Towards a Requirement-driven Identification and Selection Process for Blockchain Platforms

Blockchain is a decentralized transaction and data management technology firstly developed for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. In recent years, the interest in this technology has increased and its use has extended to other scenarios to address, for example, traceability and transparency issues in different application domains (e.g. health, government, art). On the other hand, there is a growing offer of platforms that support this technology with different characteristics (e.g. smart contracts, permissioned). Therefore, the task of identifying which platform is the most suitable for a given scenario is not usually easy. This paper proposes a requirement-driven process for the identification and selection of Blockchain platforms. The process takes as input the business requirements of a particular scenario in order to determine, firstly, the set of characteristics required by the scenario and, secondly, the most suitable Blockchain platforms based on a taxonomy also proposed in this work. The process was assessed through existing projects in the industry that use Blockchain platforms, which allowed validating the adequacy of the proposal.