1. Home
  2. Issues
  3. Volume 30, Issue 4 (2019)
  4. A Decade of Blockchain: Review of the Cu ...

Informatica


A Decade of Blockchain: Review of the Current Status, Challenges, and Future Directions
Volume 30, Issue 4 (2019), pp. 729–748
Pub. online: 1 January 2019      Type: Research Article      Open accessOpen Access
Received
1 June 2019
Accepted
1 December 2019
Published
1 January 2019

Abstract

In this paper, we present the progress of blockchain technology from the advent of the original publication titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” written by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, until the current days. Historical background and a comprehensive overview of the blockchain technology are given. We provide an up-to-date comparison of the most popular blockchain platforms with particular emphasis given to consensus protocols. Additionally, we introduce a BlockLib, an extensively growing online library on blockchain platforms collected from the various sources and designed to enable contributions from the blockchain community. Main directions of the current blockchain research, facing challenges as well as the main fields of applications, are summarized. We also layout the possible future lines in the blockchain technology development.

References

 
Abdullah, N., Hakansson, A., Moradian, E. (2017). Blockchain based approach to enhance big data authentication in distributed environment. In: 2017 Ninth International Conference on Ubiquitous and Future Networks (ICUFN). IEEE, pp. 887–892.
 
Andoni, M., Robu, V., Flynn, D., Abram, S., Geach, D., Jenkins, D., McCallum, P., Peacock, A. (2019). Blockchain technology in the energy sector: a systematic review of challenges and opportunities. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 100, 143–174.
 
Anh, D.T.T., Zhang, M., Ooi, B.C., Chen, G. (2018). Untangling blockchain: a data processing view of blockchain systems. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 4347(c), 1.
 
Bach, L., Mihaljevic, B., Zagar, M. (2018). Comparative analysis of blockchain consensus algorithms. In: 2018 41st International Convention on Information and Communication Technology, Electronics and Microelectronics (MIPRO). IEEE, pp. 1545–1550.
 
Back, A. (1997). A partial hash collision based postage scheme. http://www. hashcash.org/papers/announce.txt. Accessed: 2019-08-13.
 
Bano, S., Sonnino, A., Al-Bassam, M., Azouvi, S., McCorry, P., Meiklejohn, S., Danezis, G. (2017). SoK: consensus in the age of blockchains. arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.03936.
 
Batubara, F.R., Ubacht, J., Janssen, M. (2018). Challenges of blockchain technology adoption for e-government: a systematic literature review. In: Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Governance in the Data Age. ACM, p. 76.
 
Bayer, D., Haber, S., Stornetta, W.S. (1993). Improving the efficiency and reliability of digital time-stamping. In: Sequences Ii. Springer, pp. 329–334.
 
Belotti, M., Bozic, N., Pujolle, G., Secci, S. (2019). A vademecum on blockchain technologies: when, which and how. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 1–47.
 
Benchoufi, M., Porcher, R., Ravaud, P. (2017). Blockchain protocols in clinical trials: Transparency and traceability of consent. F1000Research, 6.
 
Bergquist, J., Laszka, A., Sturm, M., Dubey, A. (2017). On the design of communication and transaction anonymity in blockchain-based transactive microgrids. In: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Scalable and Resilient Infrastructures for Distributed Ledgers. ACM, p. 3.
 
Bitshares (2015). Bitshares 2.0. https://bitshares.org/. Accessed: 2019-09-13.
 
Buterin, V. (2018). Ethereum 2.0 spec–Casper and sharding. https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs. Accessed: 2019-09-30.
 
Buterin, V., Griffith, V. (2017). Casper the friendly finality gadget. arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.09437.
 
Buterin, V., Reijsbergen, D., Leonardos, S., Piliouras, G. (2019). Incentives in Ethereum’s hybrid casper protocol. arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.04205.
 
Castro, M., Liskov, B. (1999). Practical Byzantine fault tolerance. In: OSDI Vol. 99, pp. 173–186.
 
Castro, M., Liskov, B. (2002). Practical Byzantine fault tolerance and proactive recovery. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), 20(4), 398–461.
 
Cermeño, J.S. (2016). Blockchain in financial services: regulatory landscape and future challenges for its commercial application. BBVA Research Paper. December (16/20).
 
