Characterizing the Performance and Cost of Blockchains on the Cloud and at the Edge

While state-of-the-art permissioned blockchains can achieve thousands of transactions per second on commodity hardware with x86/64 architecture, their performance when running on different architectures, such as ARM, is not clear. The goal of this work is to characterize the performance and cost of permissioned blockchains on different hardware systems, which is important as diverse application domains are adopting blockchains. To this end, we conduct extensive cost and performance evaluation of two permissioned blockchains, namely Hyperledger Fabric and ConsenSys Quorum, on five different types of hardware covering both x86/64 and ARM architecture, as well as both cloud and edge computing. The hardware nodes include servers with Intel Xeon CPU, servers with ARM-based Amazon Graviton CPU, and edge devices with ARM-based CPU such as Nvidia Jetson TX2 and Raspberry Pi 4. Our results reveal a diverse profile of the two blockchains across different settings, demonstrating the impact of hardware choices on the overall performance and cost. We find that Graviton servers outperform Xeon servers in many settings due to their powerful CPU and high memory bandwidth. Edge devices with ARM architecture, on the other hand, exhibit low performance. When comparing the cloud with the edge, we show that the cost of the latter is much smaller in the long run if manpower cost is not considered.