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Features of NEC Blockchain![]()
Features of NEC Blockchain
The disruptive and transformative potential of blockchain technology has huge potential for enterprise.
Many business and government processes can benefit from a cost-effective solution to maintain an unbreakable record of data that’s trusted by all participants.
Companies across industries and geographies are exploring the adoption of this technology in their core functions.
The NEC team recognized, however, that none of the existing blockchain solutions were compatible with core industry requirements.
The team, spent years identifying and analyzing vulnerabilities of the existing Blockchain solutions.
NEC recommended counterbalances for privacy and security enhancements.
With an aim to overcome existing vulnerabilities, the NEC team set out to create a scalable and private industrial blockchain.
Existing Enterprise Blockchains: Severely Limited
Blockchain technology in use today is not mature enough to meet industry standards and requirements.
Several challenges need to be overcome prior to any large scale industrial adoption of this potentially revolutionary technology.
The existing Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols only support the deployment of permission-based blockchain to a limited number of nodes.
Moreover, blockchain is based on consensus, requiring all transactions to be available to all nodes in the system.
This conflicts with current industry data sharing practices.
The NEC team also identified the need for blockchain to permit a centralized regulator to regulate the complete system.
NEC Blockchain: Innovation to Overcome Challenges
NEC’s blockchain is based on a novel architecture that caters to meeting industry standards.
The architecture comprises of satellite chains that privately run different consensus protocols in parallel, boosting the scalability of the system, and allows a regulator to oversee the entire network and enforce specific policies via smart contracts.
NEC’s blockchain uses a novel BFT protocol that is the fastest and most scalable BFT protocol to date.
The protocol is powered by a novel message aggregation technique that does not require any public-key operations, thereby reducing computation / communication overheads.
Moreover, computation and communication loads are balanced by arranging nodes in a tree topology, with inter-server communication and message aggregation taking place along the edges of the tree.
The technology combines hardware-based trusted execution environments with lightweight secret sharing.
It also separates agreement from execution, so that only a subset of nodes is required to actively run the protocol.
Finally, a simple failure detection mechanism is in place to efficiently deal with non-primary faults.
The NEC blockchain can be easily integrated within existing blockchain platforms.
NEC’s technology the first practical solution for realizing blockchain sharing based on node relationships.
Tenets of the NEC Blockchain
The three driving principles of the NEC blockchain are:
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High security against attacks: NEC’s technology is Byzantine fault tolerant, which means it is resilient to network attacks and consensus-layer attacks.
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High throughput: The NEC blockchain is capable of achieving almost 100,000 transactions per second in each satellite chain of 200 nodes. This exceeds the throughput witnessed by existing centralized payments such as Visa and Mastercard. A system that e.g., comprises three satellite chains can operate at a throughput of 300,000 transactions per second.
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High confidentiality of transactions: The technology relies on private interconnected satellite chains, ensuring user and transactional privacy.
NEC Blockchain Highlights
The below is NEC blockchain highlights.
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Consensus using Secure Hardware
This is achieved through BFT protocol leveraging secure hardware, like Intel SGX.
The technology allows to reach consensus within fewer communication / verification rounds than existing BFT protocols.
Requires fewer nodes to resist faulty nodes in the system.
Prevents compromised banks from storing invalid transaction data.
Prevents adversaries from double-spending transactions. -
Confidential Satellite Chains
Private and confidential network is instantiated only among the relevant stakeholders.
Stakeholders that are not part of a given private ledger are unaware of its existence.
The system is extremely scalable, with no upper bound on the number of instantiated ledgers at any given time.
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Smart Contracts
They are based on complex business logic.
They can turn complete programs that validate, approve, or deny transactions.
They can enable the regulators to publish or enforce financial regulations on all transactions in a flexible manner.
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Asset Transfer Between Satellite Chains
The NEC blockchain achieves high efficiency in the transfer of assets between banks.
While speeding up transaction settlements, the technology reduces administrative costs.
The satellite chains can be interconnected into a single unified blockchain.
Related Information
What is Blockchain Technology?
Explain how this inovative technology was developed and how can be applied to various field.
This chapter trace how NEC has developed blockchain focusing on the basic technology of Bitcoin.
