UC Santa Cruz

In our interconnected world, the need for robust distributed systems is undeniable. Such systems must guarantee security and privacy while managing data across multiple users, making them vital for industries like finance, the Internet of Things, and healthcare that handle sensitive information. The challenge lies in building these systems to withstand diverse threats and scale effectively. The advent of blockchain technology, which is a decentralized ledger that collaboratively stores and manages transactions with consensus in a distributed manner, has provided new solutions to these challenges. It offers a way to securely and transparently handle data and transactions with its inherent security features and consensus-driven operations. Despite its promise, blockchain faces scalability limitations that impede its widespread deployment in large-scale systems. Interoperability is another challenge that hinders its application in heterogeneous network environments. It requires the community to fundamentally rethink the current design of blockchains. To tackle these issues, this thesis takes a deep look at reshaping the landscape of the Blockchain and exploring the potential integration of Blockchain with distributed systems in the following themes:- Refining the design of layer-2 blockchain, off-chain networks, to avoid the imbalanced fund utilization problem restricted by the nature of the per-channel deposit. - Enabling interoperability in existing off-chain networks to support various cryptocurrencies trading with flexibility. - Integrating Blockchain with federated learning for decentralized model verification and auditing.