A Resource-Efficient Blockchain With Delegated Fault-Tolerance for Manufacturing Nodes

The integration of blockchain into industrial environments promises secure and verifiable data exchange; however, existing permissioned blockchain (PBC) frameworks, such as Hyperledger Fabric and Quorum, impose overheads that are unsuitable for resource-constrained systems. This article introduces LowCapChain (LCC), a lightweight PBC designed for manufacturing nodes, such as programmable logic controllers, robotic arms, and smart sensors. LCC integrates Merkle ledger compression, elliptic-curve cryptography-based proof-of-membership, and delegated fault-tolerant consensus to enable secure operations without full ledger replication. Implemented in a robotic metal stamping facility using Raspberry Pi edge nodes, LCC achieves 964 transactions per second with 108 ms consensus latency and memory usage below 55 MB. Compared with Hyperledger Fabric, LCC reduces mean consensus latency by 61% and cryptographic overhead by up to 81%. Compared with Quorum, the reductions are 54% and 76%, respectively. Scalability tests confirmed near-linear throughput growth across 10–200 nodes, and fault tolerance experiments verified block finalization under validator failure. These findings establish LCC as an efficient architecture for embedded industrial systems, offering a pathway toward scalable Industry 4.0 adoption with energy savings inferred from reduced CPU cycles rather than directly measured power.