Blockchain and Cryptocurrency: A comparative framework of the main Architectural Drivers
This work provides a practical tool for software architects and developers to make informed decisions in adopting blockchain technologies, though it is incremental as it builds on existing knowledge without introducing new methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of selecting appropriate blockchain technologies for decentralized applications by presenting a comparative framework that correlates technological decisions with architectural features, validated through analysis of top cryptocurrency platforms and a real-world insurtech case study.
Blockchain is a decentralized transaction and data management solution, the technological weapon-of-choice behind the success of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. As the number and variety of existing blockchain implementations continues to increase, adopters should focus on selecting the best one to support their decentralized applications (dApps), rather than developing new ones from scratch. In this paper we present a framework to aid software architects, developers, tool selectors and decision makers to adopt the right blockchain technology for their problem at hand. The framework exposes the correlation between technological decisions and architectural features, capturing the knowledge from existing industrial products, technical forums/blogs, experts' feedback and academic literature; plus our own experience using and developing blockchain-based applications. We validate our framework by applying it to dissect the most outstanding blockchain platforms, i.e., the ones behind the top 10 cryptocurrencies apart from Bitcoin. Then, we show how we applied it to a real-world case study in the insurtech domain.