BLOCKBENCH: A FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYZING PRIVATE BLOCKCHAINS

Abstract

Blockchain technologies are taking the world by storm. Public blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, enable secure peer-to-peer applications like crypto-currency or smart contracts. Their security and performance are well studied. This thesis concerns recent private blockchain systems designed with stronger security (trust) assumption and performance requirement. These systems aim to disrupt applications which have so far been implemented on top of database systems, e.g., banking, finance, and trading. Multiple platforms for private blockchains are under active development and fine-tuning. However, there is an evident lack of a systematic framework with which different systems can be analyzed and compared against each other. Such a framework can be used to assess blockchains’ viability as another distributed data processing platform while helping developers to identify bottlenecks and accordingly improve their platforms.