# Transactional Properties of Permissioned Blockchains

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes the transactional properties of permissioned blockchains, comparing their capabilities to traditional distributed systems and public blockchains, highlighting their strengths and limitations for enterprise use.

## Contribution

It introduces a set of transaction processing criteria and applies them to evaluate permissioned blockchains, providing a comprehensive comparison and insights into their practical capabilities.

## Key findings

- Permissioned blockchains exhibit strong consistency and data confidentiality.
- They offer better scalability than public blockchains.
- Transactional finality is more deterministic in permissioned systems.

## Abstract

Traditional distributed transaction processing (TP) systems, such as replicated databases, faced difficulties in getting wide adoption for scenarios of enterprise integration due to the level of mutual trust required. Ironically, public blockchains, which promised to solve the problem of mutual trust in collaborative processes, suffer from issues like scalability, probabilistic transaction finality, and lack of data confidentiality. To tackle these issues, permissioned blockchains were introduced as an alternative approach combining the positives of the two worlds and avoiding their drawbacks. However, no sufficient analysis has been done to emphasize their actual capabilities regarding TP. In this paper, we identify a suitable collection of TP criteria to analyze permissioned blockchains and apply them to a prominent set of these systems. Finally, we compare the derived properties and provide general conclusions.