Abstract
With the interest and attention that the Blockchain and the Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) have recently demanded, the technology is advancing at a very high rate. With investors and applications in a wide variety of fields, a lot of funding and efforts are being driven into bringing the technology to everyday use. The community and companies are coming up with new ways to collaborate, which makes the blockchain ecosystem evolve at full tilt. Consequently, this paper’s aim is to review the academic and grey literature and to provide readers with information about the evolution, benefits and challenges of the Public Distributed Ledger Technologies and to discuss the latest solutions, which are being developed for bringing decentralization closer to the mainstream. The paper reviews the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structured distributed ledgers with focus on the Hedera Hashgraph, a novelty DLT bringing a unique consensus algorithm with new use-cases enabled by new cryptoeconomic mechanisms, as well as vital services, such as Solidity smart contracts and distributed file storage. Then, we are going to explore second-layer network protocols, a major topic for solving scalability issues and for decentralizing cryptocurrency exchanges. The article tries also to identify the particularities of these technologies and how they bring specific answers to the blockchain trilemma, consisting in three themes - scalability, interoperability and sustainability.
Highlights
Since Satoshi Nakamoto published the paper about Bitcoin (Nakamoto, 2008), a trustless peer-to-peer network, in 2008, and since he has turned on the blockchain by mining the genesis block one year later, the technology has proven to stand out, making it possible to disrupt the future of many fields
The next topic examined will be the Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), an alternative structure for blockchain, where we are aiming to introduce and provide insights on the different solutions using this kind of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), concentrating on Hedera Hashgraph, a unique patented network, which has to offer the whole set of decentralized services and new cryptoeconomic mechanisms, that bring a new level of fairness, speed and security to the decentralized space
We have presented extended reviews of four complementary technologies for blockchain, the first in the form of DAGs, a variant being Hedera Hashgraph, which have gained the attention and have been adopted by many leading organizations
Summary
Since Satoshi Nakamoto published the paper about Bitcoin (Nakamoto, 2008), a trustless peer-to-peer network, in 2008, and since he has turned on the blockchain by mining the genesis block one year later, the technology has proven to stand out, making it possible to disrupt the future of many fields. The blockchain benefits brought by its distributed, transparent and immutable nature make possible use cases from Finance, Banking, Business and Supply Chain to Education, Media and Health (Deshpande et al, 2017; Chaum et al, 2000) The paper is a literature review realized by analyzing academic journals, conference papers and grey literature (online articles, videos, newsletters, forums, e-mail archives, etc.) with the aim of encompassing the decentralized ecosystem, from the formal academic perspective and from the more approachable means where the blockchain has its roots
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