Blockchain-based e-cheque clearing framework with trust based consensus mechanism

The cheque based banking transactions are widely used all over the world. The reason is that it is a hustle free and trusted way of money transaction. The existing cheque settlement process involves manual processing of submitted cheques, and large amounts of time for clearance. This paper proposes a framework to automate the cheque settlement process. This framework proposes cheque generation, cheque processing and cheque settlement process through online and physical modes. The proposed framework is based on blockchain technology, where the blockchain network brings all different banks on a common platform i.e. the e-cheque issued from one bank can be submitted to any other bank in any mode of operation either physical or online. The proposed framework comprises a novel trust based consensus mechanism for block mining. The proposed consensus approach outperforms the existing proof-of-work based approach by reducing consensus time by 25%. The proposed framework can partially transform the current banking system over the blockchain. Security threats and vulnerability of the proposed framework is also discussed in this paper.