Engineering sustainable blockchain applications

Abstract

Blockchain technology has attracted attention as emerging paradigm for business collaboration. Blockchain’s consensus mechanisms allow partners to cooperate in a business network. However, many applications reported in literature present merely a proof of concept from an engineering perspective. An industrialization of blockchain requires an engineering framework, which assures the sustainability of the application and in particular its network partnerships, i.e. each participant has to act as an active peer in the network rather than being a mere consumer with a wallet for participation in the blockchain. This paper presents the skeleton of such an engineering framework starting with an ideation of partnerships and collaboration patterns to clarify the incentives for participation via business model design for sustainable network operations towards the selection of an implementation platform for the business processes re-engineered. Moreover, an initial version of an interactive tool for community-oriented capturing of know-how about characteristics of blockchain platforms is presented.