Blockchain Service Research Articles

Understanding Characteristics and System Implications of DAG-Based Blockchain in IoT Environments

Blockchain is starting to be deployed in the Internet of Things (IoT) to enable autonomous device-to-device transactions. However, traditional block-based blockchain techniques, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, are not suitable for IoT environments due to their low throughput, high computation overhead, and costly transaction fee. To satisfy the requirements of IoT environments, directed-acyclic-graph (DAG)-based approaches, aiming to provide cheap blockchain services with low latency and high throughput, are emerging. This article presents a set of comprehensive experimental studies on IOTA, a representative DAG-based blockchain. We aim to exhibit its unique characteristics mainly from three aspects: 1) performance; 2) security; and 3) system robustness. We have developed a series of benchmark tools and judiciously selected typical configurations to perform experimental examinations with a real private IOTA network. Our studies reveal several interesting findings: 1) the throughput of IOTA is higher than the traditional block-based blockchain but far less than the reported thousands of transactions per second (TPS) in its whitepaper, even with scaling-up configurations; 2) the database query heavily impacts the performance of IOTA, even more than its mining [i.e., Proof of Work (PoW)] process; and 3) the system robustness of IOTA is closely related to the frequency of the incoming transactions while the milestone sent by the centralized coordinator has little effect on the system robustness. We make our benchmark tools public and expect our works can inspire system architects, application designers, and practitioners with new optimization directions and potential application cases for further exploration.

No Algorithmization Without Representation: Pilot Study on Regulatory Experiments in an Exploratory Sandbox.

The exploratory sandbox for blockchain services, Lithopy, provided an experimental alternative to the aspirational frameworks and guidelines regulating algorithmic services ex post or ex ante. To understand the possibilities and limits of this experimental approach, we compared the regulatory expectations in the sandbox with the real-life decisions about an “actual” intrusive service: contact tracing application. We gathered feedback on hypothetical and real intrusive services from a group of 59 participants before and during the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Czech Republic (January, June 2020, and April 2021). Participants expressed support for interventions based on an independent rather than government oversight that increases participation and representation. Instead of reducing the regulations to code or insisting on strong regulations over the code, participants demanded hybrid combinations of code and regulations. We discuss this as a demand for “no algorithmization without representation.” The intrusive services act as new algorithmic “territories,” where the “data” settlers must redefine their sovereignty and agency on new grounds. They refuse to rely upon the existing institutions and promises of governance by design and seek tools that enable engagement in the full cycle of the design, implementation, and evaluation of the services. The sandboxes provide an environment that bridges the democratic deficit in the design of algorithmic services and their regulations.

A Framework of Distributed Solar Blockchain as a Service

Blockchain was combined with several other information technologies and computing concepts to create modern cryptocurrencies protecting through cryptographic mechanisms instead of a central repository or authority. A Framework of distributed solar Blockchain Service (DSBaaS) platform as a Service is designed to manage distributed solar energy system by adopting Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) platform. Base on the ability operation and maintenance features of BaaS, it is available to solve operational management, safety management, material management, project management, financial transactions management, transaction settlement and other related multi-agent transaction pain points. Providing new business models for implementing distributed solar energy production, transmission and utilization of effective coordination and management, it is a key component to forming clean, efficient, flexible and intelligent distributed solar energy system.

China's BSN Blockchain Network as a national advanced infrastructure

Subject. This article discusses the issues related to China's Blockchain Service Network (BSN) national initiative. Objectives. The article aims to consider the BSN Development Alliance mission to implement the BSN infrastructure initiative and assess the prospects of this implementation to solve present-time urgent problems. Methods. For the study, we used analysis and systematization. Results. Based on the materials of scientific conferences and foreign consulting agencies' and technical documents analytical and statistical data, the article presents certain results of the analysis of the BSN national infrastructure implementation and some problematic issues hampering this process in China. Conclusions. The prospects for the implementation of a long-term global BSN project in China, as well as in other countries, the importance of the Chinese government's activities in the legislative regulation of the BSN blockchain infrastructure and the implementation of long-term perspective projects China Standards 2035 and Smart City deserve great attention.

Synergistic Mechanism of the High-Quality Development of the Urban Digital Economy from Blockchain Adoption Perspective—A Configuration Approach

Blockchain technology is suited to the high-quality development of the digital economy in addressing privacy and data security issues. This study explores the synergistic mechanism of the following six factors from three dimensions based on the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework theory with a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fs/QCA) method: technology, organization, and environment, namely, Blockchain service capability, Blockchain knowledge accumulation, government attention allocation, government funding support, industry carrying capacity and blockchain technology R&D environment, on the quality of the digital economy of 43 cities in China. The conclusions are as follows: (1) the absence of government funding regarding the blockchain domain is a condition contributing to the absence of high urban digital economy quality; (2) there are three driving configurations for the high-quality urban digital economy in the blockchain technology adoption perspective, which are as follows: knowledge-industry driven, government-service driven, and R&D-service driven; (3) there is one driving configuration for the absence of high urban digital economy quality, namely the knowledge-R&D-funding-inhibiting type. The relevant policy implications can provide theoretical references for local governments to develop the digital economy with the help of blockchain technology.

