Blockchain

3Blockchain Prospects and Ongoing Improvements

Blockchain is a technology that is still at an experimental stage. The main areas of blockchain research aim to ensure scalability (section 3.1); to create interblockchain interoperability in the face of the proliferation of projects, blockchains, and crypto-assets (section 3.2); and to create links between the blockchain and other promising technologies, mainly the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence (section 3.3).

3.1. Scalability

With an increase in the number of people who are interested in the blockchain, the issue of scalability and speed of transactions is an important technical issue for mass adoption.

The Bitcoin blockchain confirms a limited number of transactions (about seven per second), which is very low compared to centralized systems such as Visa (about 24,000 transactions per second). This has created doubts about the ability of the Bitcoin blockchain to meet the needs of mass adoption.

In order to increase the transaction times for techniques such as sharding, trust delegation and the hierarchy of parallel chains have been proposed [CRO 16]. Other methods have also been proposed with the Bitcoin Next Generation (Bitcoin-NG) to break down the operations into two parts, one for the designation of the validator (leader election) and another to individualize the transactions (transaction serialization) [EYA 16, ZHE 17].

Another approach is the use of a payment interface operating outside of the blockchain, ...