A Full-Spectrum Blockchain-as-a-Service for Business Collaboration

Private and consortium blockchains have recently raised interest in the blockchain community around facilitating business collaboration. In a business network, multiple participants either (1) work with a centralized authority to maintain a complete and verifiable ledger, or (2) transact in a decentralized manner to maintain an independent shared ledger. A centralized, private blockchain system, such as Amazon QLDB, addresses scenario one with good price-to-performance ratio. The second scenario is commonly backed by a consortium blockchain network, such as Hyperledger Fabric, that requires greater and more complex hardware and software to handle complicated consensus and peer-to-peer communications. The disparate design objectives and resultant principles complicate efforts to handle both scenarios within a single blockchain system. Moreover, the two situations are often mixed together for a user in different business activities, and interchangeable with the evolution of the business collaboration. From the outset, users face a dilemma in choosing which blockchain system type will handle their long-term needs. In this paper, we present a novel Full-Spectrum Blockchain as a Service (FSBaaS) built on top of a high-performance centralized private blockchain runtime called Blockchain Lite and a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain runtime. It handles different scenarios flexibly by providing a unified interface for the two blockchain runtimes from programing model and RESTful APIs to the tenant model. A BaaS tenant can subscribe to the two runtimes simultaneously and migrate data from one to the other as needed. Experimental results contrasted the performance of two blockchain runtimes and the practicality of the proposed BaaS.