SBIR Phase I: BlockReduce: Scaling Public Blockchains for Enterprise Applications

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is to transform the manner in which people and entities engage in transfer of value. In our current economy, many businesses operate as middlemen between the producer of a good or service and the consumer of that good or service. Examples of such businesses can be categorized as financial services, exchange services, and regulated utilities. These intermediaries create a large inefficiency on producers, consumers, and the economy as a whole. Many of these businesses can be replaced partly or in whole by open source public blockchains. Over time, open-source public blockchains will competitively evolve to deliver the highest economic value for all market participants at the lowest cost. Although blockchain technology has enormous promise to positively impact society, current public blockchains have not been able to scale sufficiently to meet the needs of most enterprise applications. This SBIR Phase I project proposes to develop BlockReduce: a scalable, trustless, public blockchain for enterprise applications. BlockReduce presents a new blockchain topology to offer 3+ orders of magnitude improvement in transaction throughput while avoiding the introduction of hierarchical power structures and centralization. Additionally, BlockReduce is able to provide low-cost transactions with stable fees, which is key to enabling countless enterprise applications. By answering the issues of scale, cost, and access to public blockchains, BlockReduce will be the catalyst for enterprises moving from proof-of-concept (PoC) blockchain demonstrations to full scale deployments. If successful, BlockReduce could serve as fundamental infrastructure for digital value exchanges much like ethernet was technological infrastructure for digital information exchange. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.