Drunix vs Hyperledger Fabric: 5 architecture changes for Indian tokenization teams (2026)
Summary. In June 2026 the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) open-sourced Drunix, an enhanced fork of Hyperledger Fabric released under the Apache 2.0 licence and published on GitHub. Drunix keeps backward compatibility with Fabric v2.5.x but changes 5 things a platform team cares about: it splits the peer into Lite Peers (endorsement only) and Committing Peers (validation and ledger commit), decouples validation into a stateless service, adds YugabyteDB as a SQL state database alongside CouchDB and LevelDB, uses a KeyDB transient store for private data, and keeps a Raft ordering service. The context is scale: UPI ran 22.72 billion transactions worth ₹28.92 lakh crore in June 2026, and NPCI wants the same operational discipline applied to tokenization and multi-organisation networks. This is NPCI's second blockchain project after Falcon, its Kubernetes deployment helper. For Indian fintech and BFSI teams weighing a tokenization stack, the practical question is not "Drunix or Fabric" in the abstract, but which Fabric lineage to bet on, because Hyperledger's own roadmap is moving toward Fabric-X, a different architecture benchmarked far above classic Fabric's throughput. This guide breaks down the changes, the trade-offs, and where the India tokenization market actually stands after the Asset Tokenisation (Regulation) Bill, 2026 was introduced in the Rajya Sabha on 14 March 2026.
"Through Drunix, we aim to accelerate blockchain readiness by providing the ecosystem with foundational technologies that support experimentation, interoperability and real-world adoption. This initiative reflects our commitment to strengthening India's digital infrastructure while contributing to the global advancement of open-source innovation," said Vishal Kanvaty, Chief Technology Officer, NPCI, on the launch.
What Drunix is, and why NPCI built it
NPCI is the operator behind UPI, RuPay, IMPS and AePS. Those rails clear billions of transactions a month, so when NPCI ships infrastructure, the design assumptions come from production load, not a whitepaper. Drunix is an open-source blockchain platform for building tokenization platforms, digital asset ecosystems and multi-organisation networks. It is an enhanced fork of Hyperledger Fabric, the enterprise blockchain framework maintained under the Linux Foundation.
The reason a fork exists at all is that classic Fabric bundles too much into one process. In stock Fabric, a peer endorses transactions, validates blocks, and commits them to the ledger, all inside the same node. That coupling is fine for a pilot with a handful of organisations. It becomes the bottleneck when a network grows to dozens of members and the validation load spikes during settlement windows. Drunix pulls those responsibilities apart so each can scale on its own.
Drunix is NPCI's second open-source blockchain contribution. The first was Falcon, released earlier in 2026 as a Hyperledger Fabric deployment helper for Kubernetes, published on GitHub under the GPL-3.0 licence. Falcon handles the operational problem of standing up and upgrading Fabric networks on Kubernetes with templatised Helm charts. Drunix sits a layer below that, at the runtime and transaction-processing layer. Together they cover deployment and execution, which is why NPCI frames them as a pair rather than competing projects.
The 5 architecture changes that matter
Most coverage of Drunix stops at "enhanced fork of Hyperledger Fabric." That phrase hides the parts a senior engineer needs. Here are the concrete changes, drawn from NPCI's published component design.
1. Peer segregation: Lite Peers and Committing Peers
Classic Fabric runs endorsement, validation and commit in one peer. Drunix separates the roles. A Lite Peer handles endorsement and transaction simulation only; it is stateless and horizontally scalable, so you can add Lite Peers behind a load balancer during heavy endorsement traffic. A Committing Peer does the multiversion concurrency control (MVCC) checks, validation, and ledger commitment. Splitting these means a spike in endorsement requests no longer starves the commit path, and vice versa.
2. a stateless validation service
Drunix decouples validation into a separate, stateless service rather than a step buried inside the peer. Stateless services are the easy case for horizontal scaling and for Kubernetes autoscaling, because any instance can handle any request and you can add or remove replicas without shuffling data. In a tokenization network where validation cost rises with the number of participating organisations, this is the difference between scaling one component and re-provisioning every peer.
