Blockchain is the technology used by developers of cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, to enable exchange of financial “coins” between participants in the absence of a trusted third party to ensure the transaction, such as is typically done by governments. Blockchain has evolved to become a generic approach to store and process data in a highly decentralized and secure way. In this article, we review blockchain concepts and use cases, and discuss the challenges in using them from a governmental viewpoint. We begin with reviewing the categories of blockchains, the underlying mechanisms, and why blockchains can achieve their security goals. We then review existing known governmental use cases by regions. To show both technical and deployment details of blockchain adoption, we study a few representative use cases in the domains of healthcare and energy infrastructures. Finally, the review of both technical details and use cases helps us summarize the adoption and technical challenges of blockchains.

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A blockchain is a distributed system that achieves strong security guarantees in storing, managing, and processing data. All blockchains achieve a common goal: building a decentralized system that provides a trustworthy service in an untrustworthy environment. A blockchain builds a Byzantine fault-tolerant system where decentralized nodes run a protocol to reach an agreement on the common system state. In this article, we focus on the research of BFT protocols. In particular, we categorize BFT protocols according to both the system models and workflow. We seek to answer a few important questions: How has the research in BFT evolved in the past four decades, especially with the rise of blockchains? What are the driven needs for BFT research in the future?

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We present a framework for evaluating the performance of Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols theoretically. Our motivation is to identify protocols suitable for a particular power grid application. In this application, replicas are located in a LAN network where latency is the priority. To fully understand the performance of BFT, we provide a generic approach that quantifies the performance of BFT protocols based on the number of cryptographic operations under five different scenarios (in the presence of failures and without failures).We present the performance of three representative BFT protocols: PBFT, Prime, and SBFT. To validate our framework, we also evaluate the protocols experimentally in the CloudLab testbed. Our experimental results match the findings predicted by the framework. Although a variety of factors may affect the performance of the protocols, our framework can be used as a valuable reference to understand the performance of BFT.Index Terms-BFT, cryptography, power grid * Co-first author. Yue Huang performed the work while she was at UMBC. Sisi Duan performed this work while she was at UMBC and an LBNL Affiliate