Workflow Management on BFT Blockchains

Abstract

Blockchain technology has been proposed as a new infrastructure technology for a wide variety of novel applications. Blockchains provide an immutable record of transactions, making them useful when business actors do not trust each other. Their distributed nature makes them suitable for inter-organizational applications. However, proof-of-work based blockchains are computationally inefficient and do not provide final consensus, although they scale well to large networks. In contrast, blockchains built around Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) algorithms are more efficient and provide immediate and final consensus, but do not scale well to large networks. We argue that this makes them well-suited for workflow management applications that typically include no more than a few dozen participants but require final consensus. In this paper, we discuss architectural options and present a prototype implementation of a BFT-blockchain-based workflow management system (WfMS).