Platforms and Tools Within the HyperLedger Framework

During this last decade, the blockchain (BC) paradigm is being required in several use cases and scenarios in particular for security, privacy, and trust provisioning. Accordingly, the research community and developers developed several emulation tools and frameworks for BC-based systems performance analysis. Making an adequate decision regarding the choice of the most suitable tool that can be used to develop and validate the performances of a specific BC-based system or application still requires more investigation. In this context, this chapter describes and highlights the most features and characteristics of the BC platforms and tools within the Hyperledger framework. The goal is to illustrate the advantages and the limitations of several BC tools and development environments within Hyperledger. In addition, this chapter provides an insight into BC 3.0 as the new generation of BC that meets the requirements of the smart application.

Appendable-Block Blockchains

Blockchain has emerged as a technology that can change the way people and systems interact, providing mechanisms that ensure integrity and ownership of the data produced without reliance on a trusted third-party. Appendable-block blockchain is a novel instantiation that suits for solutions that require a high transaction throughput. Appendable-block blockchains focus on data produced by nodes instead of a relation (transaction) between two entities. This new kind of blockchain can improve how data are stored and managed in distributed systems. This chapter introduces the notion of appendable-block blockchain and exemplifies its applicability in multiple practical domains. Additionally, the authors provide a discussion on the security aspects of this new blockchain. Finally, the chapter presents current issues and possible future directions for appendable-block blockchains.

The World of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens)

Tokenizing assets through the use of blockchain is the next big thing in digital currency markets. Securing the assets in the world of the internet is challenging as most of them can easily be copied and sold in the secondary market. Protecting the rights of the asset owner is one of the challenging research areas. NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are very useful in representing the ownership of unique items for any assets. NFTs ensure that an asset can have only one official owner at any point in time with the help of Ethereum-based blockchain network. Ethereum NFTs can ensure that no one can modify the ownership rights or copy and paste the digital assets. NFTs are a boon to the artists, musicians, and others who want to create impressive digital assets. The objective of this chapter is to take you to the world of NFTs and to explain how the NFTs are going to impact digital transactions in a bigger way in the future. This chapter covers the introduction, technical aspects, security impacts, use cases, and successful implementations of NFTs in various realms.

Blockchain Towards Secure UAV-Based Systems

During this last decade, the blockchain (BC) paradigm has been required in several use cases and scenarios in particular for security, privacy, and trust provisioning. Accordingly, several studies proposed the use of BC technology to secure and to assure the trustworthiness of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In this context, this chapter highlights several applications and scenarios for the deployment of UAVs within diverse smart systems. In addition, it illustrates the advantages of the integration of the BC within UAVs-based smart systems. This integration reveals new challenges and future research directions that are discussed in this chapter.

Blockchain and Its Applications in Healthcare

Growing organizations, institutions, and SMEs demand for transformation in all the aspects of their businesses along with the progression in time and technology. When it comes to healthcare, the growth should be heightened to higher levels with necessity. The need of providing quality of service (QoS) in healthcare is taking significant place, allowing health institutions and medical compliances to develop an ecosystem with cutting-edge technology with the same reliability but better productivity and performance. Moreover, the healthcare systems are aiming for a more patient-centric strategy. Healthcare systems work on complicated and traditional methods, oftentimes administered via teams of professionals who manage data and supportive mechanisms of the system. Blockchain could streamline and automate those methods, conserving weeks of effort in the company's production line to increase the overall revenue and discover new opportunities. This chapter aims to illustrate blockchain technology along with its state-of-the-art applications in healthcare.

Blockchain With the Internet of Things

The internet of things (IoT) is ushering a new age of technology-driven automation of information systems into the manufacturing industry. One of the main concerns with IoT systems is the lack of privacy and security preserving schemes for controlling access and ensuring the safety of the data. Many security issues arise because of the centralized architecture of IoT-based information systems. Another concern is the lack of appropriate authentication and access control schemes to moderate the access to information generated by the IoT devices in the manufacturing industry. Hence, the question that arises is how to ensure the identity of the manufacturing machinery or the communication nodes. This chapter presents the advantages of blockchain technology to secure the operation of the modern manufacturing industry in a trustless environment with IoT applications. The chapter reviews the challenges and threats in IoT applications and how integration with blockchain can resolve some of the manufacturing enterprise information systems (EIS).

Blockchain Technology With the Internet of Things in Manufacturing Data Processing Architecture

Modern manufacturing logistics and supply chain have transformed into highly complex value-creating business networks. It has become increasingly challenging to cross-check the source of raw materials and maintain visibility of products and merchandise while moving through the value chain network. This way, the high complexity of manufacturing business processes and the continuously growing amount of information lead to extraordinary demand to find an appropriate data processing architecture for the global manufacturing industry. The internet of things (IoT) applications can help manufacturing companies track, trace, and monitor products, business activities, and processes within the respective value chain networks. Combining with IoT, blockchain technology can enable a broader range of different application scenarios to improve value chain transparency. This chapter presents a hybrid (i.e., IoT, blockchain, service-oriented computing) data processing architecture for the manufacturing industry.

Blockchain for Healthcare and Medical Systems

Blockchain is one of the trendy technologies in the current era. All industries are merging blockchain with their production line to benefit from its features such as security and decentralized data. One of the main problems in the healthcare system is the lack of interoperability (i.e., data should be patient-centered and not institution-centered). Healthcare information systems, in the current state, cannot communicate. Each organization works within its boundaries and owns its data. To make this shift, many challenges should be solved such as data privacy, standards, scalability, and others. Blockchain can solve these problems by giving the patients control over their data; therefore, they can share it with any institution for a time period. It is expected that blockchain will improve healthcare data management. In this chapter, the authors study the opportunity of blockchain to leverage biomedical and healthcare applications and research. Blockchain also contributes to the medication manufacturing area.

Extracting Insights From Bitcoin Transactions

Bitcoin is the most well-known cryptocurrency. It was first released in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin serves as a decentralized medium of digital exchange, with transactions verified and recorded in the blockchain. The latter is a public immutable distributed ledger that operates without the need of a trusted record keeping authority or a central intermediary. It provides OLTP capabilities with both atomic transactions and data durability guarantees for blockchain transactions. Blockchain ledgers were not designed to perform analytics questions. The availability of the entire bitcoin transaction history, stored in its public blockchain, offers interesting opportunities for analyzing the transactions to obtain insights on users/entities patterns and transactions patterns. For these purposes, the authors need to store and analyze cryptocurrency transactions in a data warehouse. In this chapter, they investigate public blockchain datasets, and they overview different data models for setting up a data warehouse appliance of cryptocurrencies.

Metrics, Platforms, Emulators, and TestNets for Ethereum

Blockchain technology is considered the most relevant technology after the internet that revolutionizes many application domains. The first generation of BC technology, BC 1.0, is used for cryptocurrency purposes; the second generation, BC 2.0, as represented by Ethereum, is an open and decentralized platform empowering the running of decentralized applications (DApps) on top of BC as a new computing paradigm. Ethereum as a BC 2.0 leader has a large development community. Its open-source feature leads to the development of several emulation tools, simulators, TestNets, and security verification tools dedicated to Ethereum-based system performance analysis. Making an adequate decision regarding the choice of the most appropriate Ethereum tool responding to the requirement of a specific system or application still requires more investigation from researchers. In this regard, this chapter presents the characteristics of the most-used Ethereum simulators, emulators, and TestNets and provides comparative studies between Ethereum simulators, TestNets, and security verification tools.