Received September 25, 2019, accepted October 30, 2019, date of publication November 15, 2019, date of current version December 3, 2019. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2953729 A Comparative Analysis of Distributed Ledger Technology Platforms MOHAMMAD JABED MORSHED CHOWDHURY 1, MD. SADEK FERDOUS 2,3, KAMANASHIS BISWAS4,5, (Member, IEEE), NIAZ CHOWDHURY6, A. S. M. KAYES 1, MAMOUN ALAZAB 7, AND PAUL WATTERS 1 1Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC 3086, Australia 2Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet 3114, Bangladesh 3Business School, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, U.K. 4Peter Faber Business School, Australian Catholic University, North Sydney, NSW 2060, Australia 5School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University, Gold Coast, QLD 4215, Australia 6Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, U.K. 7College of Engineering, IT and Environment, Charles Darwin University, Casuarina, NT 0810, Australia Corresponding author: Mohammad Jabed Morshed Chowdhury (
[email protected]) ABSTRACT Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has emerged as one of the most disruptive technologies in the last decade. It promises to change the way people do their business, track their products, and manage their personal data. Though the concept of DLT was first implemented in 2009 as Bitcoin, it has gained significant attention only in the past few years. During this time, different DLT enthusiasts and commercial companies have proposed and developed several DLT platforms. These platforms are usually categorized as public vs private, general purpose vs application specific and so on. As a growing number of people are interested to build DLT applications, it is important to understand their underlying architecture and capabilities in order to determine which DLT platform should be leveraged for a specific DLT application.