Blockchain Scalability Research Articles

Assessment of the impact of blockchain technology in the banking industry

The study aims to assess the impact of blockchain technology in the banking sector. Blockchain technology is considered as one of the revolutionary technology that provides several benefits to the banking sector. Infrastructure, channel, platforms, and scenarios are the four vintages considered a great success of internet finance. Blockchains are known as evolving technology that has brought attention from energy suppliers, start-ups, and developers of technologies. The technology has brought several benefits to innovate new procedures by reducing financial constraints. Blockchain technology ensures transparency and a secure system for business solutions. In addition, it works for the energy sector as well as the state of the by reviewing present business perspectives along with the cases and literature. However, the issues involved in blockchain scalability, the systems are essential in adapting and improving the process. Apart from these, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have become a major idea in the current business world. The issues include time consumed to put a transaction in the block and time consumed for reaching a consensus.

A Quantum Blind Multi-Signature Method for the Industrial Blockchain.

Traditional anti-quantum methods and multi-signature technologies to secure the blockchain against quantum attacks will quickly reduce the efficiency and scalability of the industrial blockchain, where the computational resources will experience a polynomial rise with the increasing number of traders. Here, a quantum blind multi-signature method is proposed for the multi-party transaction to provide anti-quantum security. First, the proposed multi-party transaction frame and quantum key distribution in the industrial blockchain are introduced. It integrates a novel quantum blind multi-signature algorithm that is based on the quantum entanglement mechanism, and it is absolutely secure in theory. Second, the anti-quantum multi-signature algorithm is illustrated, where there are four phases, i.e., initialization, signing, verification, and implementation. Third, the security and complexity of the proposed framework are analyzed and compared with related methods in references, and our proposed method is verified to be able to offer good computational performance and blockchain scalability for multi-party transaction. Last, the paper is summarized and future research directions are proposed.

Systematic Literature Review of Challenges in Blockchain Scalability

Blockchain technology is fast becoming the most transformative technology of recent times and has created hype and optimism, gaining much attention from the public and private sectors. It has been widely deployed in decentralized crypto currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin is the success story of a public blockchain application that propelled intense research and development into blockchain technology. However, scalability remains a crucial challenge. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum are encountering low-efficiency issues with low throughput, high transaction latency, and huge energy consumption. The scalability issue in public Blockchains is hindering the provision of optimal solutions to businesses and industries. This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) on the public blockchain scalability issue and challenges. The scope of this SLR includes an in-depth investigation into the scalability problem of public blockchain, associated fundamental factors, and state-of-art solutions. This project managed to extract 121 primary papers from major scientific databases such as Scopus, IEEE explores, Science Direct, and Web of Science. The synthesis of these 121 articles revealed that scalability in public blockchain is not a singular term. A variety of factors are allied to it, with transaction throughput being the most discussed factor. In addition, other interdependent vita factors include storages, block size, number of nodes, energy consumption, latency, and cost. Generally, each term is somehow directly or indirectly reliant on the consensus model embraced by the blockchain nodes. It is also noticed that the contemporary available consensus models are not efficient in scalability and thus often fail to provide good QoS (throughput and latency) for practical industrial applications. Our findings exemplify that the Internet of Things (IoT) would be the leading application of blockchain in industries such as energy, finance, resource management, healthcare, education, and agriculture. These applications are, however, yet to achieve much-desired outcomes due to scalability issues. Moreover, Onchain and offchain are the two major categories of scalability solutions. Sagwit, block size expansion, sharding, and consensus mechanisms are examples of onchain solutions. Offchain, on the other hand, is a lighting network.

Adjusting the Block Interval in PoW Consensus by Block Interval Process Improvement

Blockchain is not widely applied in various fields due to the critical issue of scalability as part of the blockchain trilemma. This issue arises during consensus among the nodes in a public blockchain. To address the issue of low scalability with proof-of-work (PoW) consensus, various methods have been proposed for transaction per second (TPS) improvement. However, no such methods include an improvement in the consensus step. Therefore, to improve PoW public blockchain scalability, it is important to shorten the time required for PoW consensus. This paper proposes a method for minimizing the block intervals that occur during consensus over a PoW blockchain network. A shortened block interval leads to an increase in the probability of three different attacks: selfish mining, double-spending, and eclipse attacks. According to an experiment using Ethereum, with a typical PoW blockchain, it is inevitable to provide rewards for stable block mining in competition between mining pools. To find an optimal block interval in the PoW consensus algorithm, we conducted a four-step experiment. The purpose of this experiment was to verify the difficulty level and issues with Mainnet security. Therefore, considering stale block mining rewards, an optimal block interval is proposed. The Ethereum TPS was improved by at least 200%. Given this finding, it is considered possible to achieve a similar improvement in a different PoW blockchain. On balance, even if the block interval is shorter than that of the PoW Mainnet, network security falls by only 1.21% in Testnet, even with a rise in the stale block rate, while performance is increased at up to 120 TPS, which is three times higher than that in Mainnet.