A collaboration strategy in the mining pool for proof-of-neural-architecture consensus

In most popular public accessible cryptocurrency systems, the mining pool plays a key role because mining cryptocurrency with the mining pool turns the non-profitable situation into profitable for individual miners. In many recent novel blockchain consensuses, the deep learning training procedure becomes the task for miners to prove their workload. Thus, the computation power of miners will not purely be spent on the hash puzzle. In this way, the hardware and energy will support the blockchain service and deep learning training simultaneously. While the incentive of miners is to earn tokens, individual miners are motivated to join mining pools to become more competitive. In this paper, we are the first to demonstrate a mining pool solution for novel consensuses based on deep learning.The mining pool manager partitions the full searching space into subspaces, and all miners are scheduled to collaborate on the Neural architecture search (NAS) tasks in the assigned subspace. Experiments demonstrate that the performance of this type of mining pool is more competitive than that of an individual miner. Due to the uncertainty of miners' behaviors, the mining pool manager checks the standard deviation of the performance of high reward miners and prepares backup miners to ensure completion of the tasks of high reward miners.

Servitization with blockchain in the maritime supply chain

This study provides a game-theoretic analysis of the service strategy of a two-tier maritime supply chain. We explore a setting where a port provides blockchain service with different service levels. We extend the existing literature, which discusses the servitization with blockchain in the maritime supply chain. We demonstrate both the economic and environmental benefits that blockchain service increases the operational efficiency of the port by paperless. Moreover, the port can be realized the reduction on congestion through different supply chain capacities. In addition, we find the rational strategy, including the changes in cost structure, profitability with the time reduction, the value of blockchain service in the market segment, consumer surplus, and social welfare, and the relationship between blockchain service and congestion, respectively. Furthermore, this study embodies the potential contributions of three aspects. Specifically, we reveal the role of blockchain service in the operational time of port with information transformation from paper documents to e-documents. Moreover, we find that the governance strategy of servitization with blockchain service is based on economic benefit and environmental benefits. Finally, we provide a new method to solve port congestion in the maritime supply chain. Therefore, from the perspective of management insight, the port needs to improve the operational efficiency through the blockchain technology with paperless to help consumers to increase the service experience. In addition, the port should also be concerned about the role of blockchain service in the environmental protection and port congestion. In this case, the port can adjust the strategy in order to satisfy the requirements of every stakeholder.

An implementation framework of blockchain-based hazardous waste transfer management system.

The rapid increase in volume and types of hazardous waste (HW) due to China's continuous economic growth makes it significant to conduct HW safety management. However, due to the information asymmetry between the regulators and regulated institutions, problems such as illegal dumping and statistical fraud are common in hazardous waste transfer (HWT) activities. Moreover, there is a severe problem of information isolated island among waste production, transportation, and treatment companies in the HW market. Promoting the information monitoring and tracking of the whole process of HWT is the main challenge for HW management. Blockchain provides an ideal solution to overcome the above challenges. This study developed a framework for the blockchain-based HWT management system, which could support government regulators to obtain relevant information in HWT and improve the efficiency of HWT. The HWT management system was introduced in detail from different perspectives, including infrastructure, blockchain service, functions, and users, emphasizing six information management functions. Finally, the positive impact and various challenges encountered in implementing blockchain in HWT management were discussed. This study applies blockchain to the research field of HWT management, which expands the application of blockchain in the field of solid waste management with great theoretical and practical significance.

Resource Analysis of Blockchain Consensus Algorithms in Hyperledger Fabric

In the blockchain network, the consensus algorithm is used to tolerate node faults with data consistency and integrity, so it is vital in all blockchain services. Previous studies on the consensus algorithm have the following limitations: 1) no resource consumption analysis was done, 2) performance analysis was not comprehensive in terms of blockchain parameters (e.g., number of orderer nodes, number of fault nodes, batch size, payload size), and 3) practical fault scenarios were not evaluated. In other words, the resource provisioning of consensus algorithms in clouds has not been addressed adequately. As many blockchain services are deployed in the form of blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS), how to provision consensus algorithms becomes a key question to be answered. This study presents a kernel-level analysis for the resource consumption and comprehensive performance evaluations of three major consensus algorithms (i.e., Kafka, Raft, and PBFT). Our experiments reveal that resource consumption differs up to seven times, which demonstrates the importance of proper resource provisioning for BaaS.

