FairBCaaS

The FairBCaaS project terminated in December 2021

FairBCaaS is a joint research project between the Cloud and Large Scale computing group and Proximus AG and its subsidiary company Codit. Proximus is the leading telecommunication and IT solutions provider in Belgium and Codit is an expert on cloud and blockchain integration solutions.

The FairBCaaS project is co-funded by Proximus AG and the Brussels Institute for Research and Innovation (Innoviris).

Objectives

FairBCaaS targets a better understanding and control of the performance of blockchain platforms and applications when deployed over multi-site (multi-cloud) environments.

Blockchain platforms such as Ethereum or Hyperledger Fabric are used as a trustworthy foundation for increasingly more business applications. Consortium of companies are building applications over such blockchain platforms, which can be deployed or subscribed by the consortium members over geographically-distributed environments (multi-cloud scenarios). Blockchain technologies suffer, however, from performance unpredictability and from capacity planning uncertainty: It is not clear, due to the low level of maturity of these technologies, how scalable or sustainable a blockchain platform will be and how performance will evolve, e.g., when a consortium grows to welcome more organizations.

FairBCaaS is building solutions and methodologies to allow blockchain users, developers and solution integration engineers to better understand blockchain performances and allow better capacity planning.

In addition to performance, FairBCaaS is interested in evaluating and mitigating fairness in blockchain platforms.

Difference in quality-of-service that different business actors may get when interacting with the blockchain can result in unfair advantages over other business partners. This can hinder consortiums within blockchain applications which in turn can hinder consortium members’ trust in the application.

The project highlights sources of unfairness in blockchain platforms such as specific configurations, deployment settings, faults, or instabilities at the network level. It proposes solutions at the deployment (DevOps) and algorithmic levels, allowing to address these limitations in single and multi-cloud settings. It provides guidelines for business operators to understand the limits on fairness of existing platforms and the appropriate countermeasures to ensure fair business operations.

At UCLouvain, FairBCaaS researchers are working on integrated benchmarking platforms that allow testing under production-level settings the performance and fairness of blockchain platforms, and proposing modifications to such platforms. Benchmarking tools developed by UCLouvain follow the principles of a cloud native design (everything-as-code) and enable advanced chaos engineering features, enabling to test the behavior of blockchain platforms under network performance variations and in large-scale, emulated multi-cloud settings.

Proximus/Codit engineers and DevOps focus on advanced blockchain applications for digitized industry, using the impact of fairness and of better capacity planning to tame uncertainty of blockchain platforms and offer value to their customers. Proximus/Codit engineers also provide UCL researchers with the cloud infrastructure to perform their algorithmic tests in concrete production environments.

Researchers

The following persons were involved in the FairBCaaS project on UCLouvain’s side:

On Proximus/Codit’s side, main people involved were:

  • Bernard Lenssens, Codit’s founder and Chief Innovation Officer. (implementation & contact person)
  • Alexis Laks, ML engineer & consultant at Codit France. (Project manager)
  • Axel Boniface, Architect & consultant at Codit France. (Project manager & implementation)
  • Camil Ivanovas, Architect & consultant at Codit France. (implementation)