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Research project aims to make blockchain faster and more sustainable


Bitcoin

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At the Technical University of Munich (TUM), an interdisciplinary research team consisting of experts from the fields of informatics, electrical engineering and management science will work to make blockchain technology significantly faster and prepare for completely new applications. In this interview, Professor Georg Carle explains the ACE SUPPRA project.

Duration blockchain describes several methods for creating a decentralized database. Information is gradually added to this database in units called blocks. For example, in a cryptocurrency, they contain information about transactions. The list cannot be changed. The accuracy of the information in a new block is not verified by a central unit that other entities must trust.

Instead, a distributed consensus between computers that do not need to trust each other determines what information is entered into the block and which of the participating units can add blocks. The huge energy costs caused by the cryptocurrency bitcoin are related to its proof-of-work consensus mechanism. Modern blockchain processes use consensus methods that require much less energy.

Professor Carle, ACE SUPPRA, a new large-scale research project on blockchain, is starting at TUM. What do you wish to achieve?

In short, we want to make blockchain technology faster, stronger and more sustainable. We have assembled an interdisciplinary team from five research chairs at TUM who have done extensive work in this area. Blockchain technology is known mainly through cryptocurrencies. But in fact, it is a tool suitable for many different tasks. Our goal is to eliminate the weaknesses of this tool to create more blockchain applications.

What are the disadvantages of current blockchain technologies?

For example, lack of speed: many well-known blockchain systems, including Bitcoin, operate with a probabilistic consensus mechanism. It takes quite a while for a block to become part of a valid blockchain. In the case of cryptocurrencies, this means that, after a block is generated – which takes 10 minutes on average with Bitcoin – a transaction will not be completed until consensus is reached that the block is indeed a single block. part of the valid blockchain. That can take up to an hour.

Does it take that long?

With modern blockchains, final results can be achieved in seconds. That means it only takes a few seconds until a consensus is reached on the new block and the numerous transactions it verifies. But for some applications, that’s still not good enough: for high-frequency trading on stock exchanges, significantly faster speeds will be needed. The same applies in applications that interact and use blockchain technology in network-physical systems.

Does that mean blockchain technology can be used in networked cars?

If it has real-time capabilities, then yes — and those are the speeds we’ll be implementing in our project. For example, if you turn various car components into actors in a blockchain network, you can make accurate and reliable statements about exactly which components went wrong in the event of a failure. problem and when. That idea goes further, it could be applied to multiple networked cars to record tamper-proof evidence of events leading up to an accident using data from various sensors.

What is your goal in the ACE SUPPRA project?

We are taking an interdisciplinary approach. Blockchain technology is very complex and there are countless points where it can be improved. This includes the consensus algorithms themselves, but also includes the underlying mechanisms for communication between the computers involved. For example, Andreas Herkersdorf, head of the President of Integrated Systems, and his team will be conducting research on hardware acceleration for certain blockchain mechanisms on achievable coprocessors. necessary and also have built-in security mechanisms.

And would you combine that with actual blockchain code?

Exactly. My workgroup will combine advances made with hardware acceleration with advancements in consensus protocols. An important priority will be to make privacy protection an integral part of the system and demonstrate this with reproducible experiments.

What aspects of blockchain will you tackle besides speed?

We are very interested in the ways that people can interact with blockchain. There is a lot of potential in that area: Professor Alexander Pretschner of Software and Systems Engineering, is working on smart contracts, a very interesting feature of blockchain. He wants to make these automated “contracts” reliable and usable in complex applications. Florian Matthes, who holds the chair of Software Engineer for Enterprise Information Systems, will investigate the use of blockchains for certain use cases. Among other things, he is interested in how the right incentives for cooperation in blockchain can be created and where abuse is likely. Isabell Welpe, Professor of Strategy and Organization at TUM School of Management, will study a related aspect: She will explore governance, or in other words the rules that must be put in place to achieve goals. predefined goals through the use of blockchain and how such rules can be integrated into the code.


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