How much blockchain do you need?

Abstract

Adding blockchain technology to existing systems instead of building them from the ground up poses several challenges. It is difficult to find out which attributes of blockchains are important for a given use case (e.g. immutable, trustless, anonymous) and to decide which elements of an architecture should employ blockchain technologies. Current approaches generally only give a hint on whether blockchain technology makes sense for a given use case or not. This paper proposes a more fine-grained approach to decide which elements of an application architecture could benefit from the use of blockchain technology. We illustrate the first outline of our approach which identifies participants, their trust relations and interactions to derive a hybrid architecture (i.e., an architecture embedding blockchain technology in existing software systems or creating new systems using blockchain only in certain parts).