Scalable blockchains — A systematic review

Blockchains are a key disruptive technology of recent times with applications across several application domains such as finance, supply chain, healthcare and Industry 4.0. With growing application types, scalability of blockchains has emerged as a key challenge in achieving the potential of this technology. This paper attempts to outline this challenge for blockchains as follows. It highlights blockchain scalability as a composite concept which can be interpreted in various ways i.e. expanding the number of participants of the network, or enhancing capabilities of the participants (such as processing, memory, storage or an efficient consensus strategy) to minimize the scalability overhead. Further, it presents a first thorough systemic study of existing efforts to achieve blockchain scalability with respect to; (i) innovative methods and mechanisms to strengthen blockchain’s capabilities with respect to scalability, (ii) approaches leveraging blockchains to achieve scalable applications, and (iii) efforts analyzing blockchain solutions with respect to scalability. Through a critical analysis of existing literature, the paper identifies contributions as well as open challenges which can help research community to advance knowledge within this domain.

Re-establishment and Regarding Trust and Transparency, Blockchain’s Contribution to the Solution of a Thousand-Year Problem

Trust is the most important key element in the history of humanity and its success. We see and witness an emerging and exciting technology called Blockchain, eliminating losses caused by anti-trust and relieves pain in our social-build environment. Although the atmosphere in business, management, and society today has been heavily altered and involved, trust stays the same. This requirement leads companies in various industries to use new techniques to ensure their customer's business is in safe hands. Unfortunately, most of the current research is heavily based on the Bitcoin currency rather than its underlying technology, which focuses on revealing and improving Blockchain's limitations from managerial value perspectives. Many of the proposed solutions lack a concrete evaluation of their effectiveness. Many other Blockchain scalability related challenges, including throughput and latency, have been left unstudied. In this study, enabling functions is studied, and Blockchain's contribution to organisations' management is discussed. Besides, applicability in today's economic environment in various industries is studied. It is understood that after the development of technologies that eliminate centralised structures such as Blockchain, the business world is keen to adapt to this change. In this context, it is concluded that including new technologies such as Blockchain increased trust in various industries, and in the majority of the studies, Blockhain considered being an element to reduce costs and create a more transparent environment. It can be said that this technology contributes to the development and better understanding of the application area of the industries mentioned in the study.

Blockchain-enabled Peer-to-Peer energy trading

The increasing amount of distributed power generation from rooftop solar panels allows new electricity markets to emerge in which prosumers and consumers can trade locally produced energy. The use of blockchain technology has increasingly emerged in energy markets and shows great potential to facilitate Peer-to-Peer energy trading. However, blockchain technology is still in its infancy meaning it is not yet being used to its’ full potential. In this paper, blockchain technology for Peer-to-Peer energy trading and its implications are explored, especially in view of the ‘trilemma’: scalability, security, and decentralisation. Peer-to-Peer energy trading is the focus of this paper, which ultimately proposes a blockchain scalability solution. This solution is empirically modelled using data collected in a trial case study. The proposed solution increases scalability without compromising security and decentralisation when compared to base layer models.

Enhancing the efficiency and scalability of blockchain through probabilistic verification and clustering

Blockchain is a disruptive technique that finds many applications in FinTech, IoT, and token economy. Because of the asynchrony, the competitive mining, and the indeterministic block propagation delay in networks, forks in the blockchain occur frequently, which not only waste a lot of computing resources but also result in potential security issues. This issue will greatly affect the efficiency of blockchain networks. In the meantime, when blockchain networks expand, the storage data for each node will be increasing dramatically. Participates are about to face the problem of storage limitation. Blockchain is hard to scale. This paper introduced PvScheme, a probabilistic verification scheme that could effectively reduce the block propagation delay and reduce the occurrence of blockchain forks. We further enhanced the security of PvScheme to provide reliable block delivery. We also analysed the resistance of PvScheme to fake blocks and double spending attacks. Furthermore, we proposed ICIStrategy, a multi-node collaborative storage strategy based on intra-cluster integrity. In ICIStrategy, we divided all participates into several clusters. Each cluster requires holding all data of the network, whereas a node within the cluster does not need to maintain data integrity. It aims to solve the storage pressure by reducing the amount data that each participate need to store and reduce communication overhead by collaboratively storing and verifying blocks through in-cluster nodes.We designed the experiments to study the performance of PvScheme and ICIStrategy. The experiment results illustrated that PvScheme could reduce the propagation delay of the standard protocol by 43.1% when the validation degree was 0.5. And we got the best effect when the validation degree is 0.9. It got a relatively lower forks and a relatively higher security at the same time, which achieved a compromise between the efficiency and security in the blockchain. According to the experimental results, ICIStrategy decreased effectively the storage of each node. And the larger the scale of networks, the less the storage of each node.

