Scaling up public blockchains

Abstract

Blockchain technology has emerged as the means to change the structure of the Internet and build more trustful and secure services. While deploying an application to a blockchain network brings significant development overhead, the level of decentralization and security offered by permissionless blockchain systems has triggered a huge interest in the technology and a high demand for using existing networks. This increased demand has highlighted the most significant problem of public blockchain systems, scalability in terms of the transaction processing rate. The first generation of blockchain systems is characterized by very low transaction processing rates that, in combination with high usage demand, trigger high latency and high usage fees. © 1988-2012 IEEE.