Chalaemwongwan, N., Kurutach, W. (2018). State of the art and challenges facing consensus protocols on blockchain. In: 2018 International Conference on Information Networking (ICOIN). IEEE, pp. 957–962.
 
Chaum, D. (1983). Blind signatures for untraceable payments. In: Advances in Cryptology. Springer, pp. 199–203.
 
Chen, J., Xue, Y. (2017). Bootstrapping a blockchain based ecosystem for big data exchange. In: 2017 IEEE International Congress on Big Data (Bigdata Congress). IEEE, pp. 460–463.
 
Christidis, K., Devetsikiotis, M. (2016). Blockchains and smart contracts for the internet of things. IEEE Access, 4, 2292–2303.
 
Chuen, D.L.K. (2015). Handbook of Digital Currency: Bitcoin, Innovation, Financial Instruments, and Big Data. Academic Press.
 
CoinShares (2019). The Bitcoin mining network. https://coinsharesgroup.com/research/bitcoin-mining-network-june-2019.
 
Cong, L.W., He, Z. (2019). Blockchain disruption and smart contracts. The Review of Financial Studies, 32(5), 1754–1797.
 
Dai, W. (1998). b-money. http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt.
 
Datta, A. (2019). Blockchain in the government technology fabric. arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.08517.
 
de Vries, A. (2018). Bitcoin’s growing energy problem. Joule, 2(5), 801–805.
 
Dewey, J. (2019). Blockchain & Cryptocurrency Regulation. Global Legal Group Ltd.
 
Digiconomist (2019a). Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption. Accessed: 2019-09-25.
 
Digiconomist (2019b). Ethereum Energy Consumption Index. https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption. Accessed: 2019-09-26.
 
Dinh, T.T.A., Wang, J., Chen, G., Liu, R., Ooi, B.C., Tan, K.L. (2017). Blockbench: a framework for analyzing private blockchains. In: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Conference on Management of Data. ACM, pp. 1085–1100.
 
Dunphy, P., Petitcolas, F.A. (2018). A first look at identity management schemes on the blockchain. IEEE Security & Privacy, 16(4), 20–29.
 
Dwork, C., Naor, M. (1992). Pricing via processing or combatting junk mail. In: Annual International Cryptology Conference. Springer, pp. 139–147.
 
Egelund-Müller, B., Elsman, M., Henglein, F., Ross, O. (2017). Automated execution of financial contracts on blockchains. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 59(6), 457–467.
 
EOS (2017). EOS. IO technical white paper. https://github.com/EOSIO/Documentation. Accessed: 2019-09-04.
 
European Parliament (2018). Distributed ledger technologies and blockchains: building trust with disintermediation. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-8-2018-0373_EN.pdf. Accessed: 2019-09-30.
 
Feng, Q., He, D., Zeadally, S., Khan, M.K., Kumar, N. (2019). A survey on privacy protection in blockchain system. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 126, 45–58.
 
Finck, M. (2019). Blockchain and the General Data Protection Regulation. Tech. rep., Panel for the Future of Science and Technology at European Parliament.
 
Fulmer, N. (2019). Exploring the Legal Issues of Blockchain Applications. Akron Law Review, 52(1), 5.
 
Gan, S. (2017). An IoT Simulator in NS3 and a Key-Based Authentication Architecture for IoT Devices Using Blockchain. Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.
 
Garvin, W. (2016). POLKADOT: vision for a heterogeneous multi-chain framework. https://polkadot.network/PolkaDotPaper.pdf. Accessed: 2019-09-26.
 
Gilad, Y., Hemo, R., Micali, S., Vlachos, G., Zeldovich, N. (2017). Algorand: scaling Byzantine agreements for cryptocurrencies. In: Proceedings of the 26th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. ACM, pp. 51–68.
 
Gordon, W.J., Catalini, C. (2018). Blockchain technology for healthcare: facilitating the transition to patient-driven interoperability. Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal, 16, 224–230.
 
Haber, S., Stornetta, W.S. (1990). How to time-stamp a digital document. In: Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptography. Springer, pp. 437–455.
 
Haber, S., Stornetta, W.S. (1997). Secure names for bit-strings. In: Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. ACM, pp. 28–35.
 
