Peer-to-peer and community-based markets: A comprehensive review

The advent of more proactive consumers, the so-called "prosumers", with production and storage capabilities, is empowering the consumers and bringing new opportunities and challenges to the operation of power systems in a market environment. Recently, a novel proposal for the design and operation of electricity markets has emerged: these so-called peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity markets conceptually allow the prosumers to directly share their electrical energy and investment. Such P2P markets rely on a consumer-centric and bottom-up perspective by giving the opportunity to consumers to freely choose the way they are to source their electric energy. A community can also be formed by prosumers who want to collaborate, or in terms of operational energy management. This paper contributes with an overview of these new P2P markets that starts with the motivation, challenges, market designs moving to the potential future developments in this field, providing recommendations while considering a test-case

Benchmarking Blockchains: The case of XRP Ledger and Beyond

Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies appear to be at a worldwide threshold of acceptance and adoption. Since their inception, several innovative projects have been proposing solutions to the blockchain trilemma, improving blockchain features and its technical limitations. However, the adoption of blockchain as a technology requires a comprehensive understanding and characterization of its technical aspects. The latter introduces an uncertainty for an organization to decide which blockchain protocol best meets its needs and demands. In general, there is a lack of proper testing and software engineering practices for assessing the usage of different blockchain protocols and understanding their performance. Toward that direction, this paper presents an architecture for a blockchain benchmarking framework that aims at the deployment and evaluation of different blockchain protocols. Moreover, we introduce a set of modules for testing and evaluating their behavior under different test-cases and scenarios. To illustrate the usefulness of the proposed architecture we demonstrate an instantiation with the deployment of a private XRPL Network. The experiments conducted in this work were focused on how XRPL behaves under heavy load

Chaos Engineering of Ethereum Blockchain Clients

The Ethereum blockchain is the operational backbone of major decentralized finance platforms. As such, it is expected to be exceptionally reliable. In this paper, we present ChaosETH, a chaos engineering tool for resilience assessment of Ethereum clients. ChaosETH operates in the following manner: First, it monitors Ethereum clients to determine their normal behavior. Then, it injects system call invocation errors into the Ethereum clients and observes the resulting behavior under perturbation. Finally, ChaosETH compares the behavior recorded before, during, and after perturbation to assess the impact of the injected system call invocation errors. The experiments are performed on the two most popular Ethereum client implementations: GoEthereum and OpenEthereum. We experiment with 22 different types of system call invocation errors. We assess their impact on the Ethereum clients with respect to 15 application-level metrics. Our results reveal a broad spectrum of resilience characteristics of Ethereum clients in the presence of system call invocation errors, ranging from direct crashes to full resilience. The experiments clearly demonstrate the feasibility of applying chaos engineering principles to blockchains