioned blockchain platform
designed for business applications beyond the basic digital coin addressed by
Bitcoin and other existing networks. A key property of HLF is its
extensibility, and in particular the support for multiple ordering services for
building the blockchain. Nonetheless, the version 1.0 was launched in early
2017 without an implementation of a Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) ordering
service. To overcome this limitation, we designed, implemented, and evaluated a
BFT ordering service for HLF on top of the BFT-SMaRt state machine
replication/consensus library, implementing also optimizations for wide-area
deployment. Our results show that HLF with our ordering service can achieve up
to ten thousand transactions per second and write a transaction irrevocably in
the blockchain in half a second, even with peers spread in different
continents.
