A vision for autonomous blockchains backed by secure hardware

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 raises the question if blockchains, in their current form, are the only class of datastores that can provide such strong integrity guarantees.