In this paper, we present the first bare metal comparison of modern blockchains, including Algorand, Avalanche, Diem, Ethereum, Quorum and Solana. This evaluation was conducted with the recent Diablo benchmark suite, a framework to evaluate the performance of different blockchains on the same ground. By tuning network delays in our controlled environment we were able to reproduce performance trends obtained in geo-distributed settings, hence demonstrating the relevance of bare metal evaluations to better understand blockchain performance.
Pramitha Fernando, An Braeken, Madhusanka Liyanage
The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly spreading across a wide range of applications because it is a critical technology for overcoming interoperability and heterogeneity barriers in many applications. IoT is increasingly being deployed in a distributed setting because of the vast number of devices and the physical dispersal of many use cases. Because IoT devices are often resource-restricted, this scattered implementation style exposes devices to unprecedented privacy and security risks. Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), such as blockchain, appear to be a perfect solution to integrate with IoT systems to overcome these challenges thanks to its key pillars: decentralisation, transparency and immutability. The use of blockchain in IoT has been widely examined, and the findings demonstrate how blockchain can be a crucial enabler for IoT. However, blockchain consensus mechanisms are often very energy-intensive, whereas IoT devices are resource-constrained with limited computational power, storage and energy. Therefore, as the literature emphasises, new consensus algorithms could solve most of these issues associated with blockchain technology. Holochain is an emerging DLT that promises to provide blockchain's key benefits and eliminate problems that come with it, such as consensus algorithms and the requirement to maintain a globally synchronised ledger. It has already attained the research community's awareness due to its potential to replace blockchain as a distributed computing solution. This paper compares blockchain and holochain in the context of IoT, considering scalability, availability, security and resource requirements.
Flaviene Scheidt de Cristo, Wazen M. Shbair, Lucian Trestioreanu, Radu State
The XRP Ledger is one of the oldest and most well-established blockchains, using a particular type of consensus mechanism that differs from the typical Proof of Work and Proof of Stake. The underlying p2p network uses flooding to dis-seminate certain types of messages during the consensus rounds, leading to performance and scalability issues. In this work, we propose the use of publisher/subscriber dissemination on the XRPL using GossipSub to diminish the message overhead. We use Flexi-pipe, a tool that allows integration between the XRPL validator and GossipSub, to evaluate the improvements brought.
The increasing demand for mobile data services has led to a need for efficient and cost-effective network sharing solutions. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution for addressing the challenges associated with network sharing, such as interoperability, trust, and accountability. This paper presents a comprehensive classification and categorization of blockchain-based network sharing scenarios, highlighting their advantages and limitations. We have identified seven network sharing scenarios, ranging from centralized network sharing to fully decentralized spectrum sharing. For each scenario, the suitability of some of the selected blockchain architectures, from public, private, sidechain, and hybrid, is evaluated through extensive evaluations. We also identify gaps and opportunities of blockchain-based network sharing solution and present future research directions at the end of paper. Our analysis and results reveal that a single blockchain architecture is not suitable for all network sharing scenarios but careful analysis should be performed when selecting the suitable blockchain network in network sharing.
Online social networks (OSNs) are becoming more and more integrated into people's everyday lives. In any case, since all notable OSNs are controlled, there are a few issues with privacy, management, and security. Users are usually restricted to using the services that OSN firms deploy after agreeing the OSN agreements. But a lot of contracts let OSN companies get to user data to provide personalized services like ads. Users typically have to submit a number of elaborate applications or even stop using such Online Social Network (OSN) if they don't let the businesses use their information while protecting their privacy. Blockchain technology combined with a decentralized architecture can address the aforementioned problems. In this architecture, most of the network functions are distributed among the multiple nodes. It means they are responsible for managing their own network policies, security and performance because the network traffic directly flows between those nodes. It is suggested in this project work to create an OSN service based on blockchain technology and demonstrate its decentralized operation. An enormous amount of data with generally low security requirements can be decentralized by storing it in the Interplanetary File system (IPFS). This distributes data to nodes consisting of hundreds of thousands of individual computers connected to the IPFS, rather than storing data in a single centralized server. A decentralized autonomous organization that allows users to democratically self-manage the OSN may be established in order to promote user autonomy.
