SCALABILITY IN BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY: CHALLENGES, SOLUTIONS, AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Abstract

Multiple industries bear great potential from blockchain technology although scalability issues create barriers to mass implementation. This paper investigates the basic scalability difficulties of blockchain systems while analyzing the trade-offs from the blockchain trilemma which includes decentralization, security and scalability. We conduct a discussion about consensus procedures which determine scalability strength and we evaluate Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT). This paper evaluates both on-chain and off-chain solutions such as block size enlargement along with Segregated Witness (SegWit) and sharding and payment channels and sidechains. We study Layer 1 and Layer 2 scaling solutions to deliver extensive information regarding blockchain scalability improvement methods which create paths toward future technological advancement.