The Performance of Byzantine Fault Tolerant Blockchains

Blockchains have captured the attention of many, resulting in an abundance of new systems available for use. However, selecting an appropriate blockchain for an application is challenging due to the lack of comparative information discussing core metrics such as throughput, latency and scalability. Although a number of efforts have been devoted to performance evaluation, there is limited work dedicated to blockchains that are both efficient, due to avoiding complex Proof-of-Work cryptopuzzles, and secure, because they solve consensus deterministically despite Byzantine failures. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of three blockchains that cope with such malicious behaviors, namely Burrow, Quorum and Red Belly Blockchain. To this end, we modified the Hyperledger Caliper benchmark to solve three main limitations: unnecessary overheads, online cryptographic signatures and centralized clients. Our results identify the maximum send rate that Burrow and Quorum can process, and that Red Belly Blockchain can offer an 8-times higher throughput than the other blockchains.