Along with the world state, the ledger also has a Blockchain that
stores all the historical data, and once stored, the data becomes
immutable. As shown in Figure 13.1, the Blockchain provides the
world state as the latest or current state of Blockchain, as follows:
Figure 13.1: Hyperledger Fabric Ledger
The world state database is a pluggable solution that can be
configured either with the default LevelDB option or CouchDB. The
latter comes with more features as the storage as JSON, rich query
options etc., that is preferrable for production.
13.1.2 Identity
Identity is paramount in any Blockchain network. Fabric has many
different actors such as orderers, peers, and administrators, and
each of them have separate roles and access rights associated with
their identities. In order to achieve this, Fabric uses the same public
key infrastructure, public and private keys, digital signature,
certificate authorities, and revocation of certificates, some of which,
are already described in Chapter 1.
13.1.3 Membership Service Provider (MSP)