Untangling Blockchain: A Data Processing View of Blockchain Systems

By Tien Tuan Anh Dinh, Rui Liu, Meihui Zhang, Gang Chen, Beng Chin Ooi, Ji Wang. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2017

1,027 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Blockchain technologies are gaining massive momentum in the last few years. Blockchains are distributed ledgers that enable parties who do not fully trust each other to maintain a set of global states. The parties agree on the existence, values, and histories of the states. As the technology landscape is expanding rapidly, it is both important and challenging to have a firm grasp of what the core technologies have to offer, especially with respect to their data processing capabilities. In this paper, we first survey the state of the art, focusing on private blockchains (in which parties are authenticated). We analyze both in-production and research systems in four dimensions: distributed ledger, cryptography, consensus protocol, and smart contract. We then present BLOCKBENCH, a benchmarking framework for understanding performance of private blockchains against data processing workloads. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of three major blockchain systems based on BLOCKBENCH, namely Ethereum, Parity, and Hyperledger Fabric. The results demonstrate several trade-offs in the design space, as well as big performance gaps between blockchain and database systems. Drawing from design principles of database systems, we discuss several research directions for bringing blockchain performance closer to the realm of databases.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/82d2b9d09cc339fdeac05abfb8a31f9c6eace948

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Citations in the corpus

A Survey on IoT Security: Application Areas, Security Threats, and Solution Architectures (2019, background): “Irrespective of the distance between the devices, the data generated by them can be easily stored on the blockchain in a secure manner [112].”
Blockchain for 5G and Beyond Networks: A State of the Art Survey (2019, background): “components, including transaction records and a blockchain header [28].”
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A Vademecum on Blockchain Technologies: When, Which, and How (2019, methodology): “[41], based on the recent advances in blockchain frameworks described hereafter.”
A Survey of Blockchain Technology Applied to Smart Cities: Research Issues and Challenges (2019, background): “For a more insightful discussion on smart contracts, please refer to [87] and [91].”
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Performance Analysis of Hyperledger Fabric Platforms (2018, background): “Another recent experiment studied the scalability of three blockchain platforms,Hyperledger, Ethereum, andParity [49, 50].”
A Survey on Consensus Mechanisms and Mining Strategy Management in Blockchain Networks (2018, background): “However, due to the recent market frenzy about cryptocurrencies, most of the existing general reviews and surveys on blockchains emphasize narrowly the scenarios of using blockchain networks as the backbone technologies for cryptocurrencies, especially the market-dominant ones such as Bitcoin and Et”