Standards-based performance measurement for blockchains built to connect organisations

What is it about?

Organizations in general, and businesses in particular, increasingly build dedicated blockchains/distributed ledgers to exchange and share data among themselves. In comparison to a web of direct, organization-to-organization communication, or a dedicated third party "hosting" a database for this purpose, this approach carries an immensely lower (security) risk and increases trust among the parties. The downside: it is known to be less performant than a dedicated database operated by a single party. But exactly how much less performant? We ported and open-sourced TPC-C, a classic "online transaction processing" (OLTP) database performance benchmark to one of the leading blockchain platforms, Hyperledger Fabric, to open the way for apples-to-apples comparisons.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

The novelty of our work is that we are the first to provide a faithful, widely accessible implementation of an actual standardized performance benchmark to a business blockchain platform, equipped with a reasoned description of the rationale for, and design decisions involved in, performing the "porting".