Integration of Blockchain and Auction Models: A Survey, Some Applications, and Challenges

In recent years, blockchain has gained widespread attention as an emerging technology for decentralization, transparency, and immutability in advancing online activities over public networks. As an essential market process, auctions have been well studied and applied in many business fields due to their efficiency and contributions to fair trade. Complementary features between blockchain and auction models trigger a great potential for research and innovation. On the one hand, the decentralized nature of blockchain can provide a trustworthy, secure, and cost-effective mechanism to manage the auction process; on the other hand, auction models can be utilized to design incentive and consensus protocols in blockchain architectures. These opportunities have attracted enormous research and innovation activities in both academia and industry; however, there is a lack of an in-depth review of existing solutions and achievements. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of these two research topics. We review the existing solutions for integrating blockchain and auction models, with some application-oriented taxonomies generated. Additionally, we highlight some open research challenges and future directions towards integrated blockchain-auction models

Blockchains for use in construction and engineering projects

This chapter describes blockchains and illustrates this explanation using the results of a prototype project for an industrial application for a construction project. The chapter describes the application and how modular software components can be used to assemble a blockchain solution. The chapter concludes with a design of the system architecture. The background to blockchain technology includes a description of the evolving nature due to communal, open software consortia and an accelerated prototyping of systems. Four recommendations are made in the chapter. These include the need to form consortia for prototyping applications, encouraging government involvement, the need for engagement with the open software development community, and the suggestion that systems should be designed to support Lean production. A final section offers a range of discussion topics on the current state of the technology and where to expect area of increased interest. These are summarized in three areas: Lean management, Industry 4.0 and smart cities, and topics around privacy and security

Latency Analysis of Blockchain-Based SSI Applications

Several revolutionary applications have been built on the distributed ledgers of blockchain (BC) technology. Besides cryptocurrencies, we can find many other application fields in smart systems exploiting smart contracts and Self Sovereign Identity (SSI) management. The Hyperledger Indy platform is a suitable open-source solution for realizing permissioned BC systems for SSI projects. SSI applications usually require short response times from the underlying BC network, which may vary highly depending on the application type, the used BC software, and the actual BC deployment parameters. To support the developers and users of SSI applications, we present a detailed latency analysis of a private permissioned BC system built with Indy and Aries. To streamline our experiments, we developed a Python application using containerized Indy and Aries components from official Hyperledger repositories. We deployed our experimental application on multiple virtual machines in the public Google Cloud Platform and on our local, private cloud using a Docker platform with Kubernetes. We evaluated and compared their performance with the metrics of reading and writing response latency. We found that the local Indy ledger reads 30–50% faster, and writes 65–85% faster than the Indy ledger running on the Google Cloud Platform