Blockchain Has a Future in the Lab

Data integrity is a major concern for laboratory scientists and regulators. Blockchain inherently can provide freedom from malicious data adulteration without encryption.

Unfortunately, blockchain technology got off to a dubious start when it was adopted by promoters of digital currency. Scam artists jumped in and boom led to bust. However, I kept an open, curious mind. I noticed that CSIRO was traveling to the U.S.A. to promote blockchain technology in early 2017. Having made the Sydney to San Francisco red-eye several times, I knew that this was not a pleasure trip.

Today’s press release from CSIRO describes a new version of blockchain technology called “Red Belly Blockchain” under Australia’s Data 61 program. For evaluation, CSIRO worked with Amazon Web Services to test the technology in commercial (non-Bitcoin) transactions.

The demonstration employed 1000 virtual machines located in 14 of Amazon’s geographic regions including the Americas, Europe, and Australia. The benchmark experiment started with 30,000 transactions per second from the Amazon Web Services regional centers. Processing time averaged three seconds with 1000 replicas or mirrors, which recorded the status of the transactions and the balance of all accounts using blockchain technology. This is more than 1000 times faster than benchmark tests conducted last year. Plus, spreading the information to 1000 machines greatly improves security.

Scalability was another engineering issue limiting blockchain’s utilization for routine IO. The size and speed are now useful in processing financial transactions without paying a huge energy penalty of the Bitcoin era. The press release claims that Red Belly scales “without an equivalent increase in electricity consumption.” How? Red Belly is enabled by a unique algorithm (i.e., secret sauce).

The power of Red Belly should be interesting to cloud providers and for labs that produce lots of data. It should be useful for tracing and verifying the pedigree of data points in large files.

If one is looking for validation of blockchain, this story, also published today, describes how the world’s two leading distributors are developing large commercial support programs using blockchain technology. In the case of Walmart, the program is to manage and integrate their supply and distribution chains support product recalls. This is very information-intensive, as is the transaction processing application benchmarked by Amazon.

Robert L. Stevenson, Ph.D., is Editor Emeritus, American Laboratory/Labcompare; e-mail: [email protected]

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