# A Platform Architecture for Multi-Tenant Blockchain-Based Systems

## TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable platform architecture for multi-tenant blockchain systems that ensures data privacy, integrity, and performance isolation by assigning individual permissioned blockchains to tenants and anchoring them to a main chain.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a novel multi-tenant blockchain architecture with tenant-specific chains anchored to a main chain, addressing scalability, privacy, and performance challenges.

## Key findings

- Achieves data integrity and privacy for tenants.
- Ensures performance isolation among tenants.
- Demonstrates cost efficiency and scalability in prototype.

## Abstract

Blockchain has attracted a broad range of interests from start-ups, enterprises and governments to build next generation applications in a decentralized manner. Similar to cloud platforms, a single blockchain-based system may need to serve multiple tenants simultaneously. However, design of multi-tenant blockchain-based systems is challenging to architects in terms of data and performance isolation, as well as scalability. First, tenants must not be able to read other tenants' data and tenants with potentially higher workload should not affect read/write performance of other tenants. Second, multi-tenant blockchain-based systems usually require both scalability for each individual tenant and scalability with number of tenants. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a scalable platform architecture for multi-tenant blockchain-based systems to ensure data integrity while maintaining data privacy and performance isolation. In the proposed architecture, each tenant has an individual permissioned blockchain to maintain their own data and smart contracts. All tenant chains are anchored into a main chain, in a way that minimizes cost and load overheads. The proposed architecture has been implemented in a proof-of-concept prototype with our industry partner, Laava ID Pty Ltd (Laava). We evaluate our proposal in a three-fold way: fulfilment of the identified requirements, qualitative comparison with design alternatives, and quantitative analysis. The evaluation results show that the proposed architecture can achieve data integrity, performance isolation, data privacy, configuration flexibility, availability, cost efficiency and scalability.