With the emergence of hybrid blockchain database systems, we aim to provide an in-depth analysis of the performance and trade-offs among a few representative systems. To achieve this goal, we implement Veritas and BlockchainDB from scratch. For Veritas, we provide two flavors to target the crash fault-tolerant (CFT) and Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) application scenarios. Specifically, we implement Veritas with Apache Kafka to target CFT application scenarios, and Veritas with Tendermint to target BFT application scenarios. We compare these three systems with the existing open-source implementation of BigchainDB. BigchainDB uses Tender-mint for consensus and provides two flavors: a default implementation with blockchain pipelining and an optimized version that includes blockchain pipelining and parallel transaction validation. Our experimental analysis confirms that CFT designs, which are typically used by distributed databases, exhibit much higher performance than BFT designs, which are specific to blockchains. On the other hand, our extensive analysis highlights the variety of design choices faced by the developers and sheds some light on the trade-offs that need to be done when designing a hybrid blockchain database system.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have lately piqued the interest of investors, with some NFTs achieving selling levels previously inconceivable for a non-fungible virtual asset. This raises intriguing questions about "value" and "scarcity" in relation to blockchain technology, viewed through the lens of a digital asset's non-fungibility, This study seeks to attract attention to these issues inasmuch as they may create a future alternative environment for blockchain development and trading.
Bitcoin, introduced in 2008, is considered the first implementation of blockchain. Subsequent implementations of blockchain have made changes to Bitcoin to ease application development, improve scalability, and enhance versatility in terms of the types of applications that can be created.
Blockchain has become an unavoidable future in enterprise finance, particularly enabling and securing cross-company transactions. By introducing a comparable notion of smart contract, the trusted sub-ledger operation (TSLO), this article will propose a complete architecture based on the Blockchain to solve the traceability and validity of accounting data by assets groupement. TSLO is a more flexible and adaptable method for asset management in the corporate accounting system and the enterprise resource planner. This method is built on a decentralized microservices tree (DMST) and is an extendable E-Binding form of TEA (Triple Entry Accounting). Instead of using a multi-ledger architecture, the Hyperledger Fabric skeleton, limited to participant channels inside one entity or organization, our approach uses decentralized sub-ledgers with an implementation tree (DMST) for an assets-driven transaction. Furthermore, the government’s audit and taxation procedures for financial groups are more accessible by combining Proof of Authority and Proof of Stake to assure the logic of More stake more reputation to preserve.
Piero Fraternali, Sergio Luis Herrera González, Matteo Frigerio, Mattia Righetti
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is one of the most durable results of virtual currencies, which goes beyond the financial sector and impacts business applications in general. Developers can empower their solutions with DLT capabilities to attain such benefits as decentralization, transparency, non-repudiability of actions and security and immutability of data assets, to the price of integrating a distributed ledger framework into their software architecture. Model-Driven Development (MDD) is the discipline that advocates the use of abstract models and of code generation to reduce the application development and integration effort by delegating repetitive coding to an automated model-to-code transformation engine. In this paper, we explore the suitability of MDD to support the development of hybrid applications that integrate centralized database and distributed ledger architectures and describe a prototypical tool capable of generating the implementation artefacts starting from a high-level model of the application and its architecture.
The Ethereum blockchain is a fascinating platform that uses innovative smart contract capability to empower decentralized applications in almost all major business sectors. Pioneered by Vitalik Buterin and several cofounders, Ethereum has gone through the milestones of initial launch, stable coins, ICO (Initial Coin Offering), DeFi (Decentralized Finance), DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), NFT (nonfungible tokens), and L2 (Layer 2) for scalability. The Ethereum blockchain and infrastructure are transitioning to POS (proof of stake) with sharding and are on the way to impose big impacts on CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) and enterprise blockchains with promising potential. After years of astronomical growth, Ethereum has reached a market cap of $400 billion, just trailing behind Bitcoin. Compared with bitcoin, the Ethereum blockchain has advantages such as supporting the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and smart contracts, supporting more diverse use cases, and being more nimble by changing consensus from POW to POS to save energy costs.
