Distributed Ledger Technology Review and Decentralized Applications Development Guidelines

Claudia Antal, Tudor Cioara, Ionut Anghel, Marcel Antal and Ioan Salomie
Additional contact information
Claudia Antal: Computer Science Department, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Memorandumului 28, 400114 Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Tudor Cioara: Computer Science Department, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Memorandumului 28, 400114 Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Ionut Anghel: Computer Science Department, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Memorandumului 28, 400114 Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Marcel Antal: Computer Science Department, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Memorandumului 28, 400114 Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Ioan Salomie: Computer Science Department, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Memorandumului 28, 400114 Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Future Internet, 2021, vol. 13, issue 3, 1-32

Abstract: The Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) provides an infrastructure for developing decentralized applications with no central authority for registering, sharing, and synchronizing transactions on digital assets. In the last years, it has drawn high interest from the academic community, technology developers, and startups mostly by the advent of its most popular type, blockchain technology. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of DLT analyzing the challenges, provided solutions or alternatives, and their usage for developing decentralized applications. We define a three-tier based architecture for DLT applications to systematically classify the technology solutions described in over 100 papers and startup initiatives. Protocol and Network Tier contains solutions for digital assets registration, transactions, data structure, and privacy and business rules implementation and the creation of peer-to-peer networks, ledger replication, and consensus-based state validation. Scalability and Interoperability Tier solutions address the scalability and interoperability issues with a focus on blockchain technology, where they manifest most often, slowing down its large-scale adoption. The paper closes with a discussion on challenges and opportunities for developing decentralized applications by providing a multi-step guideline for decentralizing the design and implementation of traditional systems.

Keywords: distributed ledger technology; blockchain; decentralized applications; technology review; development guidelines; architecture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/3/62/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/3/62/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jftint:v:13:y:2021:i:3:p:62-:d:507153

Access Statistics for this article

Future Internet is currently edited by Ms. Grace You

More articles in Future Internet from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().