This paper presents the design and preliminary development a new model based on blockchain for improving brand loyalty in agribusiness by customer reward. Using facilities of Ethereum Network and solidity programing, we have created an Agri non-fungible token (NFT) according to ERC-721 protocol that is most widely used protocol for creating NFTs on Ethereum. One of the main advantages of ERC-721 is its flexibility, as it allows developers to define custom metadata for each NFT and customize the attributes. The interaction between Ethereum nodes and the user is established via the frontend, which is developed in Nodejs and connects to the Ethereum network. In previous works on loyalty systems, blockchain-based solutions were proposed that resemble the system developed in this study but there are significant differences between our work and other related works such as: the use of NFT and personalization for customers, the adoption of a new version of Solidity, as well as the adoption of the metadata feature for using media to encourage and assist customer brand awareness and repurchase. We tried to provide a safe and transparent way to use NFTs in the way of increasing brand loyalty in agricultural businesses. Due to characters of NFTs as uniqueness and personalization, customers in a loyalty cycle prefer to shop more in order to earn more AgriNFT, causing retailer to sell more items and manufacturers to generate more goods.
Mikel Cortes-Goicoechea, Tarun Mohandas-Daryanani, José L. Muñoz, Leonardo Bautista-Gomez
Scalability is a common issue among the most used permissionless blockchains, and several approaches have been proposed to solve this issue. Tackling scalability while preserving the security and decentralization of the network is a significant challenge. To deliver effective scaling solutions, Ethereum achieved a major protocol improvement, including a change in the consensus mechanism towards Proof of Stake. This improvement aimed a vast reduction of the hardware requirements to run a node, leading to significant sustainability benefits with a lower network energy consumption. This work analyzes the resource usage behavior of different clients running as Ethereum consensus nodes, comparing their performance under different configurations and analyzing their differences. Our results show higher requirements than claimed initially and how different clients react to network perturbations. Furthermore, we discuss the differences between the consensus clients, including their strong points and limitations.
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Intracranial Aneurysms: Treatment and Complications
Trust is a critical element when it comes to news articles, and an important problem is how to ensure trust in the published information on news websites. First, this paper describes the inner workings of a proposed news-retrieval and aggregation architecture employed by a blockchain-based solution for fighting disinformation; this includes a comparison between existing information retrieval solutions. The decentralized nature of the solution is achieved by separating the crawling (i.e., extracting the web page links) from the scraping (i.e., extracting the article information) and having third-party actors extract the data. A majority-rule mechanism is used to determine the correctness of the information, and the blockchain network is used for traceability. Second, the steps needed to deploy the distributed components in a cloud environment seamlessly are discussed in detail, with a special focus on the open-source OpenStack cloud solution. Lastly, novel methods for achieving a truly decentralized architecture based on community input and blockchain technology are presented, thus ensuring maximum trust and transparency in the system. The results obtained by testing the proposed news-retrieval system are presented, and the optimizations that can be made are discussed based on the crawling and scraping test results.
Engin Zeydan, Luis Blanco, Josep Mangues, Şuayb S. Arslan · 5 authors
Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) has recently emerged as an identity and access management framework based on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) that enables users or organizations to control their own data. The Open RAN (O-RAN), on the other hand, provides a framework for sharing infrastructure-related data between users and mobile network operators (MNOs). By leveraging SSI, O-RAN can benefit from decentralized and secure identity management that enables a more transparent, efficient, and user-centric network ecosystem. This paper examines identity, inventory and configuration management, and authentication of users or MNOs for a resource sharing scenario in an O-RAN architecture. At the end of the paper, we explain the potential limitations and possible solutions for applying SSI to improve security, privacy, trust, and interoperability in O-RANs.
