Systematic Literature Review of Challenges in Blockchain Scalability

Abstract

Blockchain technology is fast becoming the most transformative technology of recent times and has created hype and optimism, gaining much attention from the public and private sectors. It has been widely deployed in decentralized crypto currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin is the success story of a public blockchain application that propelled intense research and development into blockchain technology. However, scalability remains a crucial challenge. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum are encountering low-efficiency issues with low throughput, high transaction latency, and huge energy consumption. The scalability issue in public Blockchains is hindering the provision of optimal solutions to businesses and industries. This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) on the public blockchain scalability issue and challenges. The scope of this SLR includes an in-depth investigation into the scalability problem of public blockchain, associated fundamental factors, and state-of-art solutions. This project managed to extract 121 primary papers from major scientific databases such as Scopus, IEEE explores, Science Direct, and Web of Science. The synthesis of these 121 articles revealed that scalability in public blockchain is not a singular term. A variety of factors are allied to it, with transaction throughput being the most discussed factor. In addition, other interdependent vita factors include storages, block size, number of nodes, energy consumption, latency, and cost. Generally, each term is somehow directly or indirectly reliant on the consensus model embraced by the blockchain nodes. It is also noticed that the contemporary available consensus models are not efficient in scalability and thus often fail to provide good QoS (throughput and latency) for practical industrial applications. Our findings exemplify that the Internet of Things (IoT) would be the leading application of blockchain in industries such as energy, finance, resource management, healthcare, education, and agriculture. These applications are, however, yet to achieve much-desired outcomes due to scalability issues. Moreover, Onchain and offchain are the two major categories of scalability solutions. Sagwit, block size expansion, sharding, and consensus mechanisms are examples of onchain solutions. Offchain, on the other hand, is a lighting network.

From Traditional Product Lifecycle Management Systems to Blockchain-Based Platforms

“…In general, there are three types of blockchain networks: public, private, and consortium blockchains. Public blockchains are permissionless in nature, and are therefore open for anyone in the world to access, perform transactions, and participate in the consensus process [19]. The blockchain concept presented by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 is an example of a public chain [20].…”

Big Data e Tecnologias Digitais Aplicadas à Economia Circular: Oportunidades para Cadeias Produtivas mais Sustentáveis

“…Um dos principais desafios refere-se à escalabilidade, uma vez que cada nó de uma rede blockchain armazena todos os dados históricos das transações realizadas [Lu 2019]. Entretanto, dado o crescente volume de transações e, consequentemente, o crescente volume de dados gerados em um sistema blockchain, torna-se necessário o investimento em pesquisas que possibilitem prover maior escalabilidade ao sistema, resolvendo, assim, questões referentes à alta taxa de latência, elevado consumo de energia e baixa taxa de transferência [Khan et al 2021].…”

SASLedger: A Secured, Accelerated Scalable Storage Solution for Distributed Ledger Systems

“…Blockchain technology is not only underpinning cryptocurrencies, but also widely adopted in other industries, such as finance [22][23][24], IoT [14,25,26] and healthcare [27][28][29]. Although blockchain benefits the systems that use this technology, it brings scalability issues to them [30][31][32]. The methods to solve the storage scalability issue of blockchain are categorized into "on-chain" solutions and "off-chain" solutions.…”