The potential of blockchain technology is immense, with its application spanning numerous sectors like finance, supply chain management, medical records management, and more. However, the scalability issues associated with blockchain technology have posed significant challenges to its widespread adoption. This article explores how advanced database architectures can tackle these scalability barriers, paving the way for a more efficient and practical use of blockchain technology.
Blockchain, the technological marvel that powered Bitcoin, has expanded its reach far beyond cryptocurrency. However, its adoption comes with several trade-offs, primarily in scalability and speed. The public blockchain networks, while less secure, are limited in speed, taking about 15 minutes to complete each transaction. The need for a new blockchain software and hardware architecture is evident, one that offers superior performance without compromising security.
The inherent scalability issues in blockchain technology can be traced back to its lack of distributed architecture. The primary objective of blockchain technology was to secure transactions through the immutability of its distributed ledgers, with scalability not being a primary focus. Solutions to blockchain scalability have ranged from Graphical Processor Unit (GPU) farms to large clusters of virtual machines (VMs).
While private blockchain networks offer greater security, their lack of distributed servers significantly limits performance. This article presents an innovative blockchain architecture, BuildDB™, that offers superior performance without compromising security, making it well-suited for various verticals beyond cryptocurrency.
Understanding Blockchain Technology
To understand the limitations of blockchain architecture, it's crucial to grasp the basic concepts of blockchain technology. At its core, blockchain can be considered a specialized distributed database/ledger that replicates copies of transactions, ensuring the transactions recorded are immutable.
Blockchain transactions are organized into blocks, each containing a timestamp and a hashed link to a previous block, forming a chain of blocks, or "blockchain". Any tampering attempts would disrupt this chain, making blockchains highly resistant to fraud.
Mining and Anchoring in Blockchain
The process of mining is integral to blockchain technology. It involves hashing numerous transactions into a single hash key, a process that is both repetitive and process-intensive. Another key component is anchoring, which allows hashed data to be anchored to a blockchain, verifying its legitimacy.
Performance and Scalability Challenges
Traditional databases rely heavily on indexes to support fast query times. However, the use of indexes requires multiple copies of data, which is both costly and requires tuning based on an application's query pattern. BuildDB™ offers a radical solution to this performance problem by introducing the Command Query Response Segregation (CQRS) design pattern.
Addressing Scalability Issues with BuildDB™ Architecture
BuildDB™, developed by 832 Energy Technology Consultants, LLC, is a patent-pending architecture designed to address the scalability issues in blockchain technology without sacrificing key components like hashing/mining and proofs. It employs several design patterns specifically tailored for distributed computing, each complementing each other to solve the various scalability challenges in blockchain.
Private "Permissioned" Blockchain Network
Private or permissioned blockchain networks are more secure than public ones and require a massive private cloud infrastructure to function at scale. BuildDB™, with its unique architecture and private cloud blockchain network, offers the security of a private blockchain network and the performance of a public one.
Event Driven Design Pattern
BuildDB™ incorporates an event-driven design model to alleviate the inefficient repetitive and intensive process of finding the parent Merkle Tree associated with a specific blockchain transaction hash.
Event Messaging Design Pattern
The architecture of BuildDB™ is built on a messaging design pattern that supports multiple formats such as JSON, XML, CSV, JSV, SOAP, MessageWire, HTML, Text, Byte Array, and Streams. It uses MessageWire as its default internal messaging system owing to its fast process for serializing and conducting intra-service communications.
Event Actor Design Pattern
BuildDB™ adopts the Event Actor design pattern, creating an abstraction of each blockchain transaction. Event Actors are a primitive unit of computation that are extremely fast, designed specifically for solving distributed computing problems. They are completely isolated, never share memory, and are thus stateful.
QueryChain™ Consensus
BuildDB™ architecture supports rapid consensus through its patent-pending consensus algorithm, Chain of Events Consensus. This consensus is a part of the QueryChain™ language used to place data onto and retrieve data from the BuildDB™ blockchain ledger system.
Performance Metrics of BuildDB™
The performance metrics of BuildDB™ architecture outperform any commercially available blockchain solution. It can process approximately 5,000,000 messages per second during intra-process communications, producing more than 1,000 blockchain proofs per second.
Conclusion
Overcoming the scalability issues in blockchain technology requires a unique approach to distributed architecture. BuildDB™ architecture, with its excellent performance metrics, provides a compelling answer to the challenge of creating a fast blockchain platform capable of supporting any vertical.
BuildDB™ offers expertise in data connectivity and interoperability. Their technology and services improve the alignment and modernization of data analytics, the management of supplier chains, and the digital security protection of sensitive data. Their team comprises recognized Subject Matter Experts in data security, connectivity, and interoperability within several business verticals.