A Lightweight Blockchain Architecture with Smart Collaborative and Progressive Evolution for Privacy-Preserving 6G IoT

As 6G wireless perception and interconnection capabilities become increasingly pervasive, the interconnected metadata of the world introduces significant challenges in preserving privacy. Blockchain technology has emerged as a potentially effective means of preserving privacy in open 6G IoT networks. However, the complexity of existing methods often inhibits their widespread deployment and the maintenance of secure ledgers for societal entities. This article introduces a novel private blockchain architecture known as smart collaborative blockchain with progressive evolution (SCOPE), designed to tackle the complexity-security trade-off in 6G IoT. In the context of the 6G IoT, we propose a swarm intelligence model called hierarchical raft (HRAFT), which gathers valuable workload information from all nodes to facilitate the election of reliable leaders. SCOPE employs these leaders to accomplish high-performance decentralization, scaling terminal, edge, and cloud resources through intelligent collaboration and offloading policies. Furthermore, we present reinforcement proof of workload (RPoW), an independent subnetting mechanism that identifies abnormal blocks via random-verifiable tasks. Evaluated in fifteen real industrial 6G IoT scenarios, RPoW has been shown to optimize energy utilization by incrementally adjusting workload levels in accordance with defined risks. Lastly, we construct a prototype system and an experimental testbed, providing scalable storage and privacy-sharing within resource-constrained 6G AIoT environments.