Blockchain is a key technology that has the potential to decentralize the way we store, share, and manage information and data. One of the more recent blockchain platforms that has emerged is Hyperledger Fabric, an open source, permissioned blockchain that was introduced by IBM, first as Hyperledger Fabric v0.6, and then more recently, in 2017, IBM released Hyperledger Fabric v1.0. Although there are many blockchain platforms, there is no clear methodology for evaluating and assessing the different blockchain platforms in terms of their various aspects, such as performance, security, and scalability. In addition, the new version of Hyperledger Fabric was never evaluated against any other blockchain platform. In this paper, we will first conduct a performance analysis of the two versions of Hyperledger Fabric, v0.6 and v1.0. The performance evaluation of the two platforms will be assessed in terms of execution time, latency, and throughput, by varying the workload in each platform up to 10,000 transactions. Second, we will analyze the scalability of the two platforms by varying the number of nodes up to 20 nodes in each platform. Overall, the performance analysis results across all evaluation metrics, scalability, throughput, execution time, and latency, demonstrate that Hyperledger Fabric v1.0 consistently outperforms Hyperledger Fabric v0.6. However, Hyperledger Fabric v1.0 platform performance did not reach the performance level in current traditional database systems under high workload scenarios.

Public sector and governments have been actively exploring new technologies to enable the smart services transformation and to achieve strategic objectives such as citizens satisfaction and happiness, services efficiency and cost optimization. The Blockchain technology is a good example of an emerging technology that is attracting government attention. Many government entities such as United Kingdom, Estonia, Honduras, Denmark, Australia, Singapore and others have taken steps to unleash the potential of Blockchain technology. Dubai Government is aiming to become paperless by adopting the Blockchain technology for all transactions by 2021. The Blockchain is a disruptive technology that is playing a vital role in many sectors. It's a revolutionary technology transforming the way we think about trust as it enables transacting data in a decentralized structure without the need to have trusted central authorities. Blockchain technology promises to overcome security challenges in IoT enabled services such as enabling secure data sharing and data integrity. However, it also introduces new security challenges that should be investigated and tackled. In this paper, we review the literature to identify the potential use cases and application of Blockchain to enable government services. We also synthesized literature related to the security of Blockchain implementations to identify the security benefits, challenges and the proposed solutions. The analysis shows that is huge potential for Blockchain technology to be used in to enable smart government services. This paper also highlights future research in the areas of concerns that required further investigation.