Huh, S., Cho, S., Kim, S. (2017). Managing IoT devices using blockchain platform. In: 2017 19th International Conference on Advanced Communication Technology (ICACT). IEEE, pp. 464–467.
 
IBM (2018). Blockchain market shares, market strategies, and market forecasts. 2018 to 2024. https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/PPRR983X.
 
ICO Watch List (2019). ICO statistics – by industry. https://icowatchlist.com/statistics/categories. Accessed: 2019-09-29.
 
INATBA (2019). INATBA: international association for trusted blockchain applications. https://inatba.org. Accessed: 2019-10-01.
 
Jaoude, J.A., Saade, R.G. (2019). Blockchain applications – usage in different domains. IEEE Access, 7, 45360–45381.
 
Johnson, S., Robinson, P., Brainard, J. (2019). Sidechains and interoperability. arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.04077.
 
Karafiloski, E., Mishev, A. (2017). Blockchain solutions for big data challenges: A literature review. In: IEEE EUROCON 2017-17th International Conference on Smart Technologies. IEEE, pp. 763–768.
 
Khan, M.A., Salah, K. (2018). IoT security: review, blockchain solutions, and open challenges. Future Generation Computer Systems, 82, 395–411.
 
Kiayias, A., Russell, A., David, B., Oliynykov, R. (2017). Ouroboros: a provably secure proof-of-stake blockchain protocol. In: Annual International Cryptology Conference. Springer, pp. 357–388.
 
Kim, S., Kwon, Y., Cho, S. (2018). A survey of scalability solutions on blockchain. In: 2018 International Conference on Information and Communication Technology Convergence (ICTC). IEEE, pp. 1204–1207.
 
King, S. (2013). Primecoin: cryptocurrency with prime number proof-of-work. July 7th, 1, 6.
 
King, S., Nadal, S. (2012). PPCoin: peer-to-peer crypto-currency with proof-of-stake. https://decred.org/research/king2012.pdf.
 
Krause, M.J., Tolaymat, T. (2018). Quantification of energy and carbon costs for mining cryptocurrencies. Nature Sustainability.
 
Kuo, T.T., Zavaleta Rojas, H., Ohno-Machado, L. (2019). Comparison of blockchain platforms: a systematic review and healthcare examples. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 26(5), 462–478.
 
Kwon, J. (2014, 2017). Tendermint: consensus without mining. Draft v. 0.6, Fall, 1, 11.
 
Kwon, J., Buchman, E. (2016). Cosmos: a network of distributed ledgers. https://cosmos.network/cosmos-whitepaper.pdf. Accessed: 2019-09-26.
 
Lamport, L. (1998). The part-time parliament. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 16(2), 133–169.
 
Li, X., Jiang, P., Chen, T., Luo, X., Wen, Q. (2017). A survey on the security of blockchain systems. Future Generation Computer Systems.
 
Lin, I.C., Liao, T.C. (2017). A survey of blockchain security issues and challenges. International Journal of Network Security, 19(5), 653–659.
 
Lopes, V., Alexandre, L.A., Pereira, N. (2019). Controlling robots using artificial intelligence and a consortium blockchain. arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.00660.
 
Lundqvist, T., De Blanche, A., Andersson, H.R.H. (2017). Thing-to-thing electricity micro payments using blockchain technology. In: 2017 Global Internet of Things Summit (GIoTS). IEEE, pp. 1–6.
 
Merkle, R.C. (1980). Protocols for public key cryptosystems. In: 1980 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. IEEE, pp. 122–122.
 
Mingxiao, D., Xiaofeng, M., Zhe, Z., Xiangwei, W., Qijun, C. (2017). A review on consensus algorithm of blockchain. In: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC). IEEE, pp. 2567–2572.
 
Momtaz, P.P., Rennertseder, K., Schröder, H. (2019). Token offerings: a revolution in corporate finance? Available at SSRN 3346964.
 
Münsing, E., Mather, J., Moura, S. (2017). Blockchains for decentralized optimization of energy resources in microgrid networks. In: 2017 IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA). IEEE, pp. 2164–2171.
 
Mytis-Gkometh, P., Drosatos, G., Efraimidis, P., Kaldoudi, E. (2018). Notarization of knowledge retrieval from biomedical repositories using blockchain technology. In: Precision Medicine Powered by pHealth and Connected Health. Springer, pp. 69–73.
 