3. YugabyteDB as a SQL state database
Fabric's state database is either LevelDB (fast key-value, no rich queries) or CouchDB (JSON documents, rich queries, slower). Drunix adds YugabyteDB support alongside both. YugabyteDB is a distributed SQL database, so it brings relational queries and horizontal scale to on-chain state. For an asset-tokenization platform that has to answer questions like "every token held by this custodian, grouped by asset class," a SQL state store is a materially better fit than iterating a key-value ledger in application code.
4. a KeyDB transient store for private data
Fabric's private data collections keep confidential data off the shared ledger and share it only with authorised organisations, which costs extra network round-trips. Drunix uses a KeyDB transient store to hold private data and to batch those operations, reducing per-transaction network calls. In a consortium of banks where most flows carry data only two members should see, cutting the round-trips directly improves settlement latency.
5. Raft ordering and Fabric v2.5.x compatibility
Drunix keeps a Raft ordering service for consensus and stays backward compatible with Hyperledger Fabric v2.5.x. Smart contracts (chaincode) run in Go, Java, JavaScript and TypeScript, the same languages Fabric teams already use. That compatibility is the quiet headline: a team with an existing Fabric v2.5.x deployment can adopt Drunix's scaling changes without rewriting chaincode or retraining engineers.
Here is how the components map:
| Component | Role in the Drunix architecture |
|---|---|
| Lite Peer | Endorsement and transaction simulation; stateless; horizontally scalable |
| Committing Peer | Validation, MVCC checks, and ledger commitment |
| YugabyteDB | SQL state database for enterprise query workloads |
| KeyDB | Transient store for private-data sharing and batching |
| Raft ordering service | Consensus and block ordering |
| Chaincode runtime | Smart contracts in Go, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript |
Drunix vs Hyperledger Fabric vs Fabric-X
The real decision is not binary. Hyperledger's own community is building Fabric-X, a redesigned architecture on the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust roadmap. Fabric-X decomposes the peer into independent microservices, replaces Raft with the Arma Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocol, and moves from multi-channel isolation to a single-channel-with-namespaces model. The roadmap (April 2026) reports a benchmark above 400,000 transactions per second in a 4-party, 4-shard deployment, against classic Fabric's roughly 3,500 TPS Raft ceiling. Fabric-X was available as an MVP via chaindeploy v0.4.0 as of May 2026, described as production-ready for pilots and still maturing for regulated workloads.
That framing matters because Drunix and Fabric-X answer the same problem, throughput and scale, with different bets. Drunix enhances the proven v2.5.x line with Raft and a familiar peer model, so it is lower-risk for a team that already runs Fabric. Fabric-X is a more radical redesign with a higher ceiling and a BFT ordering service that tolerates up to one-third of orderer nodes acting maliciously, but it is younger and less battle-tested for regulated deployments. Fabric v3.0 already introduced a BFT ordering service for teams that want fault tolerance without the full Fabric-X rewrite.
| Vector | Drunix (NPCI) | Classic Hyperledger Fabric v2.5.x | Fabric-X |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peer model | Split into Lite and Committing peers | Single monolithic peer | Peer decomposed into microservices |
| Consensus / ordering | Raft | Raft (v2.5.x); BFT in v3.0 | Arma BFT |
| Throughput posture | Optimised over v2.5.x, horizontally scaled | ~3,500 TPS Raft ceiling | 400,000+ TPS in a 4-party, 4-shard benchmark |
| State database | LevelDB, CouchDB, YugabyteDB | LevelDB, CouchDB | Distributed committer service |
| Maturity for regulated use | New (June 2026), on the v2.5.x base | Mature and widely deployed | MVP (May 2026), maturing |
| Migration cost from Fabric | Low; v2.5.x compatible | None (it is Fabric) | Higher; new model |
When Drunix is the right call, and when it is not
Drunix fits when three things are true. You already run, or plan to run, a Hyperledger Fabric consortium; your bottleneck is validation and commit under load rather than raw ordering throughput; and you value staying on a compatible, familiar codebase over chasing the highest published benchmark. A domestic tokenization or multi-bank settlement network in India fits that profile well, and the NPCI provenance is a governance signal that matters to Indian regulators and bank risk committees.