Blockchain, a widely utilized distributed ledger technology, faces the scalability challenge. State sharding has emerged as a promising solution for addressing this challenge. However, conventional state allocation solutions often face two major obstacles: a high ratio of cross-shard transactions and an unbalanced workload distribution, due to their reliance on a simple and fixed assignment of states to shards. The former increases the overall workload on the system, while the latter reduces resource utilization. Both factors significantly impact system performance. Moreover, our key observation is that the collection of smart contract transactions can be represented as a hypergraph network by analyzing their characteristics. Therefore, this study proposes HyperChain, a novel dynamic state sharding protocol that integrates a hypergraph partition algorithm. HyperChain aims to reduce the ratio of cross-shard transactions and balance workload distribution, thereby achieving improved throughput and reduced transaction latency in smart contract blockchain systems. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed HyperChain exhibits superior performance than other solutions in terms of cross-shard transaction ratio, workload balance, throughput, and transaction latency.
Germán Abu Arab, Juan Ignacio Cogliatti, Cristina Mayr, Juan Abu Arab · 6 authors
The advent of Web3 technologies and blockchain has opened new avenues for exploring decentralized solutions to pressing environmental issues. A blockchain-based Web3 application for the management of CO2 absorption rights could be a very effective solution to combat climate change. Blockchain technology allows the creation of permanent and transparent records of transactions in a decentralized network, which makes it an ideal tool for monitoring and managing CO2 absorption rights. The rights could be registered in the blockchain and transferred through smart contracts, which would guarantee the validity and traceability of these transactions. In addition, the Web3 application would allow greater accessibility for users, since it could be accessed from anywhere without the need to have proprietary systems installed. Decentralized applications could also be used to verify CO2 emissions and removals by users, which would increase transparency and trust in the system. This paper presents the development of a novel Web3 application that leverages blockchain technology for managing CO2 absorption rights using Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). The proposed application allows for the secure, transparent, and efficient management of CO2 absorption rights, significantly enhancing the effectiveness of carbon offsetting initiatives.
Mustafa Abdmajeed Shihab, Salma Abdullah Aswad, Rawshan Nuree Othman, Saadaldeen Rashid Ahmed
This survey paper provides a comprehensive overview of emerging technologies in networking, focusing on caching in Information-Centric Networking (ICN), context-aware radio access technology (RAT) selection in 5G ultra-dense networks, cryptocurrency adoption, and mobility support for routing in Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs). Adaptive RAT selection mechanisms are stressed in 5G context-aware RAT selection. RAT selection processes address context acquisition, decision-making algorithms, and resource allocation. 5G context-aware RAT selection study is suggested. The report then discusses bitcoin adoption, including its current state and benefits. Scalability, security, and regulation are difficulties. Future studies should address these issues and increase cryptocurrency adoption. Finally, LLN mobility support investigates routing techniques for mobility needs. LLN reactive and proactive routing protocols are analyzed. LLN routing mobility support research is suggested. This survey article discusses techniques, difficulties, and future research by summarizing each technology. To help researchers and practitioners make educated judgments and enhance networking technologies.
This research paper investigates the integration of blockchain technology to enhance the security of Android mobile app data storage. Blockchain holds the potential to significantly improve data security and reliability, yet faces notable challenges such as scalability, performance, cost, and complexity. In this study, we begin by providing a thorough review of prior research and identifying critical research gaps in the field. Android's dominant position in the mobile market justifies our focus on this platform. Additionally, we delve into the historical evolution of blockchain and its relevance to modern mobile app security in a dedicated section. Our examination of encryption techniques and the effectiveness of blockchain in securing mobile app data storage yields important insights. We discuss the advantages of blockchain over traditional encryption methods and their practical implications. The central contribution of this paper is the Blockchain-based Secure Android Data Storage (BSADS) framework, now consisting of six comprehensive layers. We address challenges related to data storage costs, scalability, performance, and mobile-specific constraints, proposing technical optimization strategies to overcome these obstacles effectively. To maintain transparency and provide a holistic perspective, we acknowledge the limitations of our study. Furthermore, we outline future directions, stressing the importance of leveraging lightweight nodes, tackling scalability issues, integrating emerging technologies, and enhancing user experiences while adhering to regulatory requirements.