Nakamoto, S. (2008). Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.
 
Narayanan, A., Clark, J. (2017). Bitcoin’s academic pedigree. Communications of the ACM, 60(12), 36–45.
 
Nem (2018). Nem technical reference. https://nem.io/wp-content/themes/nem/files/NEM_techRef.pdf. Accessed: 2019-09-28.
 
Nguyen, C.T., Hoang, D.T., Nguyen, D.N., Niyato, D., Nguyen, H.T., Dutkiewicz, E. (2019). Proof-of-stake consensus mechanisms for future blockchain networks: Fundamentals, applications and opportunities. IEEE Access, 7, 85727–85745.
 
Nguyen, G.T., Kim, K. (2018). A survey about consensus algorithms used in blockchain. Journal of Information Processing Systems, 14(1).
 
Panarello, A., Tapas, N., Merlino, G., Longo, F., Puliafito, A. (2018). Blockchain and IOT integration: a systematic survey. Sensors, 18(8), 2575.
 
Technologies, P. (2017). Proof of authority chains. https://github.com/paritytech/parity-ethereum. Accessed: 2019-09-13.
 
Paulavičius, R., Grigaitis, S., Filatovas, E. (2019). BlockLib: a collection of the blockchain platforms. https://github.com/blockchain-group/BlockLib. Accessed: 2019-09-26.
 
Pawlak, M., Guziur, J., Poniszewska-Marańda, A. (2018). Voting process with blockchain technology: auditable blockchain voting system. In: International Conference on Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems. Springer, pp. 233–244.
 
Peters, G.W., Panayi, E. (2016). Understanding modern banking ledgers through blockchain technologies: future of transaction processing and smart contracts on the internet of money. In: Banking Beyond Banks and Money. Springer, pp. 239–278.
 
Poon, J., Dryja, T. (2016). The bitcoin lightning network: Scalable off-chain instant payments. https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf. Accessed: 2019-09-29.
 
Popov, S. (2016). The tangle. Cit. on, 131.
 
Ramya, U., Sindhuja, P., Atsaya, R., Dharani, B.B., Golla, S.M.V. (2018). Reducing forgery in land registry system using blockchain technology. In: International Conference on Advanced Informatics for Computing Research. Springer, pp. 725–734.
 
Risius, M., Spohrer, K. (2017). A blockchain research framework. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 59(6), 385–409.
 
Samaniego, M., Deters, R. (2016). Using blockchain to push software-defined IoT components onto edge hosts. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Big Data and Advanced Wireless Technologies. ACM, p. 58.
 
Sarpatwar, K., Vaculin, R., Min, H., Su, G., Heath, T., Ganapavarapu, G., Dillenberger, D. (2019). Towards enabling trusted artificial intelligence via blockchain. In: Policy-Based Autonomic Data Governance. Springer, pp. 137–153.
 
Shibata, N. (2019). Blockchain consensus formation while solving optimization problems. arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.01915.
 
Sicari, S., Rizzardi, A., Grieco, L.A., Coen-Porisini, A. (2015). Security, privacy and trust in internet of things: the road ahead. Computer Networks, 76, 146–164.
 
Singh, S., Singh, N. (2016). Blockchain: future of financial and cyber security. In: 2016 2nd International Conference on Contemporary Computing and Informatics (IC3I). IEEE, pp. 463–467.
 
Singh, S.K., Rathore, S., Park, J.H. (2019). BlockIoTIntelligence: a blockchain-enabled intelligent IoT architecture with artificial intelligence. Future Generation Computer Systems.
 
Siyal, A., Junejo, A., Zawish, M., Ahmed, K., Khalil, A., Soursou, G. (2019). Applications of blockchain technology in medicine and healthcare: challenges and future perspectives. Cryptography, 3(1), 3.
 
Stoll, C., Klaaßen, L., Gallersdörfer, U. (2019). The carbon footprint of bitcoin. Joule, 3(7), 1647–1661.
 
Sullivan, C., Burger, E. (2019). Blockchain, digital identity, E-government. In: Business Transformation through Blockchain. Springer, pp. 233–258.
 
