Blockchain technology is one among the recent innovations in the computing industry. Blockchains have gathered a widespread interest in the industry mainly due to their security promise. Despite the anticipated benefits of Blockchains, there are several limitations which make the technology less suitable in large scale applications such as banking, one being low throughput. Several initiatives to improve the throughput of Blockchains are being tried out both in the academia and the business worlds but no systematic classification of the initiatives and the strategies used has been done. This study explores Blockchain performance improvement initiatives and classify the initiatives by the improvement strategy used. This study has found that, out of 365 articles on the area of Blockchain performance, 300 were solution proposals aimed at improving the performance of Blockchains. The most used strategies in these proposals were alternative to PoW, sharding and multi-chain architecture.

Blockchain technology is one among the latest innovations in computing industry. Blockchains have gathered widespread interest in the industry due to their potential as secure data storage. Despite the potential benefits of blockchains, there are several limitations which hinders mass deployment, one of these limitations being low throughput. Low throughput has limited blockchain adoption in large scale applications such as banking or mobile payments. This study addresses this limitation through development of a performance enhancement algorithm called Path of Trust (PoT). PoT uses off-chain stratergy in which transactions meeting certain criteria bypass the main chain and sent direct to the recipient. The PoT algorithm was incorporated into a blockchain wallet that was developed as a mobile app. Experiments were run to verify the performance of the developed solution. Based on the experiments performed, the performance of the blockchain based on the developed solution was improved when compared to the original blockchain. With PoT algorithm running, the average transaction processing time was 12.81 secs per transaction compared to 18.52 secs when PoT was not running.

Blockchains have caught the attention of governments, businesses, and researchers due to their potential to revolutionize the way data is stored and consumed. Despite the current interest in blockchains globally, there has been unsatisfactory progress of this promising technology in developing countries, including Tanzania. One factor hindering the advancement of blockchain in the country is the lack of knowledge of the technology itself. Challenged by the situation, this study implemented a blockchain lab to provide a platform for users to explore and practice various concepts of blockchain. This online lab, called Dinari, was implemented using Ethereum blockchain and was hosted on a cloud server. Experiments were conducted to verify the performance of the developed lab. Results from the experiment show that the platform gives an average transaction processing time of 15.17 seconds. The processing times were within an acceptable range of performance when compared with other online platforms, such as Mainnet and Kovan that provide average processing times of between 8.8 seconds and 18.3 seconds. The study can be scaled up in future to deploy more use cases, including health, in addition to the existing payment use case.