An Off-Chain-Based Blockchain with Improved Decentralization

Blockchain must ensure all of the three important features for being considered a revolutionary technology: security, scalability and decentralization. Decentralization depends on both security and scalability, so improving these two characteristics can contribute to an enhanced decentralized blockchain. However, very few researches have been conducted to maintain security and scalability at the same time, leading to poor decentralization levels. Also, no formal measurement techniques have been proposed to calculate the level of a blockchain’s decentralization. In this paper, we propose an off-chain-based blockchain where only references to these transactions are stored in the ledger, which resolves both the scalability and large storage requirement issue. As any consensus protocol can be used with our system, secure ones like Proof-of-Work (PoW) can deliver robust security. We also propose several metrics to measure the decentralization level and applied them to calculate how much our blockchain is decentralized. Finally, we analyze the performance of our blockchain by calculating the latency caused by the off-chain storage and how it affects our system.