The rise of blockchain technology within a few years has attracted researchers across the world. The prime reason for worldwide attention is undoubtedly due to its feature of immutability along with the decentralized approach of data protection. As this technology is progressing, lots of developments in terms of identifying new applications, blockchain-based platforms, consensus mechanisms, etc are taking place. Hence, in this article, an attempt has been made to review the recent advancements in blockchain technology. Furthermore, we have also explored the available blockchain platforms, highlighted and explored future research directions and challenges.
Blockchain Technology is exclusively used to make online transactions secure by maintaining a distributed and decentralized ledger of records across multiple computers. Tendermint is a general-purpose blockchain engine that is composed of two parts; Tendermint Core and the blockchain application interface. The application interface makes Tendermint suitable for a wide range of applications. In this paper, we analyze and improve Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant (PBFT), a consensus-based Tendermint blockchain algorithm. In order to avoid negative issues of locks, we first propose a lock-free algorithm for blockchain in which the proposal and voting phases are concurrent whereas the commit phase is sequential. This consideration in the algorithm allows parallelism. Secondly, a new methodology is used to decide the size of the voter set which is a subset of blockchain nodes, further investigating the block sensitivity and trustworthiness of nodes. Thirdly, to fairly select the voter set nodes, we employ the random walk algorithm. Fourthly, we imply the wait-freedom property by using a timeout due to which all blocks are eventually committed or aborted. In addition, we have discussed voting conflicts and consensuses issues that are used as a correctness property, and provide some supportive techniques.This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA license.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.