Drunix is the wrong call when your ceiling is genuinely six figures of TPS, in which case Fabric-X's microservice model is the architecture the throughput numbers point to, or when you have no Fabric footprint at all and could pick any ledger. For a greenfield build with no consortium requirement, an engineering team should still run the honest build-versus-adopt comparison rather than defaulting to any Fabric lineage.
| Decision factor | Adopt Drunix | Stay on classic Fabric v2.5.x | Move toward Fabric-X |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to production | Fast if already on Fabric | Fastest (no change) | Slower (new model, pilots) |
| Scaling bottleneck | Validation and commit | Not yet a bottleneck | Ordering throughput at scale |
| Risk appetite | Low to moderate | Lowest | Higher (younger stack) |
| Query needs | Relational (YugabyteDB) | Key-value or JSON | Distributed committer |
| Governance signal | NPCI-backed, India context | Neutral | Community roadmap |
The honest engineering read: for most Indian BFSI teams already invested in Fabric, Drunix is a low-friction upgrade path, not a reason to rebuild. The real cost of any blockchain platform is rarely the ledger. It is the integration with core banking, the key management, and the operational runbook.
Where tokenization in India actually stands
The technology arrived before the law. India does not yet have an enacted asset-tokenization statute. The Asset Tokenisation (Regulation) Bill, 2026 was introduced in the Rajya Sabha on 14 March 2026 by Member of Parliament Raghav Chadha as a Private Member's Bill. It runs to 27 sections across 11 chapters and proposes a statutory framework for the issuance, trading, custody and settlement of tokenized real-world assets, from real estate and commodities to carbon credits and intellectual property, under a multi-regulator model.
Two caveats keep this accurate. First, a Private Member's Bill is a proposal, not law: since Independence only 14 such bills have become law, and the last one passed both Houses in 1970, so treat the Bill as a signal of direction rather than a compliance deadline. Second, the regulatory home for a tokenized asset would follow the underlying asset under the proposed model: securities tokens toward the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), payment and stable-value arrangements toward the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), and sectoral assets toward their statutory regulators. The RBI has separately explored tokenizing settlements through its wholesale central bank digital currency, the digital rupee.
For a platform team this means the compliance surface is provisional and multi-headed. Where a tokenization network processes personal data, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP) already applies today regardless of the tokenization Bill's fate, so consent, data minimisation and storage design belong in the architecture from day one. Anyone scoping this work should read our DPDP Act engineering playbook alongside the RBI Digital Lending Directions engineering checklist, because the controls those pieces describe, audit logging, consent capture, and data-tagging, are the same controls a regulated tokenization network needs.
A pragmatic adoption path
A team evaluating Drunix for a regulated Indian deployment can run a short, honest pilot before committing.
First, confirm the baseline: if you already run Fabric v2.5.x, a Drunix migration is a configuration and topology change, not a chaincode rewrite. Second, model the load: separate your endorsement peak from your commit peak, because Drunix's whole value is scaling those independently, and if they never diverge in your traffic, the split buys you less. Third, decide the state database deliberately: choose YugabyteDB only if you actually need relational queries over ledger state, since running distributed SQL adds operational weight. Fourth, treat private data as a first-class design input: map which flows must stay between two organisations and size the KeyDB transient store for that batch pattern. Fifth, wire compliance in early: personal data handling under DPDP, key management, and audit trails are harder to retrofit than to design.
Teams building payment-adjacent services should also account for how NPCI's own rails behave under load; the same discipline appears in our guide to NPCI API rate limits and app architecture and in our look at NPCI's Unified Agent Protocol for agentic UPI payments, both of which share Drunix's premise that India's payment infrastructure is now something you build on, not just integrate with.
FAQ
What is Drunix?
Drunix is an open-source blockchain platform that NPCI released in June 2026 under the Apache 2.0 licence on GitHub. It is an enhanced fork of Hyperledger Fabric built for tokenization platforms, digital asset ecosystems and multi-organisation networks, and it stays backward compatible with Hyperledger Fabric v2.5.x deployments.
How is Drunix different from Hyperledger Fabric?
