Layered Consensus Mechanism in Consortium Blockchain for Enterprise Services

The concept of blockchain born out of Bitcoin in just a decade ago has greatly attracted the attentions of industry and academia. The third generation of blockchain is believed to be able to support a large number of commercial and social applications with security, scalability, speed and developer friendly. To maintain a distributed ledger in many independent peer nodes without central authority, the consensus mechanism is the key protocol to construct a blockchain system with multiple technologies. However compared to the well-studied consensus protocols in public blockchain, the customized consensus mechanism is still lack of research for the consortium blockchain in both industry and academia, especially in the enterprise scenarios of applications and services. The layered consensus mechanism in the consortium blockchain is discussed after considering and combining the common characteristics of enterprise applications and services. Based on the famous Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), the new layered and service-oriented consensus mechanism should be more practical to apply the blockchain technology to much diversified enterprise services with decentralization and extensibility in the principle of enterprise-level security.