FBaaS: Functional blockchain as a service

Abstract

Serverless architecture has been gaining popularity in the last three years. Function as a Service (FaaS) is a concrete realization of the Serverless architecture and has several advantages and features. This paper proposes a new service model which is based on FaaS model, named FBaaS – Functional Blockchain as a Service. Compared with Blockchain as a Service (BaaS), FBaaS has a lighter implementation of top-level business logics, which brings a number of advantages. Firstly, it could improve the operation speed of a blockchain. Secondly, the continuous advances in high robustness, high availability of the underlying FaaS network can be naturally adapted to the FBaaS because of its hierarchical architecture. Thirdly, FaaS implements higher level of abstraction of the logics that is much succinct. Moreover, this paper proposes an abstraction method in the realization of a business logic of consortium blockchain that could further improve the performance. In this paper, we also unfold the details of a concrete example network, which is the conference blockchain network for Services Conference Federation (SCF) 2018.