The StakeCube blockchain : Instantiation, Evaluation & Applications

Blockchains have seen a recent rise in popularity as a generic solution for trustless distributed applications across a wide range of industries. However, blockchain protocols have faced scalability issues in applications involving a growing number of participants. In this paper we instantiate and evaluate StakeCube, a proposal for a scalable shard-based distributed ledger. We further detail and tune a byzantine agreement algorithm suited for StakeCube's sharding structure, and we experimentally study and asses its performance, especially regarding scalability. We were successfully able to run StakeCube with up to 5000 participants, confirming up to 1100 bytes/s of transaction, with a confirmation time starting at 200 seconds. Finally, we use StakeCube in a large scale energy marketplace application, and show that a node running on a Raspberry Pi Zero is able to handle the load without issues.