Blockchain Performance Analysis for Supporting Cross-Border E-Government Services

Abstract

With the continuous development of distributed ledger and blockchain technologies, new use cases apart from cryptocurrencies have come into the spotlight. In this article, we evaluate whether an e-government service could be a suitable candidate for a blockchain transformation. We selected as a reference test system an existing cross-border e-government service that is used for supporting goods exchanges across the European Union. We show how such an indicative paradigm can be transformed into a blockchain system. In order to do so, we deployed it in an emulated architecture for evaluating its performance under various realistic conditions. Our results show that the deployed system is able to meet the requirements, both in terms of throughput and transaction speed. Moreover, it shows clear advantages in terms of usability and synchronization between all entities.