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Blockchain is the technology used by developers of cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, to enable exchange of financial “coins” between participants in the absence of a trusted third party to ensure the transaction, such as is typically done by governments. Blockchain has evolved to become a generic approach to store and process data in a highly decentralized and secure way. In this article, we review blockchain concepts and use cases, and discuss the challenges in using them from a governmental viewpoint. We begin with reviewing the categories of blockchains, the underlying mechanisms, and why blockchains can achieve their security goals. We then review existing known governmental use cases by regions. To show both technical and deployment details of blockchain adoption, we study a few representative use cases in the domains of healthcare and energy infrastructures. Finally, the review of both technical details and use cases helps us summarize the adoption and technical challenges of blockchains. 

While adopting Blockchain technologies to automate their enterprise functionality, organizations are recognizing the challenges of scalability and manual configuration that the state of art present. Scalability of Hyperledger Fabric is an open challenge recognized by the research community. We have automated many of the configuration steps of installing Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain on AWS infrastructure and have benchmarked the scalability of that system. We have used the UCR (University of California Riverside) Time Series Archive with 128 timeseries datasets containing over 191,177 rows of data totaling 76,453,742 numbers. Using an automated Serverless approach, we have loaded this dataset, by chunks, into different AWS instances, triggering the load by SQS messaging. In this paper, we present the results of this benchmarking study and describe the approach we took to automate the Hyperledger Fabric processes using serverless Lambda functions and SQS triggering. We will also discuss what is needed to make the Blockchain technology more robust and scalable.