A Scoping Review of Integrated Blockchain-Cloud (BcC) Architecture for Healthcare: Applications, Challenges and Solutions.

Blockchain is a disruptive technology for shaping the next era of a healthcare system striving for efficient and effective patient care. This is thanks to its peer-to-peer, secure, and transparent characteristics. On the other hand, cloud computing made its way into the healthcare system thanks to its elasticity and cost-efficiency nature. However, cloud-based systems fail to provide a secured and private patient-centric cohesive view to multiple healthcare stakeholders. In this situation, blockchain provides solutions to address security and privacy concerns of the cloud because of its decentralization feature combined with data security and privacy, while cloud provides solutions to the blockchain scalability and efficiency challenges. Therefore a novel paradigm of blockchain-cloud integration (BcC) emerges for the domain of healthcare. In this paper, we provide an in-depth analysis of the BcC integration for the healthcare system to give the readers the motivations behind the emergence of this new paradigm, introduce a classification of existing architectures and their applications for better healthcare. We then review the development platforms and services and highlight the research challenges for the integrated BcC architecture, possible solutions, and future research directions. The results of this paper will be useful for the healthcare industry to design and develop a data management system for better patient care.

Big data driven supply chain design and applications for blockchain: An action research using case study approach

Blockchain appears to still be nascent in its growth and a relatively untapped asset. This research investigates the need of blockchain in Industry 4.0 environment from Big Data perspective in supply chain management. The research method used in this study involves a combination of an Action Research method and Case Study research. More specifically, the action research method was applied in two industry case studies that implemented and tested the designed architecture in a global logistics environment. Case Study A examined the blockchain application in cross-border cargo movements whereas Case Study B investigated the application in a liquid chemical logistics company serving to petroleum industries. Our research analysis has identified that the Case A subject had disconnected systems and services for blockchain wherein the big data interactions had failed (failure case). Whereas in Case B, the company has achieved nearly 25% increase in revenue through its customer service after the blockchain implementation and thereby reduction in paperwork and carbon emissions (success case). This research contributes to the advancement of the body of knowledge to big data and blockchain by identifying key implementation guideline and issues for blockchain in supply chain management. Further, action-based research coupled with a case study approach has been used to evaluate the application aspects of the architecture's scalability and functionality of bigdata and blockchain in supply chain management.

Performance-Based Analysis of Blockchain Scalability Metric

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, are widely known applications of blockchain technology, have drawn much attention and are largely recognized in recent years. Initially Bitcoin and Ethereum processed 7 and 15 Transactions Per Second (TPS) respectively, whereas VISA and Paypal process 1700 and 193 TPS respectively. The biggest challenge to blockchain adoption is scalability, defined as the capacity to change the block size to handle the growing amount of load. This paper attempts to present the existing scalability solutions which are broadly classified into three layers: Layer 0 solutions focus on optimization of propagation protocol for transactions and blocks, Layer 1 solutions are based on the consensus algorithms and data structure, and Layer 2 solutions aims to decrease the load of the primary chain by implementing solutions outside the chain. We present a classification and comparison of existing blockchain scalability solutions based on performance along with their pros and cons

A novel Dual-Blockchained structure for contract-theoretic LoRa-based information systems

LoRa serves as one of the most deployed technologies in Internet-of-Things-based information systems (IoT-IS), and self-motivated deployment is the key to the rollout of LoRa. Proper incentive can play an important role in encouraging the private deployment of LoRa, increasing coverage and promoting effective management of IoT-IS. However, existing incentive mechanisms have the vulnerabilities of insecure centralized architecture and excessive utility loss of LoRa Controllers and Gateways, due to asymmetric information between private owners of gateways and centralized controller (or service providers). Blockchain-based LoRa networks, as a promising solution, have not been comprehensively studied to address the vulnerabilities, let alone the other issues of security, scalability, and flexibility. In this paper, we propose a novel Dual-Chained LoRa-based information system (LoRa-IS) to provide globally cross-validated security. Behaviors, including state-of-the-art contract-theoretic incentive mechanism and new flow control protocol, can be secured with the tamper-resistance of Blockchains. Being part of the proposed incentive mechanism, the new self-driven flow control allows both the Dual-Chain system and the LoRa network to scale. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed system is the first comprehensive Blockchain-based LoRa-IS combined with contract theory. We also provide analysis and simulations, showing that our system can pay fair incentives under information asymmetry. With the new flow control, the system can optimize network coverage while improving the Blockchain scalability and flexibility.

