Towards Scalable and Private Industrial Blockchains

Abstract

The blockchain emerges as an innovative tool that has the potential to positively impact the way we design a number of online applications today. In many ways, the blockchain technology is, however, still not mature enough to cater for industrial standards. Namely, existing Byzantine tolerant permission-based blockchain deployments can only scale to a limited number of nodes. These systems typically require that all transactions (and their order of execution) are publicly available to all nodes in the system, which comes at odds with common data sharing practices in the industry, and prevents a centralized regulator from overseeing the full blockchain system. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain architecture devised specifically to meet industrial standards. Our proposal leverages the notion of satellite chains that can privately run different consensus protocols in parallel - thereby considerably boosting the scalability premises of the system. Our solution also accounts for a hands-off regulator that oversees the entire network, enforces specific policies by means of smart contracts, etc. We implemented our solution and integrated it with Hyperledger Fabric v0.6.