Tech giant Intel recently announced a new project, called “Sawtooth Lake” – a highly modular platform for building, deploying and running distributed ledgers.

Generally, distributed ledgers consists of three basic components, which includes a data model that captures the current state of the ledger, a language of transactions that change the ledger state, and a protocol used to build consensus among participants around which transactions will be accepted by the ledger.

Intel explains:

“In Sawtooth Lake, the data model and transaction language are implemented in a “transaction family”. While we expect users to build custom transaction families that reflect the unique requirements of their ledgers, we provide three transaction families that are sufficient for building, testing and deploying a marketplace for digital assets:

• EndPointRegistry - A transaction family for registering ledger services.
• IntegerKey - A transaction family used for testing deployed ledgers.
• MarketPlace - A transaction family for buying, selling and trading digital assets”

It added that these set of transaction families provide an “out of the box” ledger that implements a fully functional marketplace for digital assets.

For achieving consensus, Sawtooth Lake abstracts the core concepts of consensus, isolates consensus from transaction semantics, and provides two consensus protocols: “Proof of Elapses Time” (PoET) and Quorum Voting:

• PoET is a lottery protocol that builds on trusted execution environments (TEEs) provided by Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) to address the needs of large populations of participants.
• Quorum Voting is an adaptation of the Ripple and Stellar consensus protocols and serves to address the needs of applications that require immediate transaction finality.

Intel warns users that the project is intended for experimental usage and is not secure at the moment and recommends not to use it for security sensitive applications.

The company has shown interest in blockchain technology in the past couple of months. It is actively involved the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project – a collaborative effort to advance blockchain technology by identifying and addressing important features and currently missing requirements, for a cross-industry open standard for distributed ledgers that can transform the way business transactions are conducted globally.