SBIR Phase I: BlockReduce: Scaling Public Blockchains for Enterprise Applications

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是改变人们和实体从事价值转移的方式。在我们当前的经济中，许多企业作为商品或服务的生产者和该商品或服务的消费者之间的中间人。此类业务的示例可以分类为金融服务、交换服务和受监管的公用事业。这些中介机构对生产者、消费者和整个经济造成了极大的低效率。其中许多业务可以部分或全部被开源公共区块链所取代。随着时间的推移，开源公共区块链将有竞争力地发展，以最低的成本为所有市场参与者提供最高的经济价值。虽然区块链技术有巨大的希望对社会产生积极的影响，但目前的公共区块链还不能充分扩展以满足大多数企业应用程序的需求。这个SBIR第一阶段项目提议开发BlockReduce：一个可扩展的、无信任的、面向企业应用的公共区块链。BlockReduce提出了一种新的区块链拓扑，在避免引入分层权力结构和集中化的同时，将交易吞吐量提高了3个数量级。此外，BlockReduce能够以稳定的费用提供低成本的交易，这是实现无数企业应用程序的关键。通过解决规模、成本和访问公共区块链的问题，BlockReduce将成为企业从概念验证（PoC）区块链演示转向全面部署的催化剂。如果成功，BlockReduce可以作为数字价值交换的基础设施，就像以太网是数字信息交换的技术基础设施一样。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is to transform the manner in which people and entities engage in transfer of value. In our current economy, many businesses operate as middlemen between the producer of a good or service and the consumer of that good or service. Examples of such businesses can be categorized as financial services, exchange services, and regulated utilities. These intermediaries create a large inefficiency on producers, consumers, and the economy as a whole. Many of these businesses can be replaced partly or in whole by open source public blockchains. Over time, open-source public blockchains will competitively evolve to deliver the highest economic value for all market participants at the lowest cost. Although blockchain technology has enormous promise to positively impact society, current public blockchains have not been able to scale sufficiently to meet the needs of most enterprise applications.This SBIR Phase I project proposes to develop BlockReduce: a scalable, trustless, public blockchain for enterprise applications. BlockReduce presents a new blockchain topology to offer 3+ orders of magnitude improvement in transaction throughput while avoiding the introduction of hierarchical power structures and centralization. Additionally, BlockReduce is able to provide low-cost transactions with stable fees, which is key to enabling countless enterprise applications. By answering the issues of scale, cost, and access to public blockchains, BlockReduce will be the catalyst for enterprises moving from proof-of-concept (PoC) blockchain demonstrations to full scale deployments. If successful, BlockReduce could serve as fundamental infrastructure for digital value exchanges much like ethernet was technological infrastructure for digital information exchange.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.