Design of a Cloud-Blockchain-based Secure Internet of Things Architecture

The growing number of Internet of Things (IoT) objects and the operational and security challenges in IoT systems are encouraging researchers to design suitable IoT architecture. Enormous data generated in the IoT environment face several kinds of security and privacy challenges. IoT system generally suffers from several issues like data storage, safety, privacy, integrity, transparency, trust, and single point of failure. IoT environment is emerging with several solutions to resolve these problems. The main objective of this paper is to design a cloud-blockchain-based secure IoT architecture that provides advanced and efficient storage and security solutions to IoT ecosystem. Blockchain technology appears to be a decent choice to resolve such kinds of problems. Blockchain technology uses a hash-based cryptographic technique for information security and integrity. Cloud computing provides advanced storage solutions with several remote services to store, compute and analyze the data. The proposed IoT architecture is based on the integration of cloud and blockchain services, which aim to provide transparent, decentralized, and trustworthy and secure storage solutions. In addition to the standard layers (perception layer, network layer, processing layer, and application layer) the proposed IoT architecture in the present paper includes a service layer, a security layer, and a parallel management and control layer, which focus on the security and management of the entire IoT infrastructure.

Exploring the Intersection of Consortium Blockchain Technologies and Multi-Access Edge Computing: Chronicles of a Proof of Concept Demo

The efficient administration of network resources in Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) is an active research topic these days. Task sharing, in particular, is one of the fundamental problems regarding MEC architectures although the existing literature approaches the topic mostly from the mobile user point of view. In this article, we present the chronicles of EdgeChain network, a proof of concept demo of a blockchain-based model for secure and private task sharing collaboration specially designed for edge computing servers. EdgeChain operates on a decentralized approach that counts on the blockchain services provided by the Hyperledger Fabric platform. The network offers enhanced security features that leverage the permissioned nature of Fabric, more specifically, it relies on Fabric’s membership service to validate identities and allowed behavior of participant nodes in the network. This design choice restrains external attackers from interfering with the normal operation of the task sharing scheme. The network also offers enhanced privacy features powered by a smart contract design that makes use of multiple decoupled Fabric channels with separate operation rules, ledgers, and peer-to-peer communication networks. This design choice guarantees that the computational tasks circulating in the network are only exposed to servers participating in task sharing services. The trait prevents other servers in the network to have access to private tasks and their data. The article goes through the multiple stages of the design and construction process of the proof of concept demo, from the blockchain-based task sharing framework and system model, all the way to the implementation details of the network.

Blockchain technology empowers telecom network operation

Telecom operators are deploying the fifth generation (5G) networks around the world which promises high information transmission rate, wide network coverage, low communication delay, and easy access to a large number of devices. However, during the construction and operation of 5G, telecom operators face many challenges, such as insufficient frequency resources, low efficiency of network management, information opacity, risks of data interoperability, and network privacy vulnerabilities. As 5G is generally deployed in heterogeneous networks with massive ubiquitous devices, it is quite necessary to provide secure and decentralized solutions. Blockchain is a distributed system maintained by multiple parties with inherit features including decentralization, traceability and tamperproof. These features collectively contribute to a new application ecosystem where transactions are secure and trustworthy. Therefore, blockchain is expected to integrate with 5G networks to build safer and more reliable mobile network infrastructures. This paper firstly discusses the merits of blockchain technology and the benefits of integrating it with 5G networks. Then a variety of applications of blockchain technology in telecom network operation are reviewed, including spectrum sharing, international roaming settlement, network operation management, number selection management and supply chain management. In the end, we show our recently advance in integrating blockchain in 5G by introducing a multi framework based blockchain service network architecture deployed in real environment.

Role of Smart Contract Technology Blockchain Services in Finance and Banking Systems: Concept and Core Values

Role of Smart Contract Technology Blockchain Services in Finance and Banking Systems: Concept and Core Values

Blockchain-Based Software Architecture Development for Service Requirements With Smart Contracts

We review the background, classification, specifications, and related aspects of using smart contracts in blockchain services and introduce a framework for generating a general software architecture in the context of contract-oriented programming.

User experience framework for understanding user experience in blockchain services

Since the advent of blockchain, interest in the technology has rapidly increased, bringing the launch of new blockchain services. User experience (UX) research provides a basis for systematically understanding and improving the experience of users, and must be carried out regardless of service type. However, it seems that research on the UX of blockchain services has not kept up with the speed with which blockchain technology has been implemented. To remedy this situation, this study proposes a UX framework for understanding the nature of UX in blockchain services. An extensive literature survey related to UX, blockchain technology, and blockchain services was conducted to define UX in blockchain services and identify the elements of UX. Blockchain functions and values that had been newly introduced in blockchain services were identified to help clarify the nature of UX in blockchain services. The proposed framework consists of two parts: a general UX and a technological UX. The elements and sub-elements of the defined UX are derived with detailed explanations. The proposed framework was applied to four blockchain services as a case study. The appropriateness and applicability of the framework are supported by the results of this case study. This study is expected to inspire researchers to provide enhanced UX in blockchain services in the future.