Louis Tremblay Thibault, Tom Sarry, Abdelhakim Hafid
Blockchain systems have seen much growth in recent years due to the immense potential attributed to the technology behind these systems. However, this popularity has outlined a critical scalability issue that most blockchain systems are now confronted with. With their increasing popularity comes an increasing amount of load on the system. Several scaling solutions that modify either the functioning of the underlying protocol or that build on top of them have already been proposed; however, each of these solutions comes with their advantages and disadvantages. This paper aims to survey the current state-of-the-art of rollups as a scaling solution. We discuss the mode of operation of the different types of rollups, outline state-of-the-art implementations of each type together with their features and limitations. We also conduct a performance analysis comparing these implementations. Finally, we outline avenues for future research around rollups as a scaling solution.
Antonio Welligton Abreu, Emanuel Ferreira Coutinho, Carla Bezerra
Blockchain is an emerging technology, with a decentralized infrastructure avoiding third party dependency. Smartcontracts are one of the features of Ethereum blockchain, capable of running distributed applications in unreliableenvironments, enabling process automation and being one of the most sought technologies due to the highcustomization added to transactions. However, little is known about predicting the cost and execution time behavior of blockchain-based system transactions. This work aims to evaluate the performance of an Ethereum network through an application designed to analyze the cost and time of transactions that store characters in the blockchain. To meet the proposed objective, we designed an application for performing transactions with data inclusion and query on a blockchain, collecting time and cost data. As main conclusions of this work we have: the Ethereum platform proved to be inconstant in relation to the processing time of transactions on the blockchain and the application developed based on blockchain can provide a mechanism to evaluate text-type operations on Ethereum network.
Ensuring a production-ready state of the application under development is the imminent feature of the Continuous Delivery (CD) approach. In a blockchain network, nodes communicate and store data in a distributed manner. Each node executes the same business application but operates in a distinct execution environment. The literature lacks research focusing on continuous practices for blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). Specifically, it lacks such works with support for both design and deployment. The author has proposed a solution that takes into account the continuous delivery of a business application to diverse deployment environments in the DLT network. As a result, two continuous delivery pipelines have been implemented using the Jenkins automation server. The first pipeline prepares a business application whereas the second one generates complete node deployment packages. As a result, the framework ensures the deployment package in the actual version of the business application with the node-specific up-to-date version of deployment configuration files. The Smart Contract Design Pattern has been used when building a business application. The modeling aspect of blockchain network installation has required using Unified Modeling Language (UML) and the UML Profile for Distributed Ledger Deployment. The refined model-to-code transformation generates deployment configurations for nodes. Both the business application and deployment configurations are stored in the GitHub repositories. For the sake of verification, tests have been conducted for the electricity consumption and supply management system designed for prosumers of renewable energy.
Sura I. Mohammed Ali, Haitham Farouk, Hussien Sharaf
Blockchain stores a series of transactions in form of a sequence of linked blocks. Hence, the concept of a single decentralized ledger is easily maintained. Transactions and interactions that take place among the participants accessing the distributed and decentralized but cooperative blockchain network are held through a single ledger. A student information system (SIS) can make use of a decentralized, reliable, and highly trusted ledger that stores vital information. Traditional education systems encounter problems such as centralized record keeping where fault tolerance depends on a single cloud provider; not to mention locally hosted databases. The implementation of blockchain in the education sector provides a new horizon for set of non-functional requirements including but not limited to: security, immutability, independence from the institution, immutability of official records and certificates. In addition, total trust in the accuracy and infallibility are all gathered in the decentralized ledgers of blockchain. The proposed models emphasize on the data availability; represented in students' ability to access all of their data at any time. This paper proposes three models for using blockchains to implement fully functional SIS that maintains transactions such as students’ and faculty members’ records, course registration records and student marks. In addition, avoiding the role of a super administrator or a centralized exposed store where data integrity is vulnerable. Using the proposed models pushes towards an electronic community where genuine certificates can be easily issued and published to the interested parties without the need for involving a centralized administration.
Many cross-organization cooperation applications of blockchain-based distributed ledger technologies (DLT) do not aim at innovation at the cooperation pattern level: essentially the same ''business'' is conducted by the parties, but this time without a central party to be trusted with bookkeeping. The migration to DLT is expected to have a negative performance impact, but some DLTs, such as Hyperledger Fabric, are accepted to be much better suited performance-wise to such use cases than others. However, with the somewhat surprising, but ongoing absence of application-level performance benchmarks for DLTs, cross-DLT comparison for "classic" workloads and the evaluation of the performance impact of "blockchainification" is still ill-supported. We present the design and Hyperledger Caliper-based open implementation of a full port of the classic TPC-C benchmark to Hyperledger Fabric, complete with a structured approach for transforming the original database schema to a smart contract data model. Initial measurements about the workload characteristics that will affect the design of large-scale performance evaluations are also included.
