Virtualization for Distributed Ledger Technology (vDLT)

TLDR

Distributed ledger technology has attracted attention as the next evolution of the internet, promising an internet of value, but scalability and other drawbacks limit its global adoption. The paper proposes a virtualization approach to overcome existing DLT challenges. The proposed vDLT abstracts underlying hardware, compute, storage, and network resources, and demonstrates its effectiveness through several illustrative use cases. vDLT improves performance, facilitates system evolution, and simplifies management and configuration by providing a logical resource view.

Abstract

Recently, with the tremendous development of crypto-currencies, distributed ledger technology (DLT) (e.g., blockchain) has attracted significant attention. The traditional Internet was originally design to handle the exchange of information. With DLT, we will have the Internet of value. Although, DLT has a great potential to create new foundations for our economic and social systems, the existing DLT has a number of drawbacks (e.g., scalability) that prevent it from being used as a generic platform for distributed ledger across the globe. In this paper, we present a novel virtualization approach to address the challenges in the existing DLT systems. Specifically, in the proposed virtualization for DLT (vDLT), the underlying resources (e.g., hardware, compute, storage, network, and so on) are abstracted. By providing a logical view of resources, vDLT can significantly improve the performance, facilitate system evolution, and simplify DLT management and configuration. Several use cases of vDLT are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed vDLT.