Eder J. Scheid, Sebastian Küng, Muriel Figueredo Franco, Burkhard Stiller
Since the proposal of Bitcoin in 2009 and with the inclusion of the first transaction in its genesis block, Blockchains (BC) have been used to store arbitrary data, including texts, images, and documents. However, such data is often not easily discoverable in BCs and is embedded within their binary data structures. Thus, this paper presents the design and implementation of a solution to analyze BC transactions searching for “media” content. This solution, called blockchain-parser, is capable of detecting ASCII strings and files (e.g., PDF, GIF, and SVG) embedded in BC's transactions. To evaluate such a solution, Bitcoin, Monero, and Ethereum cryptocurrencies were examined to find commonalities and differences between different BCs regarding their arbitrary data storage usage. Conclusions from such an evaluation indicate that Ethereum has been the most used BC for media data storage compared to Bitcoin and Monero.
Distributed replication systems that use consensus mechanisms to process clients' requests have major limitations and problems in scalability, throughput, and performance. Such problems are mainly due to the time and message complexity of the consensus algorithms used in such systems. Sharding has already been implemented in several blockchain-based replication systems and although it has shown remarkable potential to improve performance and scalability, yet current sharding techniques have several significant scalability and security issues. In this paper, we propose a novel sharding technique for distributed replication systems that use a consensus to process clients' requests. We modified the approach of how nodes are allocated between shards through the public key generation process. Our approach effectively reduces undesirable cross-shard transactions that are more complex and costly to process than intra-shard transactions. Also, there is no concept of Beacon chain — as a shared-ledger between shards — which imposes additional scalability limitations and security issues on the network. With our approach, a network using a classical distributed consensus algorithm can grow outstandingly in number of nodes and still remain permissionless,
Michael Sober, Giulia Scaffino, Marten Sigwart, Philipp Frauenthaler · 6 authors
Missing interoperability is a prevalent issue in today's blockchain landscape. Due to this lack of interoperability, only smart contracts deployed on the same blockchain can call each other. Smart contract interactions across the boundaries of blockchains would, however, provide an opportunity to create cross-blockchain applications. Hence, an additional mechanism for the execution of cross-blockchain smart contract calls is desirable. Unfortunately, already proposed solutions usually require one or more trusted intermediaries, which eventually leads to a lower degree of decentralization. Therefore, we propose a novel framework to enable smart contract interoperability across different blockchains. The framework enables the execution of asynchronous cross-blockchain smart contract calls. It uses blockchain relays to maintain a high degree of decentralization while placing only minor trust in intermediaries. We provide a prototypical implementation for Ethereum-based blockchains and evaluate it regarding costs and execution time.
Blockchain technology is a technology that inherently solves trust issues. It has the character-istics of decentralization, distributed storage, tamper resistance, security, and transparency. It ensures reliable communication between nodes that do not trust each other through consensus mechanisms, smart contracts, and other means. Blockchain stores each transaction data on each transaction node to make the data public and transparent, and generates the data into a blockchain.. As a relatively new distributed database system, blockchain has expanded to many other fields since the initial digital currency, but its development is seriously constrained by problems such as large storage overhead and low query efficiency. In order to find a suita-ble optimization method, select the representative blockchain system Bitcoin, analyze its data structure, data storage and data query processing mechanism, discuss the problems existing in the two functions of storage and query, summarize the existing relevant optimization methods, and look forward to the main research problems of the blockchain system represented by Bitcoin in the future.
In recent times, content-centric network has been evolved as one of the most popular technologies of the modern era, facilitating cache content-based data sharing, especially in vehicle-to-grid (V2G) networks. However, to get benefits from content-based caching services, it is essential to match the service providers with service requesters optimally during high mobility vehicles scenarios. Most of the existing literature proposals for this problem are based upon the centralized architecture, which may be vulnerable to congestion matching operations, with a lack of trustworthiness among nodes. Also, a content holder may spread fake information about content availability to requesters, which may affect the performance of any implemented solution in this environment. In this paper, we model the two-sided preferences of both parties (service providers and requesters) to maximize the cache content sharing using content centric network (CCN) communications. Then, we formulated a decentralized matching problem with joint transmit power of both the content providers and requesters. The framed matching game involves aspiration level and agreement functions for both the parties. Finally, a distributed blind matching algorithm (BLMA) is also proposed, which is executed by deploying a smart contract on the Ethereum network without involving an intermediate authority. Moreover, we provide the theoretical analysis on the number of successive iterations for convergence of the proposed BLMA algorithm. To verify and validate the effectiveness of the proposal, we compare it with three benchmark schemes and evaluated its performance with respect to average individual utility, latency, and energy consumption on the benchmark data sets. The results obtained show that the proposed scheme is superior in comparison to the existing state-of-the-art solutions with respect to various performance evaluation metrics.
