A domestic research team has developed technology that addresses blockchain's data storage scalability and analysis efficiency issues, increasing the potential of blockchain technology in various fields, including disease monitoring in fish like flounder.

The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) is conducting research to overcome the limitations of blockchain technology, such as duplicate storage, slow speed, and uniform search, while taking advantage of the advantages of a blockchain platform that cannot be manipulated or deleted. ETRI recently announced the results of its demonstration to date, saying that it is developing a fish disease monitoring service in cooperation with the Jeju Ocean Research and Fisheries Research Institute.

This presentation showcased a system developed by ETRI that enables rapid assessment and response to fish diseases using a blockchain-based storage and analysis platform. This platform was developed based on disease data collected during a fish image data collection project conducted in Jeju Island.

The research team built various indices by storing photos of flounder taken at a fish farm and various data on decentralized storage and blockchain. In the future, we plan to provide a trust-based service that can determine and predict disease outbreaks through rapid search and analysis.

Jeju Island and the Jeju Ocean and Fisheries Research Institute plan to further improve the usability of the system by providing feedback on the entire process, from flounder data collection to disease diagnosis and antibiotic prescription, from the perspective of service users, and by collecting actual user requirements.

In this study, it is possible to store large-scale transaction data in a distributed manner using only 5% or less of the storage space compared to existing blockchains.

Data is stored using erasure coding to maximize space efficiency and processing speed.

The goal is to increase efficiency by minimizing the amount of data stored within the scope of ensuring Byzantine fault tolerance, which can be considered a basic condition of blockchain.

Additionally, you can select an efficient index method based on data characteristics and use it for searches.

ETRI announced that it showed performance more than twice as fast as existing search speeds when experimenting with 1 million data sets.

△It supports various index formats such as multidimensional index, multi-level index, and R-Tree index, and △It provides various search services such as content-based, time series, and spatiotemporal.

City Labs, Inc., which participated as a joint research institute, plans to develop an app that can be used with smartphones and register it in the app store next year to increase user accessibility, while BI Matrix, Inc. plans to provide analysis convenience with a solution that visualizes data collected on the blockchain platform.

ETRI Smart Data Research Lab Director Kim Ji-yong said, “We hope that this research will serve as a foundation for further expansion of blockchain applications across various industrial sectors. “At its core, there must always be transparency and trustworthiness of data,” he said.

This research result is the result of two projects, “Data Sovereignty-Guaranteed Blockchain Data Management Technology,” as part of the Ministry of Science and ICT’s “Blockchain Technology Development Project for the Data Economy.”

Seoul National University, Sogang University, Pohang University of Science and Technology, City Labs Co., Ltd., Parameta Co., Ltd., BI Matrix Co., Ltd., and Jeju Special Self-Governing Province are cooperating as joint research institutions.