This paper focuses on the application of blockchain technology in the copyright field. This distributed digital ledger technology offers a platform to record information. Blockchain technology has the potential to take over the current Digital Risk Management System (DRMS) and improve the current situation. However, the technology has its limitations and may bring future challenges in the industry.
Andrea De Salve, Andrea Lisi, Paolo Mori, Laura Ricci
Decentralized Applications have become of paramount importance, especially thanks to the widespread adoption of blockchains, such as Ethereum and EOS.IO, which are two of the most known platforms where such applications can be executed. Even if the goal of Ethereum and EOS.IO is very similar, the two projects have distinct capabilities and properties. For example, they use different consensus algorithms, different languages to program smart contracts, and allocate and manage on-chain resources in different ways. In this paper, we perform in-depth analysis of the models used by EOS.IO blockchain to manage its resources (i.e., ram, cpu and network bandwidth). For this purpose, we instantiate an EOS.IO-based Decentralized Application (DApp) implementing a Decentralized Rating Framework and we measure its resource requirements. Finally, we evaluate and compare the cost in fees required for running the DApp under three different resource management models provided by EOS.IO, which are the staking, rex, and power up models.
The distributed transmission of a dynamic blockchain in a cloud computing platform may cause network overload. To overcome this challenge, a novel idea for a network architecture that is suitable for blockchain transmission and storage is proposed. Emerging edge computing technology has been proven to improve the efficiency of blockchain construction and operation. In this paper, we focus on solving the problem of unbalanced resource allocation for blockchain construction and transmission in a novel edge computing network architecture. We propose the edge bandwidth and storage optimization (EBSO) algorithm to balance effective bandwidth allocation and storage space selection during dynamic blockchain processing. In addition, we build a dynamic blockchain based on a link bandwidth allocation analysis in an edge computing network environment. Subsequently, the reasonable value range of the tradeoff parameter γ between the link bandwidth and storage space during the transmission of the constructed dynamic blockchain is determined. Finally, we use version 2 of the network simulator (ns-2) to simulate the performance of the EBSO algorithm and compare it with other excellent algorithms in terms of transmission bandwidth efficiency (TBE), storage space efficiency (SSE), blockchain construction efficiency (BCE), average throughput, and average delay in the same network environment.
The decentralization and traceability of blockchain technology can realize the supervision of industrial Internet industry processes. As a jointly maintained distributed ledger, blockchain can provide an open, transparent and tamper proof information publicity platform. However, due to the huge amount of data and complex data interface of IOT equipment, blockchain cannot become a platform for direct access of IOT system. Nowadays, more and more decentralized applications are born. Building such services using emerging blockchain technology is a promising direction. We attempt to use the latest blockchain proxy strategy to solve data management problems in the system. We propose a blockchain sub-proxy model that traces workflows. Host data links to proxies, blockchain only store necessary information to ensure that subsequent transactions can be traced back to previous operations. Multiple tasks are represented by distributed agents to form a complete industry chain. In this model, industrial processes can be recorded asynchronously and on a large scale. Unlike centralized management processes, agents and blocks work together to ensure data storage efficiency and security.
Ensuring a production-ready state of the application under development is the immanent feature of the continuous delivery approach. In a blockchain network, nodes communicate, storing data in a decentralized manner. Each node executes the same business application but operates in a distinct execution environment. The literature lacks research, focusing on continuous practices for blockchain and distributed ledger technology. In particular, such works with support for both software development disciplines of design and deployment. Artifacts from considered disciplines have been placed in the 1 + 5 architectural views model. The approach aims to ensure the continuous deployment of containerized blockchain distributed applications. The solution has been divided into two independent components: Delivery and deployment. They interact through Git distributed version control. Dedicated GitHub repositories should store the business application and deployment configurations for nodes. The delivery component has to ensure the deployment package in the actual version of the business application with the node-specific up-to-date version of deployment configuration files. The deployment component is responsible for providing running distributed applications in containers for all blockchain nodes. The approach uses Jenkins and Kubernetes frameworks. For the sake of verification, preliminary tests have been conducted for the Electricity Consumption and Supply Management blockchain-based system for prosumers of renewable energy.