Design paradigms and efficiency trade-offs in blockchain frameworks: A comprehensive comparative

Abstract

The spread of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) beyond its roots in cryptocurrency has led to a proliferation of blockchain frameworks with differing architectural philosophies, performance attributes, and applications in mind. This non-uniformity poses a significant problem for enterprises and developers who aim to find the best platform that suits them. The paper is based on a rigorous, multi-dimensional comparison of the four most crucial blockchain frameworks that encompass the breadth of the current DLT: Ethereum as an early smart contracts and decentralized application pioneer, Hyperledger Fabric for permissioned blocks designed to work in enterprise consortia, R3 Corda as a privacy-oriented ledger that is suitable to regulated industries, and Solana as a high-performance public blockchain that was developed to support web-scale applications. The paper breaks down the major architectural building blocks of each framework, including their permissioning models, data models, consensus models, and execution environments for smart contracts. Next, it compares their scalability and performance by combining the findings of notable benchmark experiments with relevant performance metrics (throughput and latency). Moreover, the paper investigates practical adoption by examining notable examples in financial services, supply chain management, and the fundamental growth of the Web3 economy. The most valuable output of this study is a synthesized framework selection matrix, which aligns platform abilities with the particular business and technical requirements as an evidence-based (observed in the field) guide that practitioners can use; at the same time, it will serve as a well-structured point of departure in future academic studies and research on the topic of distributed systems.