Master's Thesis Christian Ziegler

Analysis of Business Applications integrating Distributed Ledger Technology

Abstract

Since the introduction of Bitcoin through Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System in 2008 there has been ongoing development around distributed ledger technology. Five years later, in 2013, Vitalik Buterin published the Ethereum Whitepaper, which in its core describes a next-generation smart contract and decentralized application platform. Four years later, in 2017, the Linux Foundation released Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 the first major platform utilizing distributed ledger technology aimed at private companies.

In 2020 there are more than 7000 active Cryptocurrency projects active. A bit more than two million smart contracts have been deployed on the Ethereum Blockchain, and about 250 companies collaborate on the Hyperledger project. From these statistics, a huge interest in the technology world can be assumed for distributed ledger technology.

This work looks at features and functionality that are frequently used within distributed ledger applications and provides them summarized in a structured form. This thesis aims to structure and bundle research and development efforts made to distributed ledger technology allowing developers to follow them when they create new distributed ledger applications instead of re-inventing already existing features and workflows. Furthermore, structured use-case studies are presented that show decisions made in the development of distributed ledger applications and explain why they were made to help guide new developers in their process of developing. The use case studies are also used to verify the presented feature summary.

This thesis introduces the fundamentals of distributed ledger technologies on the example of Bitcoin and Ethereum representing public permissionless ledgers, and Hyperledger representing private permissioned ledgers. Following an overview of distributed ledger features in general and business applications in this context are given. Furthermore, related work is presented, and differences to this thesis are made clear. However, the core is the eight structured use-case studies that each describe a current distributed ledger project, its decisions, and features. Additionally, a feature summary divided into 12 categories that each have their related features is given. Each feature is also validated by the interviews that are conducted for the use-case studies.