Performance study of blockchains

• Main Author: Wongso, Daniel Anthony
• Other Authors: Ma Maode
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Data; Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/149954
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

We see that blockchain usage has been on an exponential rise since the prominent adoption and release of Bitcoin, commonly dubbed as Blockchain 1.0. Beyond Bitcoin, the development of Ethereum and its implementation of smart contracts (Blockchain 2.0) gave rise to many other significant projects, such as peer to peer lending and borrowing, complex financial derivatives and implementation of non-fungible tokens to represent real world assets. Blockchain 2.0 however is too slow, with Ethereum having a transaction per second of 8 and Bitcoin having a transaction per second of 4.5. Although the open and public consensus nature of blockchain is suitable for IoT and many industrial applications, its low transaction speed count hinders it application in these fields. Blockchain today has evolved to blockchain 3.0 with many developments improving transaction per second and targeting industrial applications such as IoT. One popular blockchain system for such application is Hyperledger Fabric. Hyperledger Fabric is first developed by the Linux Foundation in 2015 and has received contributions from IBM, SAP, and other notable projects. The purpose of this final year project report is to provide understanding and a detailed report on my findings and study on the performance study of blockchains. The blockchain network in context is a modified Hyperledger Fabric blockchain network with an added accelerator to enhance the performance of the overall network. This project is to understand and replicate the performance, utility, and mechanism of the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain network. We will also study the performance of Hyperledger Fabric with the accelerator already implemented.