An Infrastructure Cost and Benefits Evaluation Framework for Blockchain-Based Applications

Blockchain is currently a core technology for developing new types of decentralized applications. With the unique properties of blockchain, unique challenges and characteristics are introduced to the system. Among these characteristics, the infrastructure costs and benefits of the system are critical to evaluate the feasibility of any system and have yet to be addressed in the current literature. This work presents a framework for evaluating blockchain applications’ infrastructure costs and benefits. The framework includes a taxonomy to classify the related transactions, a model to evaluate the infrastructure costs and benefits in applications using public or private blockchains, and a methodology to guide the use of the model. The model is based on simple parameters that describe the systems, and the methodology helps to identify and estimate these parameters at any stage of the application life cycle. We quantitatively analyze three real use cases to demonstrate the framework’s merit. The analyses highlight the model’s accuracy by achieving the same results presented in the use cases. Furthermore, the use-case analyses emphasize the framework’s potential to evaluate different scenarios across the entire life cycle of blockchain-based applications.