With the increasing acceptance and utilization of blockchain technology, a multitude of blockchain-based systems have emerged. Consequently, the need for interoperability among these systems has become paramount, particularly in a trustless manner. To enable decentralized and secure cross-chain applications for users, the establishment of a trust-minimized interoperability solution is imperative for homogeneous blockchain-based networks. This paper presents an analysis of the current state and challenges associated with interoperability between blockchain-based systems. Building upon previous research, we propose that the set of blockchain-based networks should be narrowed down based on the same settlement layer for supporting trust-minimized interoperability. Specifically, we concentrate on the cross-rollup functionality between rollups. We have devised and implemented two similar solutions to address the aforementioned interoperability problem, employing a trust-minimized optimistic approach. Through extensive experimentation, we compare our proposed solutions with existing cross-rollup bridges in terms of gas consumption, time complexity, and newly introduced trust assumptions. Our experimental investigations concentrate on the transmission of arbitrary data utilizing non-fungible tokens. The results reveal that one of our proposed solutions offers an optimal approach for cross-rollup communication between optimistic rollups.
Zhen Zhang, Bingqiao Luo, Shengliang Lu, Bingsheng He
Numerous studies have been conducted to investigate the properties of large-scale temporal graphs. Despite the ubiquity of these graphs in real-world scenarios, it's usually impractical for us to obtain the whole real-time graphs due to privacy concerns and technical limitations. In this paper, we introduce the concept of {\it Live Graph Lab} for temporal graphs, which enables open, dynamic and real transaction graphs from blockchains. Among them, Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have become one of the most prominent parts of blockchain over the past several years. With more than \$40 billion market capitalization, this decentralized ecosystem produces massive, anonymous and real transaction activities, which naturally forms a complicated transaction network. However, there is limited understanding about the characteristics of this emerging NFT ecosystem from a temporal graph analysis perspective. To mitigate this gap, we instantiate a live graph with NFT transaction network and investigate its dynamics to provide new observations and insights. Specifically, through downloading and parsing the NFT transaction activities, we obtain a temporal graph with more than 4.5 million nodes and 124 million edges. Then, a series of measurements are presented to understand the properties of the NFT ecosystem. Through comparisons with social, citation, and web networks, our analyses give intriguing findings and point out potential directions for future exploration. Finally, we also study machine learning models in this live graph to enrich the current datasets and provide new opportunities for the graph community. The source codes and dataset are available at https://livegraphlab.github.io.
Jongbeen Han, Yunhyeong Seo, Sangjin Lee, Sunggon Kim · 5 authors
A blockchain is designed to establish consistent and reliable agreements in an untrusted and decentralized environment. In addition, the blockchain enables transaction processing and the creation of smart contracts. It empowers end users to execute contracts without any intermediate entities. However, there are some issues when it comes to retrieving information, such as the state and history of smart contracts and regular transactions in the blockchain. For example, in a smart contract, user-defined data structures can be used to recall the state of the smart contract for a range query, which can decrease the general performance. In addition, an external database can be required to retrieve regular transactions for range queries, which increases management costs. To achieve this, we propose a new scheme that enables SQL query operations to retrieve a smart contract and regular transaction information within the blockchain system. To achieve this, we combine an embedded relational database with an Ethereum-based blockchain system to provide the SQL query. It enables range queries on smart contracts without requiring user-defined data structures and decreases management costs for regular transactions without any external database. We implement the proposed blockchain system on quorum, which is an Ethereum-based blockchain system. Also, we evaluate the proposed system using a synthetic benchmark. The performance of retrieving smart contract data is improved by up to approximately 22×, with low memory usage compared with the existing system. Moreover, the proposed system demonstrates a similar search performance to the existing system, even when considering external databases in regular transactions.