Support for smart contracts about firefly HOT 2 CLOSED

This is great. Almost precisely lines up with work in progress on architecture and engineering fyi @nguyer @jimthematrix @awrichar

Custom tokens

For ERC20 as a token standard there is another thread of engineering, that's pretty advanced at this point, to support Tokens (fungible and non-fungible) including custom token implementations (ERC20/ERC721/ERC1155 derivatives).

This goes beyond pure custom on-chain logic support, by providing the the off-chain API per a standardized token model that can work across multiple token implementations, including across protocols.
Importantly, it includes packaging the work of building an off-chain cache of transaction history, that is prevalent in enterprise token based projects.

The architecture embraces the fact that tokens will need on-chain logic customization, and also that likely mapping to a common API will require some simple transformation of data structures / API calls. So there is an easy pluggable connector layer included -with a Typescript exemplar repo based on ERC1155 + OpenZeppelin + Ethconnect.

A demo + update was provided by @awrichar on the most recent FireFly community call, Sep 15th:
https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/labs/2021-09-15+FireFly+Community+Call

Fully custom on-chain logic

Custom smart contract submission/event functionality is available directly in the APIs events of the connector layer - through ethconnect for Ethereum, and recently through fabconnect for Fabric.

There is active work in flight, to roll this up to the core FireFly API and provide suitable unification across protocols, while retaining the ability to exploit the full feature-set of an individual protocol. We waited for the first two protocols (Fabric and Ethereum) to be ready before attempting it for that reason - so it wasn't heavily biased to one individual protocol.

This includes, amongst other things:

• How to broadcast definitions/existence of your smart contract to the FireFly network
• Automated API generation from this definition
• Managed event subscription from this definition
• Plugin architecture to allow multiple protocols with individual connectors to map definitions, API calls and events

from firefly.

Implemented in v1.

https://hyperledger.github.io/firefly/tutorials/custom_contracts.html

from firefly.