On Cyber Risk Management of Blockchain Networks: A Game Theoretic Approach

Open-access blockchains based on proof-of-work protocols have gained tremendous popularity for their capabilities of providing decentralized tamper-proof ledgers and platforms for data-driven autonomous organization. Nevertheless, the proof-of-work based consensus protocols are vulnerable to cyber-attacks such as double-spending. In this paper, we propose a novel approach of cyber risk management for blockchain-based service. In particular, we adopt the cyber-insurance as an economic tool for neutralizing cyber risks due to attacks in blockchain networks. We consider a blockchain service market, which is composed of the infrastructure provider, the blockchain provider, the cyber-insurer, and the users. The blockchain provider purchases from the infrastructure provider, e.g., a cloud, the computing resources to maintain the blockchain consensus, and then offers blockchain services to the users. The blockchain provider strategizes its investment in the infrastructure and the service price charged to the users, in order to improve the security of the blockchain and thus optimize its profit. Meanwhile, the blockchain provider also purchases a cyber-insurance from the cyber-insurer to protect itself from the potential damage due to the attacks. In return, the cyber-insurer adjusts the insurance premium according to the perceived risk level of the blockchain service. Based on the assumption of rationality for the market entities, we model the interaction among the blockchain provider, the users, and the cyber-insurer as a two-level Stackelberg game. Namely, the blockchain provider and the cyber-insurer lead to set their pricing/investment strategies, and then the users follow to determine their demand of the blockchain service. Specifically, we consider the scenario of double-spending attacks and provide a series of analytical results about the Stackelberg equilibrium in the market game.

Research on Block Chain Service Composition Strategy Based on Big Data

With the proposal of China’s new infrastructure strategy, big data, artificial intelligence and 5G networks are bound to get further rapid development, and the Internet of Things, as a key component, is also getting more and more extensive attention and in-depth research. Wireless sensor network is an important part of the development of the Internet of Things, which is widely used in military, transportation, industry and daily life. Therefore, the security of wireless sensor network is particularly important. Due to the limited resources such as energy, storage and space, existing heavyweight security authentication methods are not suitable for wireless sensor networks. Based on the block chain design idea, a lightweight wireless sensor network security authentication model is proposed to solve the data security problem of wireless sensor network terminal. The model divides the sensor network into two layers: global network and local network. The local network adopts asymmetric encryption for centralized security authentication. The global network uses directed acyclic graph (DAG) and Tangle technology to construct the account books, and uses the key nodes and random walk method to verify the consistency.

Ruling through technology: politicizing blockchain services

Next to artificial intelligence and big data, blockchains have emerged as one of the most oft-cited technologies associated with the digital economy. Leading technology companies have recently contributed to making the technology used more widely by developing integrated blockchain offerings. The emergence of such services yet strikingly clashes with the original stated goal of the technology to remove any form of central political authority, such as the one companies behind these new services can represent. How should we then understand the embrace of blockchains by companies that this technology was notably supposed to displace? Using the concept of infrastructure from Science and Technology Studies, we argue that these companies are not merely adopting the technology but actively promoting a new assemblage of socio-technical devices to reassert their authority over how information is exchanged online. Based on a comparative analysis of the technical documentation of Ethereum and Amazon Web Services (AWS) blockchain services, we highlight how actors contributing to building digital infrastructures regulate their users' behavior by affording them different capacities and constraints. We moreover show how by pursuing its commercial interest, AWS supported a corporate form of governance historically promoted by the United States to oversee the digital economy.

MNCF: Prediction Method for Reliable Blockchain Services under a BaaS Environment

Blockchain is an innovative distributed ledger technology that is widely used to build next-generation applications without the support of a trusted third party. With the ceaseless evolution of the service-oriented computing (SOC) paradigm, Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) has emerged, which facilitates development of blockchain-based applications. To develop a high-quality blockchain-based system, users must select highly reliable blockchain services (peers) that offer excellent quality-of-service (QoS). Since the vast number of blockchain services leading to sparse QoS data, selecting the optimal personalized services is challenging. Hence, we improve neural collaborative filtering and propose a QoS-based blockchain service reliability prediction algorithm under BaaS, named modified neural collaborative filtering (MNCF). In this model, we combine a neural network with matrix factorization to perform collaborative filtering for the latent feature vectors of users. Furthermore, multi-task learning for sharing different parameters is introduced to improve the performance of the model. Experiments based on a large-scale real-world dataset validate its superior performance compared to baselines.

A model-based approach for planning blockchain service provisioning

A model-based approach for planning blockchain service provisioning