Implications and Impact of Blockchain Transaction Pruning

Sammanfattning: This thesis presents an extension to Hyperledger Fabric, a private blockchain system, allowing historic transactions to be pruned without peer coordination. The feature is facilitated via pruning predicate functions, provided along any smart contracts a given system is desired to host. An evaluation of the extension demonstrates its impact, in terms of memory saved, for a specific asset delivery use case. It is concluded that the gains of pruning historic transactions from blockchain systems could yield significantly reduced storage requirements for some categories of applications, especially such with low transaction interdependency. It is also suggested that the deterministic consensus algorithms used by Hyperledger Fabric makes the transaction histories it may maintain not strictly required, meaning that the particular set of transactions that must survive pruning depend on what properties a blockchain is expected to maintain.