Testing Private Ledger Fabrics for Internal ICURY Transaction Support

We’re in preparation of the next step in the ICURY project, in which we want to support internal ICURY transactions off the Ethereum ledger. The main reasons are that the transaction costs of Ethereum are far too high, the transaction speed is too low, and data on Ethereum’s ledger is public, which limits the use case because of privacy concerns.

We do a quick comparison of a few Private DLT/Secure database technologies that we might include as part of our future ICURY transaction architecture. Deliberately, we also compared a situation with a classic private database setup (DBMS), as in corporate environments a blockchain framework might not necessarily be the most effective setup.

The overview is work in progress, as during further tech trials more information about the stability and actual costs will become evident.

Overview of Private Ledger alternatives. A trial starts to verify things.

Critical for the private ICURY ledger is that internal transaction can be processed at zero transaction costs, and that high transaction processing speeds can be realized.

We starred* the features that are most critical in our evaluation.

Features	Ledgable	EOSIO	Standard DBMS (e.g., MySQL or CQL)
Setup fees*	120€ per node per year	Account cost $100 one-time	Depends on server and DB capacity
Transaction costs*	0	0	0
Transaction speed in TPS*	>1 million tps	>3,000 tps	> 1 million tps, depends on configuration
Flexibility (in terms of creating our own data model)*	Yes, fully relational data model, definition of chains and entities via web-interface	Yes, records defined via C++ statements	Yes, fully relation data model, SQL or SQL-like
Security info*	No known incidents. No external references available.	Some issues, though stable in the last few months.	Complete access control, distributed setup is an option. Centralized security issues.
Documentation	Poor documentation	Well documented	Well documented
SLA*	Enterprise account SLA: 10,000/year	No information on SLA	Many commercial offers available for standard environments.
Fully Private Nodes*	Yes	Yes (Enterprise Solutions, not using the public EOS blockchain)	Yes (default)
Interface to see data	Via web-interface on each data node	Interface is already provided with https://eostracker.io/	Application based
Technology	Private multi-blockchain DLT	EOSIO software, public/private blockchain	Stable and scalable tech available, non-blockchain DLT
Consensus protocol	Not predefined: controlled by the application.	Proof of Stake (POS)	To be be defined in the application.
Open Source	Only Node	Fully open source	Fully open source options available
dApp Support	Yes	Highly supported	Not Decentralized
Smart Contract Support	Via XSCRO user interface/application based	Supported, inspired on Ethereum	No, application based

Possible outcomes:

1. Choice for a blockchain-based or traditional ledger application for internal off-chain and private transactions. External transactions can still be posted on the external, public blockchain.
2. EOS could replace ERC-20 (Ethereum) as public blockchain for external on-blockchain transactions.