Blockchains: Improve the Scalability and Efficiency of Conventional Blockchain by Providing a Lightweight Block Mining and Communication Algorithm

To provide secure and reliable services using the internet of things (IoT) in the smart cities/villages is a challenging and complex issue. A high throughput and resilient services are required to process vast data generated by the smart city/villages that felicitates to run the applications of smart city. To provide security and privacy a scalable blockchain (BC) mechanism is a necessity to integrate the scalable ledger and transactions limit in the BC. In this paper, we investigated the available solutions to improve its scalability and efficiency. However, most of the algorithms are not providing the better solution to achieve scalability for the smart city data. Here, proposed and implemented a hybrid approach to improve the scalability and rate of transactions on BC using practical Byzantine fault tolerance and decentralized public key algorithms. The proposed Normachain is compares our results with the existing model. The results show that the transaction rate got improved by 6.43% and supervision results got improved by 17.78%.

PyRos: A State Channel-Based Access Control System for a Public Blockchain Network

Blockchain is a technology that enables the implementation of a decentralized system by replacing the role of the centralized entity with the consensus of participants in the system to solve the problem of subordination to the centralized entity. Blockchain technology is being considered for application in numerous fields; however, the scalability limitation of a public blockchain has led many researchers to consider private blockchains, which reduce the security of the system while improving scalability. A state channel represents a leading approach among several scalability solutions, intended to address public blockchain scalability challenges while ensuring the security of the blockchain network. Participants in the channel perform the process of updating the state of the channel outside the blockchain. This process can proceed very quickly because it does not require the consensus of the blockchain network, but still, like on-chain, it can guarantee features such as irreversibility. In this paper, we propose the PyRos protocol, an access control system that supports the trading and sharing of data between individuals on a public blockchain based on the state channel. As far as we know, the research using the off-chain state channel for access control has not been proposed yet, so PyRos is a new approach in this field. In PyRos, user-defined access control policies are stored off-chain, and policy updates are always rapid regardless of the performance of the blockchain network. Moreover, PyRos provides means to prevent malicious participants from arbitrarily using the channel’s previous state while resolving constraints due to scalability problems, along with privacy guarantees for the transaction content. To evaluate the efficiency and security of PyRos, we provide qualitative analysis of security requirements and analysis in terms of the performance of public blockchain platforms.

블록체인 기법의 확장가능성을 위한 병행 수행 제어 기법에 대한 연구

블록체인 기법의 확장가능성을 위한 병행 수행 제어 기법에 대한 연구

A Many-Objective Optimization Model of Industrial Internet of Things Based on Private Blockchain

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has developed rapidly in recent years. Private blockchains with decentralization, flexible rules, and good privacy protection can be applied in the IIoT to process the massive data and tackle the security problem. However, the scalability of blockchain places a restriction on IIoT. Accordingly, this article proposes an improved algorithm based on Two_Arch2 to improve the scalability and decentralization while reducing the latency and cost of the blockchain. By integrating the private blockchain theory to IIoT and simultaneously considering the above four objectives, a many-objective blockchain-enabled IIoT model is constructed. Then an improved Two_Arch2 algorithm is utilized to solve the model. Experimental results show that the improved algorithm can effectively optimize four indicators of the model.