Drunix splits Fabric's single peer into stateless Lite Peers for endorsement and Committing Peers for validation and commit, decouples validation into a stateless service, and adds YugabyteDB as a SQL state database beside CouchDB and LevelDB. It also uses a KeyDB transient store to batch private-data operations, while keeping a Raft ordering service.
Is Drunix the same as Fabric-X?
No. Both target throughput and scale, but Drunix enhances the proven Fabric v2.5.x line with Raft ordering, while Fabric-X is a more radical redesign that decomposes the peer into microservices and replaces Raft with Arma BFT consensus. Fabric-X reports over 400,000 TPS in a benchmark but is younger and still maturing for regulated workloads.
What is NPCI Falcon, and how does it relate to Drunix?
Falcon is NPCI's earlier open-source project, a Hyperledger Fabric deployment helper for Kubernetes published on GitHub under GPL-3.0. It automates standing up and upgrading Fabric networks with templatised Helm charts. Drunix sits below it at the runtime and transaction layer, so Falcon handles deployment and Drunix handles execution.
Is asset tokenization legal in India in 2026?
There is no enacted tokenization statute yet. The Asset Tokenisation (Regulation) Bill, 2026 was introduced in the Rajya Sabha on 14 March 2026 as a Private Member's Bill, proposing a multi-regulator framework. Private Member's Bills rarely become law, so treat it as direction, not a compliance deadline, and design to existing DPDP obligations today.
Which regulator governs a tokenized asset in India?
Under the proposed 2026 Bill's multi-regulator model, jurisdiction follows the underlying asset: securities tokens fall toward SEBI, payment and stable-value arrangements toward the RBI, and sectoral assets toward their statutory regulators. The RBI has separately explored tokenizing settlements through its wholesale central bank digital currency, the digital rupee.
Do I need to rewrite chaincode to adopt Drunix?
Not if you run Fabric v2.5.x. Drunix maintains backward compatibility with that version and supports smart contracts in Go, Java, JavaScript and TypeScript, the same languages Fabric teams use. Adoption is mainly a topology and configuration change, separating peer roles and choosing a state database, rather than an application rewrite.
When should a team not choose Drunix?
Skip Drunix when you have no Hyperledger Fabric footprint and could pick any ledger, or when your genuine ceiling is six figures of transactions per second, where Fabric-X's microservice architecture is the better technical target. For greenfield builds with no consortium requirement, run a full build-versus-adopt comparison before defaulting to any Fabric lineage.
How eCorpIT can help
eCorpIT is a Gurugram-based senior engineering organisation that builds regulated fintech and BFSI platforms for Indian and global clients, and we are certified for CMMI Level 5, MSME and ISO 27001:2022. We help teams run the build-versus-adopt evaluation for Hyperledger Fabric, Drunix and Fabric-X, design the peer topology and state-database choice, and engineer applications aligned with DPDP Act, 2023 and RBI requirements. If you are scoping a tokenization or multi-organisation network, talk to our engineering team about a short architecture pilot before you commit a roadmap.
References
- NPCI Launches Drunix: A Next-Gen Open-Source Blockchain Platform (IndianWeb2)
- Hyperledger Fabric-Based Drunix Debuts As NPCI's Latest Open Source Project (Open Source For You)
- NPCI unveils Drunix to support blockchain and tokenisation ecosystems (Business Standard)
- Falcon: NPCI's Open-Source Project for Orchestrating Hyperledger Fabric Networks (NPCI)
- npci/falcon (GitHub)
- The Hyperledger Fabric-X Roadmap (Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust)
- Hyperledger Fabric releases, including v3.0 BFT ordering (GitHub)
- YugabyteDB architecture (Yugabyte documentation)
- UPI clocks 22.72 Bn transactions worth Rs 28.92 lakh Cr in June (Entrackr)
- UPI transactions rise 23% to over 22 billion in June (IBEF)
- Raghav Chadha introduces Asset Tokenisation Bill in Rajya Sabha (The Tribune)
- India's Asset Tokenisation Bill, 2026: A Landmark Proposal (Mondaq)
- RBI eyes market transformation with CBDC-based tokenization (CoinGeek)
Last updated: 27 July 2026.
Top comments (0)