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Article
A Review of Blockchain Architecture and Consensus Protocols: Use Cases, Challenges, and Solutions
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Submitted:
16 September 2019
Posted:
17 September 2019
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Abstract
Over the last decade the blockchain technology has emerged to provide solutions to the complexity and privacy challenges of using distributed databases. It reduces the cost for customers by eliminating intermediaries and builds the trust in peer-to-peer communications. Over this time, the concept of blockchain has shifted greatly due to its potential in business growth for enterprises and the rapidly evolving applications in a collaborative smart cities' ecosystem, healthcare, and governance. Many platforms, with different architectures and consensus protocols, have been introduced. Consequently, it becomes challenging for an application developer to choose the right platform. Furthermore, blockchain has misaligned with the goals for efficient green collaborative digital ecosystem. Therefore, it becomes critical to address this gap and to build new frameworks to align blockchain with those goals. In this paper, we discuss the evolution of blockchain architecture and consensus protocols, bringing a retrospective analysis and discussing the rationale of the evolution of the various architectures and protocols, as well as capturing the assumptions conducting to their development and contributions to building collaborative applications. We introduce a classification of those architectures helping developers to choose a suitable platform for applications and providing insights for future research directions in the field to build new frameworks.
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Subject: Computer Science and Mathematics - Information Systems
Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.
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