What’s New for Oracle Blockchain Platform

Here’s an overview of the new features and enhancements that were recently added to Oracle Blockchain Platform. This document is organized by the date a specific feature or capability became available.

Topics

Release 22.2.1 — April 2022

Feature Description
Hyperledger Fabric v2.2.4 upgrades

You can now upgrade existing instances of Oracle Blockchain Platform that are based on Hyperledger Fabric v1.4.7 to Hyperledger Fabric v2.2.4. You can upgrade instances that are part of a network that includes a single organization. To upgrade the platform version of a network with multiple organizations, contact Oracle support.

For more information, see: Upgrade the Platform Version of an Instance.

Hyperledger Fabric v2.2.4 uses a new chaincode life cycle and a new model that separates chaincode packages from chaincode definitions. You might need to update chaincode and client applications to work with the new version of Hyperledger Fabric. To learn more about the impact of a new version of Hyperledger Fabric on existing applications, see Updating Applications for a New Platform Version.

Reliable callbacks for event subscriptions

Oracle Blockchain Platform now supports more reliable delivery for subscribed events. If a callback fails, it is retried based on an exponential backoff policy. When you subscribe to chaincode events, you can specify the maximum number of times that a callback will be retried after a communication failure.

See: Subscribe to an Event in the REST API documentation.

Blockchain App Builder for Oracle Blockchain Platform v22.2.1
The new version of Blockchain App Builder includes the following features:
  • Support for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), including automatically generated methods and SDKs for NFTs.
  • A new command for applying patches to Blockchain App Builder projects.
  • New methods for filtering and paginating query results.
  • New SDK methods that support cross-chaincode function calls.
  • A local testing environment that is now based on Hyperledger Fabric v2.4.
  • Enhanced account creation for fractional fungible tokens, which includes an additional step to associate the token account with the token ID.
Download Blockchain App Builder from the Developer Tools tab in your blockchain instance.

See: Using Blockchain App Builder

The following table outlines changes that might cause incompatibilites with previous releases of Oracle Blockchain Platform.

Change Notes
Hyperledger Fabric v2.2.4 does not automatically vendor the Go chaincode shim dependency as previous versions did. You must manually vendor the Go chaincode shim. See Vendor the Shim for Go Chaincodes in Write a Chaincode.
Hyperledger Fabric v2.2.4 requires Go version 1.16.7 or later. For instances based on Hyperledger Fabric v2.2.4 that run Go chaincodes, upgrade to Go version 1.16.7 or later.
Multiple versions of the Hyperledger Fabric SDKs are available. Use a version of the SDK that is compatible with the version of Hyperledger Fabric that your instance is based on. For instances based on Hyperledger Fabric v2.2.4, use versions that are compatible with the Hyperledger Fabric v2.2 long-term support (LTS) release. Oracle Blockchain Platform was verified to work with the following versions for Hyperledger Fabric v2.2.4:
  • Node.js SDK v2.2.9
  • Java SDK v2.2.2
  • Go SDK v1.0.0

For more information, see: Use the Hyperledger Fabric SDKs to Develop Applications

Release 21.4.1 — November 2021

Feature Description
Hyperledger Fabric v2.2.4
You can now create instances of Oracle Blockchain Platform based on Hyperledger Fabric v2.2.4, which includes the following features:
  • A new chaincode life cycle, with new procedures for installing chaincode on peers and starting it on a channel.
  • A new model that separates chaincode packages from chaincode definitions, which allows for more flexibility when deploying chaincodes.
  • Decentralized governance, so that multiple organizations must agree to chaincode parameters before deployment, instead of using one group of parameters set by the founder.

See: Deploy and Manage Chaincodes on Hyperledger Fabric 2.2.4
Private data collection enhancements

You can specify an endorsement policy to control access to a private data collection. You can also automatically prevent members of organizations that are not part of the collection from reading or writing private data.

See: Add Private Data Collections
User-initiated upgrades

When a new release of Oracle Blockchain Platform is available, you can now use the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure console or the REST APIs to upgrade an instance at the time you choose.

See: Upgrade an Instance

Release 21.3.2 — August 2021

Feature Description
Blockchain App Builder for Oracle Blockchain Platform v21.3.2
The new version of Blockchain App Builder includes the following features:
  • Exclusive infrastructure optimizations for high throughput for token applications.
  • Flexibility to add multiple token admins during chaincode instantiation. See: Tokenization Support.
  • New API to get all accounts that are owned by a specific user.
Download Blockchain App Builder from the Developer Tools tab in your blockchain instance.

See: Using Blockchain App Builder
Optimized transaction validation for token-based apps

Oracle Blockchain Platform is now optimized to avoid Multiversion Concurrency Control (MVCC) errors and to increase throughput for token-based apps.

See: Deploying and Testing Token Chaincode
Tokenization sample

Oracle Blockchain Platform now provides a sample tokenization app on the Developer Tools tab of the service console. The sample illustrates the complete life cycle of a fractional fungible token.

See: What Are Chaincode Samples?
Enabling rich history for private data collections

You can now use the service console to enable rich history for private data collections.

See: Enable and Configure the Rich History Database
What's New in the service console You can now access information on new features and enhancements in the console.

