SASLedger: A Secured, Accelerated Scalable Storage Solution for Distributed Ledger Systems

Blockchain technology provides a “tamper-proof distributed ledger” for its users. Typically, to ensure the integrity and immutability of the transaction data, each node in a blockchain network retains a full copy of the ledger; however, this characteristic imposes an increasing storage burden upon each node with the accumulation of data. In this paper, an off-chain solution is introduced to relieve the storage burden of blockchain nodes while ensuring the integrity of the off-chain data. In our solution, an off-chain remote DB server stores the fully replicated data while the nodes only store the commitments of the data to verify whether the off-chain data are tampered with. To minimize the influence on performance, the nodes will store data locally at first and transfer it to the remote DB server when otherwise idle. Our solution also supports accessing all historical data for newly joined nodes through a snapshot mechanism. The solution is implemented based on the Hyperledger Fabric (HLF). Experiments show that our solution reduces the block data for blockchain nodes by 93.3% compared to the original HLF and that our advanced solution enhances the TPS by 9.6% compared to our primary solution.

A Subsea Chemicals Storage Solution Based on Liquid Barriers

This paper presents a solution for subsea storage of chemicals, where the conventional solid barriers between the chemical and sea water are replaced by a liquid layer, forming a liquid stacking tower inside a vertical tank. It can deal with most of the chemical formulations, providing a pressure balanced system based on barriers that are inherently damage-free. The storage units are easy to integrate and maintain as their design is simple. The benefits of the technology are discussed, also providing an overview of the ongoing qualification programme.