As a decentralized distributed ledger, blockchain is endowed with immutability, traceability, anonymity, and transparency, which has got rapid development in cryptocurrency and production as a new trend. In the meantime, the occurrence of Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) helps in mitigation of the complexity and difficulty in deployment and management of blockchain systems and makes it easier to concentrate on business logic implementation for developers. However, most existing BaaS systems are hosted in the environment of cloud vendors, which has also incurred vendor lock-in risk and impairs the inherent trustless characteristic of blockchain. Though present BaaS systems own a level of availability by using cloud computing or edge computing as infrastructure, the availability is limited, considering the availability of network connections and the data center itself. In this article, a novel cloud-edge collaborative BaaS paradigm is proposed. With the assistance of redundant blockchain node candidates, leader election, and edge network self-healing components, the proposed BaaS system is equipped to extend BaaS to the on-premises edge or private cloud, and realize high availability of blockchain systems in edge-autonomy and cross-data-center scenarios. Through testing a simplified system in a simulated environment in cloud servers, this proposed BaaS system has an acceptable throughput under specific transaction sending rates without much performance degradation due to containerization and data synchronization compared with the original blockchain on-premises deployment method.INDEX TERMS Blockchain, blockchain as a service, cloud computing, cloud-edge collaboration, edge computing, high availability.
Cross-chain is the key technology to achieve interconnectivity and interoperability across various blockchain networks. It surpasses traditional single-chain architecture in terms of the performance, capacity, privacy, economic and technical scalability. Cross-chain can break barriers between institutions, industries, and regions. This paper integrates existing blockchain interoperability technologies and proposes a distributed fusion cross-chain model in financial industry. In order to support large scale computing and high availability requirements in financial industry, the model is built on a decentralized architecture and highly scalable. It supports large-scale isomorphic or heterogeneous blockchain crosschain data and state interaction. And it achieves reliable financial value circulation in various underlying blockchain networks.
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.