FPGALedger: FPGA based Decentralized Ledger for Enterprise Applications

Abstract

Decentralized ledger has been found in many enterprise applications, such as cross-border transaction processing and supply chain management that multiple companies involved. While enjoying all the benefits of the decentralized ledger technology, there is a burden for each party to maintain its own IT infrastructure to run the decentralized ledger node. Therefore, the concept of blockchain-as-a-service has been proposed where these nodes are kept in the cloud. Blockchain-as-a-service greatly reduces the burden to adopt the decentralized ledger technology but also introduces a new security threat. To mitigate these concerns, we propose an FPGA based decentralized ledger for enterprise applications, which leverages security features of FPGA to prevent unauthorized access to data stored on the ledger without affecting all the desirable features of the decentralized ledger. We also implement the major components and evaluate their cost/performance to demonstrate the practicality.