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An Ultra-Scalable Blockchain Platform for Universal Asset Tokenization: Design and Implementation
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  • Ahto Buldas ,
  • Dirk Draheim ,
  • Mike Gault ,
  • Risto Laanoja ,
  • Takehiko Nagumo ,
  • Märt Saarepera ,
  • Joosep Simm ,
  • Jamie Steiner ,
  • Tanel Tammet ,
  • Ahto Truu
Ahto Buldas
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Dirk Draheim
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Mike Gault
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Risto Laanoja
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Takehiko Nagumo
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Märt Saarepera
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Joosep Simm
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Jamie Steiner
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Tanel Tammet
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Ahto Truu
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Abstract

Since its introduction with Bitcoin in 2009, blockchain technology has received tremendous attention by academia, industry, politics and media alike, in particular, through extended blockchain-based visions such as smart contracts, decentralized finance, and, most recently, Web3. The critical prerequisite for any such blockchain-based vision to be turned into reality is uncapped scalability. Furthermore, and equally important, blockchain technology needs to transcend the stage of specialized tokens into an adaptive, heterogeneous tokenization platform. In this paper, we explain the Alphabill family of technologies that addresses both unlimited scalability and unrestricted adaptivity. We deliver a sharded blockchain technology with unlimited scalability and performance, called KSI Cash, which is based on a new form of electronic money scheme, the bill scheme. We present performance tests of KSI Cash that we have conducted with the European Central Bank and a group of eight national central banks from the Eurosystem in order to assess the technological feasibility of a digital euro, showing the system operating with 100 million wallets and 15 thousand transactions per second (under simulation of realistic usage), having an estimated carbon footprint of 0.0001g CO2 per transaction (Bitcoin = 100 kg and more); furthermore, showing the system operating with up to 2 million payment orders per second, an equivalent of more than 300.000 transactions per second (in a laboratory setting with the central components of KSI Cash), scaling linearly in terms of the number of deployed shards.  We explain, in detail, the key concepts that unlock this performance (i.e., the concepts of the bill money scheme). The results provide evidence that the scalability of our technology is unlimited in both permissioned and permissionless scenarios, resulting into the Alphabill Money technology. Next, we contribute the architecture of a universal tokenization platform that allows for universal asset tokenization, transfer and exchange as a global medium of exchange,  called Alphabill platform. We reveal the crucial conceptual and technical contributions of the platform’s architecture and their interplay, including the data structures of KSI Cash and Alphabill Money, the dust collection solution of Alphabill Money, and the  atomic swap solution of the Alphabill platform.
2022Published in IEEE Access volume 10 on pages 77284-77322. 10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3192837