Scalable and redactable blockchain with update and anonymity

Internet-of-Things (IoT) envisions communications between heterogeneous devices and utilization of the associated data for smart decision making. Blockchain bridges the gap between widely-distributed IoT devices and the need for a universal trust-layer. When applying blockchain for IoT, some concerns can arise. Among them, scalability is a crucial factor because it decides whether blockchain can keep empowering IoT in the long term. According to a recent survey by Ali et al., some newly launched blockchains are suffering from powerful attacks (e.g. 51% attack) when the computing pool is small, and the number of participated nodes is inadequate (USENIX 2016). To ensure the scalability of initially-deployed blockchains, a proper countermeasure is important to be devised. Ateniese et al. proposed the notion of the redactable blockchain (EuroS&P 2017) which allows block history to be rewritten by using chameleon hash. However, the distribution and management of trapdoor key is crucial for the scalability of chameleon hash as well as redactable blockchain. To deal with the above problems, we propose two cryptographic schemes as the new theoretic tools for blockchain redaction: time updatable chameleon hash (TUCH) and linkable-and-redactable ring signature (LRRS). The use of TUCH and LRRS schemes enables redaction to take place scalably and anonymously where the spontaneous ring is generated for redaction, which costs little expenditures to rewrite a block content. Specifically, the redaction will be processed without assigning and splitting trapdoor key among multiple users in a complex way, and achieve transaction anonymity for users. What is more, we briefly instantiate how to build a redactable blockchain with update and anonymity (SRB) with our proposed TUCH and LRRS. While security analysis confirms that our proposals are theoretically secure, the experimental results show that our proposals are efficient for implementation purposes.

Internet of Things Based Blockchain for Temperature Monitoring and Counterfeit Pharmaceutical Prevention.

The top priority of today’s healthcare system is delivering medicine directly from the manufacturer to end-user. The pharmaceutical supply chain involves some level of commingling of a collection of stakeholders such as distributors, manufacturers, wholesalers, and customers. The biggest challenge associated with this supply chain is temperature monitoring as well as counterfeit drug prevention. Many drugs and vaccines remain viable within a specific range of temperatures. If exposed beyond this temperature range, the medicine no longer works as intended. In this paper, an Internet of Things (IoT) sensor-based blockchain framework is proposed that tracks and traces drugs as they pass slowly through the entire supply chain. On the one hand, these new technologies of blockchain and IoT sensors play an essential role in supply chain management. On the other hand, they also pose new challenges of security for resource-constrained IoT devices and blockchain scalability issues to handle this IoT sensor-based information. In this paper, our primary focus is on improving classic blockchain systems to make it suitable for IoT based supply chain management, and as a secondary focus, applying these new promising technologies to enable a viable smart healthcare ecosystem through a drug supply chain.

Privacy-Utility Tradeoffs in Routing Cryptocurrency over Payment Channel Networks

As the adoption of cryptocurrencies grows to unprecedented levels, the scalability of blockchain technologies has become increasingly important. A major open question is whether cryptocurrencies are fundamentally able to support as much traffic as traditional, centralized solutions. One prominent approach for improving the scalability of blockchains is payment channel networks (PCNs) [1]. Instead of committing every transaction to the blockchain, a separate overlay network (called a PCN) is maintained. Each node represents a user, and each edge (or payment channel) represents pre-allocated funds that can be efficiently transacted between the two endpoints under a mutual agreement. Users can transact with each other by relaying payments over a sequence of channels.

A Highly Parallelized PIM-Based Accelerator for Transaction-Based Blockchain in IoT Environment

Blockchain has gained a lot of attention from both academia and industry. However, traditional standard blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, suffer from low throughput, high computation overhead, and large transaction fee, which is not suitable for Internet of Things (IoT) transactions. Recently, transaction-based approaches, such as Tangle structure which is based on a directed acyclic graph (DAG), have emerged to solve blockchain scalability issues for IoT environment. In transaction-based blockchain, for a transaction, namely, a node, to be attached to the Tangle, it needs to verify two other transactions. However, with the Tangle expanding, this attaching process consumes huge computational resources and energy, which severely limits the performance of the transaction-based blockchain. In this article, we present Re-Tangle, a highly parallelized processing-in-memory (PIM)-based accelerator for transaction-based blockchain. Re-Tangle is composed of a random walking module, a transaction validation module, and a PoW module, to improve the Tangle system performance. These modules transfer Tangle functions, such as fast exponentiation and modular, into ReRAM-based logic analog computation units. In the random walking module, Re-Tangle maintains an exponentiation table to reduce its design complexity and improve its computation efficiency. In the transaction validation module, Re-Tangle further proposes a highly parallel modular unit to accelerate the validation of different tags in a transaction. In the PoW module, we decompose the Curl hash function into basic logic OR, AND, SHIFT, and XOR operations, and map these logic operations to ReRAM crossbars in parallel to accelerate the working process. The experimental results show that Re-Tangle distinguishes itself from other architectures with significant performance improvement and energy saving. The throughput of Re-Tangle is about $22.4\times $ and $2.38\times $ higher compared with CPU and GPU, respectively, and the energy consumption of Re-Tangle is $83.5\times $ and $5.77\times $ less for equal workload.