Hyperledger Besu

Deploy Hyperledger Besu for permissioned enterprise blockchain networks. Compare Besu's QBFT consensus, privacy features, and EEA compliance for consortium applications.

Hyperledger Besu is the leading open-source enterprise Ethereum client, enabling organizations to build permissioned consortium networks with full Ethereum compatibility. Backed by the Linux Foundation and designed for enterprise-grade security, privacy, and governance.

Which enterprises benefit from Hyperledger Besu?

Financial Consortiums

Banks and financial institutions building trade finance, settlement networks, and cross-border payment systems with known participants.

Supply Chain Networks

Manufacturers, retailers, and logistics providers creating transparent, auditable supply chains with controlled access and data privacy.

Healthcare Alliances

Healthcare organizations sharing patient data, research, and medical records while maintaining HIPAA compliance and access controls.

Government Networks

Public sector agencies building inter-agency networks for citizen services, voting systems, and regulatory compliance platforms.

Enterprise Trust: Hyperledger Besu provides the security and governance features enterprises need while maintaining full compatibility with Ethereum's development ecosystem.

What is hyperledger besu?

Hyperledger Besu is an open-source Ethereum client developed under the Apache 2.0 license and written in Java. It was started by the Linux Foundation under the Hyperledger umbrella project. This project is largely known for its Hyperledger Fabric component, which is one of the most prominent permissioned protocols in the blockchain space. While they both exist under the Hyperledger umbrella, Fabric and Besu have little in common in terms of the underlying technology. More specifically, whereas Fabric is a private protocol designed from the ground up to support enterprise-grade solutions, Besu seeks to utilize the public Ethereum network. Besu can run on the public network or on private networks, as well as on a number of testnets. The project, formerly known as Pantheon, joined the Hyperledger family in 2019, adding for the first time a public blockchain implementation to Hyperledger's suite of private blockchain frameworks.

Features

Hyperledger Besu's main features include:

Permissioning: Contrary to the Ethereum Mainnet, a permissioned network allows only specified nodes to join the network and to participate.
The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM): The EVM is what enables the deployment and execution of Ethereum smart contracts.
Privacy: The Private Transaction Manager makes it possible to keep transactions between predefined parties private from other users of the network.
User-facing API: The client provides mainnet Ethereum and EEA JSON-RPC APIs over HTTP and WebSocket protocols. It also supports a GraphQL API.

Hyperledger Besu's enterprise features are designed to adhere to the requirements of the Enteprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) client specification.

Consensus mechanisms

A consensus mechanism defines the rules for the nodes in a blockchain network to reach an agreement on the current state of the blockchain ledger.

Besu comes with several consensus mechanisms. As an Ethereum implementation, Proof of Work (PoW) is a given, but the Proof of Authority (PoA) options are more suitable for enterprise projects. These can be used when participants know each other and there is a level of trust between them, e.g. in a permissioned consortium network.

PoA is a light and practical consensus mechanism that gives a small and designated number of blockchain actors the power to validate transactions within the network and to create new blocks. This results in faster block times and a much greater transaction throughput.

SettleMint's Enterprise Ethereum networks always use QBFT

In QBFT networks, a set of validator nodes is responsible for maintaining consensus on the blockchain. Similar to IBFT, these validators participate in a round-based process to propose and validate blocks. At the start of each round, one validator is chosen as the proposer. This proposer puts forward a new block to be added to the chain.

The remaining validators review the proposed block and share their votes. If a supermajority (at least 66%) of the validators agree that the block is valid, it is finalized and committed to the chain. Like IBFT 2.0, QBFT achieves immediate finality , blocks are either committed or discarded in a single round. There are no forks, and every valid block becomes a permanent part of the main chain.

QBFT enhances performance and fault tolerance over IBFT by introducing optimizations for large validator sets, making it better suited for enterprise-grade and high-throughput networks.

When you deploy a Hyperledger Besu blockchain network on SettleMint, it should be Byzantine fault tolerant.

More information on Hyperledger Besu can be found in the official Hyperledger Besu documentation.