International Journal of Science, Engineering and TechnologyAuthors: Rudra Rai, Krishnakant Tripathi, Priya Pandey
Abstract: Blockchain is becoming an approachable data platform with several stakeholders having a shared history of transactions without being owned by an individual. The fundamental concepts of cryptographic hashing, peer-to-peer communication, and agreement protocols are sufficiently documented, and a lot of current research focuses on performance, security, privacy, and governance individually rather than as interacting dimensions. Recent blockchain research publications and deployments were structured based on a four-axis perspective that follows the dynamics of a system in terms of security, scalability, privacy, and governance. This lens was applied to consent mechanisms including proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, and practical Byzantine fault tolerance, and to techniques such as sharding and layer-2 that are designed to enhance throughput. Basic throughput calculations using reported block sizes, transaction sizes, and block intervals indicate that configuration limits are usually much larger than the transaction rates achieved in practice, implying that protocol overheads and network behaviour require a major share of the budget. A survey of attacks and defences indicates that increases in speed and programmability often expand the attack surface at the consensus and smart contract layers, which motivates the development of better analysis and monitoring tools. The results are applied to draw design insights for domains of finance, supply chains, healthcare, identity, and smart city platforms, and to highlight remaining problems in benchmarking and cross-chain coordination. A practical mapping of major blockchain platforms, namely Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Hyperledger Fabric, onto the four-axis framework was also provided to demonstrate its utility for platform comparison and selection.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21701701
