HyBlockArch - Hybrid Blockchain Architectures for the Industry of the Future

Blockchain technologies have been identified to have a disruptive potential for various aspects of our economy, with high impact to the future development of the European industry. Blockchains realize a secure and decentralized digital ledger and allow to replace traditional centralized architectures based on trusted third parities by a radically a decentralized approach. Once a transaction is validated, it cannot be altered: like in an accounting ledger. In this project we want to investigate to which extent our novel scalable hybrid blockchain architecture is able to overcome shortcomings of existing blockchain approaches, and how it can be applied to use cases relevant to the industry of the future.

Goal

HyBlockArch wants to investigate to which extent novel hybrid blockchain architectures are able to overcome shortcomings and limitations of existing blockchain approaches, and how this can be applied to use cases relevant to the industry of the future. The project aims to design and to prototypically implement an innovative industrial platform with a hybrid blockchain architecture. Limitations of existing blockchain-based systems such limited scalability due to growing size of the blockchain, increasing transaction pending time, potential vulnerabilities to denial-of-service attacks and data privacy issues are to be overcome by innovative features including the combination of blockchain ledgers with blind signatures. An emphasis of the project is to verify that the hybrid architecture brings up a strong solution to the question of scalability through use cases linked to the industry 4.0.