In the future, some banking IT systems will rely on so-called blockchain nodes, which provide APIs to read and write on the blockchain. Those nodes will have to be as reliable as the rest of the banking infrastructure.

In that domain, SEBx is closely following the research done at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in blockchain reliability.

In a pre-print published on arXiv, KTH researchers have introduced the concept of N-version Blockchain nodes. The goal is to improve the reliability of the network in order to hardening the security of transactions. The idea is to rely on simultaneous execution of different implementations of the same blockchain protocol, in the line of Avizienis' N-version programming vision.

The experiments in the paper involve an N-version blockchain node prototype in the context of Ethereum, which is relevant for projects in decentralized finance. The results show the new design provides increased availability, even under aggressive fault-injection strategies.

SEBx is also conducting similar experiments to enhance functionality and availability of blockchain nodes running on top of Google Cloud Platform.

For more information about the paper, see Highly Available Blockchain Nodes With N-Version Design