Effective Scaling of Blockchain Beyond Consensus Innovations and Moore's Law: Challenges and Opportunities

• Published in: IEEE systems journal Vol. 16; no. 1; pp. 1424 - 1435
• Main Authors: Liu, Yinqiu, Qian, Kai, Wang, Kun, He, Lei
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.03.2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Benchmark testing; Benchmarks; Blockchain; consensus mechanism; Cryptography; Hardware; Innovations; Moore's law; New technology; Peer-to-peer computing; performance benchmarking; Scalability; Technological innovation; Throughput; Topology
• ISSN: 1932-8184; 1937-9234
• DOI: 10.1109/JSYST.2021.3087798

As an emerging technology, blockchain has achieved great success in numerous application scenarios, from intelligent healthcare to smart cities. However, a long-standing bottleneck hindering its further development is the massive resource consumption attributed to the distributed storage and consensus mechanisms. This makes blockchain suffer from insufficient performance and poor scalability. In this article, we evaluate numerous representative blockchain proposals in the past decade and demonstrate that the potential of the widely adopted consensus-based scaling is seriously limited, especially in the current era when Moore's law-based hardware evolution is about to end. We achieve this by developing an open-source benchmarking tool, called Prism , with which we further investigate the resource-related factors that hinder the current scaling attempts. Furthermore, we discuss various topology and hardware innovations which could help to scale up blockchain. Generally speaking, this article provides blockchain researchers many valuable insights because it explores the next-generation scaling strategies by conducting a large-scale benchmarking.