Dinari: A Blockchain Lab for Supporting Blockchain Learning, Research, and Innovation in Tanzania

Blockchains have caught the attention of governments, businesses, and researchers due to their potential to revolutionize the way data is stored and consumed. Despite the current interest in blockchains globally, there has been unsatisfactory progress of this promising technology in developing countries, including Tanzania. One factor hindering the advancement of blockchain in the country is the lack of knowledge of the technology itself. Challenged by the situation, this study implemented a blockchain lab to provide a platform for users to explore and practice various concepts of blockchain. This online lab, called Dinari, was implemented using Ethereum blockchain and was hosted on a cloud server. Experiments were conducted to verify the performance of the developed lab. Results from the experiment show that the platform gives an average transaction processing time of 15.17 seconds. The processing times were within an acceptable range of performance when compared with other online platforms, such as Mainnet and Kovan that provide average processing times of between 8.8 seconds and 18.3 seconds. The study can be scaled up in future to deploy more use cases, including health, in addition to the existing payment use case.