  As an emerging technology, blockchain has achieved great success in numerous
application scenarios, from intelligent healthcare to smart cities. However, a
long-standing bottleneck hindering its further development is the massive
resource consumption attributed to the distributed storage and computation
methods. This makes blockchain suffer from insufficient performance and poor
scalability. Here, we analyze the recent blockchain techniques and demonstrate
that the potential of widely-adopted consensus-based scaling is seriously
limited, especially in the current era when Moore's law-based hardware scaling
is about to end. We achieve this by developing an open-source benchmarking
tool, called Prism, for investigating the key factors causing low resource
efficiency and then discuss various topology and hardware innovations which
could help to scale up blockchain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the
first in-depth study that explores the next-generation scaling strategies by
conducting large-scale and comprehensive benchmarking.
