A Comparative Analysis of DAG-Based Blockchain Architectures

Abstract

Blockchain is a shared distributed ledger that promises tamper-proof secure transactions over the highly available and resilient network involving multiple participants. Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) has revolutionized the blockchain technology. Owing to its optimized validation mechanism, high scalability, efficient provenance, support for IoT and multiparty involvement, DAG is rapidly over-shadowing traditional blockchain architecture. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of most popular DAG based blockchain architectures including Nxt, IOTA, Orumesh, DagCoin,Byteball, Nano and XDAG. The comparison is based on the functional data structures for maintaining the ledger, consensus algorithms, transaction validation, ledger size, scalability and popularity. Extracting the best features various DAG based blockchains, we move on to outline the best of all worlds DAG-based blockchain architecture.