Permissioned blockchains receives a lot of attention as naturally evolved alternative to permissionless blockchains, the blockchains where anyone is allowed to participate, e.g. Bitcoin, Etherium. The Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) facilitates consistent replication of an arbitrary application state via an abstraction of an append-only persistent log of transactions, called a ledger. In order to maintain high levels of security and trust required by the enterprise, DLT systems typically follow the permissioned ledger approach.

The blockchain is a distributed system consisting of many nodes that communicate with each other. The blockchain runs programs called chaincode, holds state and ledger data, and executes transactions. The chaincode is the central element as transactions are operations invoked on the chaincode. Transactions have to be "endorsed" and only endorsed transactions may be committed and have an effect on the state. There may exist one or more special chaincodes for management functions and parameters, collectively called system chaincodes.

The HyperLedger project (HLP) is an open-source industry backed initiative seeking to develop a large-scale permissioned blockchain infrastructure. To achieve scalability, the HLP architecture decouples the transaction logic execution and transaction ordering activities between two separate sets of entities called peers, and orderers respectively.