Comparative Analysis of Blockchain Technologies for Data Ownership and Smart Contract Negotiation

Abstract

Blockchain technologies have gained significant popularity in the recent past. They are distributed ledgers that record all the transactions on the network and allows parties who do not trust each other to transact. The parties collaborate in its maintenance. The Blockchain’s distributed nature connotes multiple ethical and privacy concerns, such as unauthorized access and control of decentralized applications. In this thesis, we first survey the state of the art, focusing on a comparative analysis of public and private implementations of distributed ledgers. Additionally, we present a proof of concept (PoC) implementation on the access control to certain parts of smart contracts as well as investigate the possibility of negotiating the terms of a smart contract. We make use of the commercial real estate leasing operations as a case study. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of our PoC. This evaluation demonstrates a trade-off in the choice of blockchain technology for building distributed applications. Drawing from the process flow of paper based contract negotiations, we design a library mechanism that can be used to negotiate contract terms in a bilateral fashion.