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Blockchains have emerged as a potential mechanism to enable immutable and consistent sharing of data across organizational boundaries. While much of the discussion on blockchains to date has been structured around public versus permissioned blockchains, both of these architectures have significant drawbacks. Public blockchains are energy inefficient, hard to scale and suffer from limited throughput and high latencies, while permissioned blockchains depend on specially designated nodes, potentially leak metainformation, and also suffer from scale and performance bottlenecks.

This paper introduces autonomous blockchains, a new blockchain architecture based on free-standing, immutable, eidetic databases that implement independent timelines, linked together through interactions. Autonomous blockchainscanberealizedinsidetrustedexecutionenvironments, to provide not only blockchain-like integrity …