Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has recently published a document which lists the criteria for evaluating blockchain-based systems.

Created by the Information Economy Division of the ministry's Commerce and Information Policy Bureau, the document titled “Evaluation Forms for Blockchain-based Systems ver. 1.0”, says:

“Blockchain technologies are new types of technology used for trading virtual currencies, e.g., Bitcoins. The important features of blockchain technology are that it is extremely difficult to falsify compared to conventional systems, and that inexpensive systems that cause no downtime in effect could be built. Therefore, the technologies are expected to be applied in a wide variety of fields.”

The document noted that the already established evaluation models for conventional IT systems cannot be used for blockchain-based systems, “due to unique tradeoff caused by the structure of blockchain (e.g. Consensus between multiple nodes)”.

“[N]o evaluation indices or criteria had been established to adequately assess the features of the [blockchain] technologies and to compare them with existing systems. This causes the public anxiety, misunderstanding, and unreasonable hopes to blockchain technologies, and leading to a potential unwillingness to introduce the technology", it added.

Accordingly, the Evaluation forms of Blockchain-based systems, possibly the first-of-its-kind in the world, have been established through domestic/global surveys of literatures & actual use cases of blockchain-based systems, and discussion in the Study Committee of Experts. An exploratory committee was organized for discussion chaired by Dr. Takagi Soichiro, Center for Global Communications, International University of Japan, and composed of experts from academia, blockchain developers, domestic system vendors, and companies participating in international consortium. Five committee meetings were held from November 2016 to March 2017.

In particular, the Evaluation forms are composed of 32 evaluation items, closely related to the characteristics of blockchain technology including scalability, reliability, security, and others.