Release 21.2.1 — June 2021

Feature Description
Blockchain App Builder for Oracle Blockchain Platform v21.2.3
The new version of Blockchain App Builder includes the following features:
  • Support for fractional fungible tokens, including tokenization of assets and automatic generation of token classes and methods necessary for token lifecycle management.
  • New validation features in Visual Studio Code, including command validation, syntax checking, and context-sensitive help.
  • Generation of equivalent CLI commands from queries in Visual Studio Code.
  • Automated upgrade of existing chaincode projects to use the new features.
Download Blockchain App Builder from the Developer Tools tab in your blockchain instance.

See: Using Blockchain App Builder

Release 21.2.1 — April 2021

Feature Description
Node OU (organizational unit) support

You can now import Node OU information when you add a Fabric organization to the Oracle Blockchain Platform network.

See: Create a Fabric Organization's Certificates File

REST proxy enrollment enhancements

New REST API endpoints support creating REST Proxy enrollments and adding users to enrollments.

See: Nodes REST Endpoints
Rich history database supports private data collections

In addition to ledger transactions, the rich history database now can store data from private data collections. Private data collections store data that is shared among a subset of peers on a channel.

To activate this feature or for more information, contact Oracle Support.

Release 21.1.2 — February 2021

Feature Description
Scaling of load balancer is supported

For enterprise instances, you can now choose between the 100Mbps and 400Mbps load balancer shapes.

See: Scale Your Instance
Rich history database supports blockchain tables

You can now store rich history data in blockchain tables. You can also configure rich history at the channel level as well as the instance level, get rich history replication status, and use channel policies to control access to rich history data.

See: Enable and Configure the Rich History Database
Blockchain App Builder for Oracle Blockchain Platform v1.4

A new version is available which offers support for embedded assets and derived keys.

See: Using Blockchain App Builder
Block validation utility
Block validation can be run from a REST API endpoint. It:
  • Parses local blockchain ledger files.
  • Verifies the integrity and data format.
  • Collects statistics such as block size, and number of transactions.

See Block Validation REST API
Audit Log

You can retrieve audit log information from a REST API endpoint. The audit log is a record of administrative console activity, including actions related to channels, organizations, nodes, and chaincode.

See Audit Log REST API

Release 20.3.3 — December 2020

Feature Description
Blockchain App Builder for Oracle Blockchain Platform v1.3

A new version is available which offers support for Windows. Download it from Developer Tools tab in your blockchain instance.

See: Using Blockchain App Builder
Running Solidity smart contracts with EVM on Oracle Blockchain Platform.

We now supply a walkthrough for using Solidity smart contracts with EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) deployed as a chaincode on Oracle Blockchain Platform.

See: Run Solidity Smart Contracts with EVM on Oracle Blockchain Platform

Release 20.3.3 — November 2020

Feature Description
Fine-grained access control sample

Oracle Blockchain Platform now provides a new version of the marbles sample on the Developer Tools tab of the console. This sample includes a library of functions that chaincode developers can use to create access control lists for chaincode functions.

See Using the Fine-Grained Access Control Library Sample.

Release 20.3.3 — October 2020

Feature Description
Blockchain App Builder for Oracle Blockchain Platform v1.2.1

A new component of Oracle Blockchain Platform to help speed up development of custom blockchain applications. It helps to expedite chaincode development, testing and deployment with a powerful CLI and Visual Studio Code extension. And it enables automated chaincode generation with a no-code/low-code approach for professionals looking to quickly model blockchain applications based on a declarative specification of the assets and their behaviors. Download it from Developer Tools tab in your blockchain instance.

See: Using Blockchain App Builder

Release 20.3.1 — July 2020

Feature Description
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (Gen 2) support
  • Each instance is deployed across 3 availability domains to provide higher resilience.
  • Dynamic scalability allows you to add peer nodes or increase peer OCPUs as needed, add more replicas of other node types, or to expand your storage in 1TB increments.
  • Idle mode support for times when you have uneven usage scenarios. You can pause your instance which drops the usage reporting to 25% of the allocated OCPUs.
Integration with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure This release of Oracle Blockchain Platform is tightly integrated with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This means the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure features such as compartment quotas, events and monitoring, command line interfaces, and SDKs are all available to use with Oracle Blockchain Platform.

See the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure documentation for additional information on how to use the platform: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation.

Supports Raft consensus

In previous releases Kafka was the only available consensus type of orderer. As of this release, Raft consensus is supported and Kafka is no longer supported.

With this feature, orderers from multiple organizations can join a cluster, and channels can use different Raft orderer clusters to distribute load and provide better scalability.

See What is the Ordering Service
REST API updates

There are a set of new REST APIs for Oracle Blockchain Platform Administrative and Application Operations. See: REST API for Oracle Blockchain Platform.

Serveral of the previous (v1) Application Operations REST APIs are still compatible with this release (with exceptions outlined in New, Changed and Deprecated APIs). The new (v2) Applications Operations REST APIs should be migrated to when possible.

Improved scaling

After you've provisioned your Blockchain Platform, you can scale the OCPU capacity up or down to meet your evolving needs.

You can also scale individual components of your Blockchain Platform such as adding an additional orderer node, or adding storage capacity.

See Scale Your Instance.

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