Szabo, N. (1994). Smart Contracts. Unpublished manuscript.
 
Szabo, N. (2008). Bit gold. Unenumerated. https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html.
 
TeqAtlas (2019). Blockchain investment trends. https://teqatlas.com/analytics-and-research/fs776-blockchain-investment-trends-1h-2019. Accessed: 2019-10-20.
 
The ZILLIQA Team (2017). The ZILLIQA technical whitepaper. https://docs.zilliqa.com/whitepaper.pdf.
 
Truby, J. (2018). Decarbonizing Bitcoin: law and policy choices for reducing the energy consumption of Blockchain technologies and digital currencies. Energy Research & Social Science, 44, 399–410.
 
Tseng, J.H., Liao, Y.C., Chong, B., Liao, S.W. (2018). Governance on the drug supply chain via gcoin blockchain. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15(6), 1055.
 
University of Cambridge (2019). Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index. https://www.cbeci.org. Accessed: 2019-09-26.
 
Valenta, M., Sandner, P. (2017). Comparison of Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric and Corda. FSBC Working Paper.
 
Veena, P., Panikkar, S., Nair, S., Brody, P. (2015). Empowering the edge-practical insights on a decentralized internet of things. Empowering the Edge-Practical Insights on a Decentralized Internet of Things. IBM Institute for Business Value, 17.
 
Vranken, H. (2017). Sustainability of Bitcoin and blockchains. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 28, 1–9.
 
Wang, W., Hoang, D.T., Xiong, Z., Niyato, D., Wang, P., Hu, P., Wen, Y. (2018). A survey on consensus mechanisms and mining management in blockchain networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.02707, 1–33.
 
Xiao, Y., Zhang, N., Lou, W., Hou, Y.T. (2019). A survey of distributed consensus protocols for blockchain networks. http://arxiv.org/abs/1904.04098.
 
Xu, X., Pautasso, C., Zhu, L., Gramoli, V., Ponomarev, A., Tran, A.B., Chen, S. (2016). The blockchain as a software connector. In: 2016 13th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA). IEEE, pp. 182–191.
 
Yaga, D., Mell, P., Roby, N., Scarfone, K. (2018). Blockchain Technology Overview. Tech. rep., National Institute of Standards and Technology.
 
Yang, W., Garg, S., Raza, A., Herbert, D., Kang, B. (2018). Blockchain: trends and future. In: Yoshida, K., Lee, M. (Eds.), Knowledge Management and Acquisition for Intelligent Systems, pp. 201–210.
 
Yli-Huumo, J., Ko, D., Choi, S., Park, S., Smolander, K. (2016). Where is current research on blockchain technology? – A systematic review. PLOS ONE, 11(10), e0163477.
 
Yuan, Y., Wang, F.Y. (2016). Towards blockchain-based intelligent transportation systems. In: 2016 IEEE 19th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC). IEEE, pp. 2663–2668.
 
Zhang, A., Lin, X. (2018). Towards secure and privacy-preserving data sharing in e-health systems via consortium blockchain. Journal of Medical Systems, 42(8), 140.
 
Zheng, Z., Xie, S., Dai, H., Chen, X., Wang, H. (2017). An overview of blockchain technology: architecture, consensus, and future trends. In: 2017 IEEE International Congress on Big Data (BigData Congress). IEEE, pp. 557–564.
 
Zheng, Z., Xie, S., Dai, H.N., Chen, X., Wang, H. (2018). Blockchain challenges and opportunities: a survey. International Journal of Web and Grid Services, 14(4), 352.
 
Zhou, L., Wang, L., Sun, Y. (2018). Mistore: a blockchain-based medical insurance storage system. Journal of medical systems, 42(8), 149.

Biographies

Paulavičius Remigijus
remigijus.paulavicius@mif.vu.lt

R. Paulavičius is a senior researcher and head of the Blockchain Group at the Institute of Data Science and Digital Technologies, Vilnius University, Lithuania. His research interests include blockchain technology, optimization software, parallel computing, development and application of various operation research techniques.

Grigaitis Saulius
saulius.grigaitis@mif.vu.lt

S. Grigaitis is a partnership associate professor at Vilnius University, a member of the Blockchain Group in the Institute of Data Science and Digital Technologies, and an experienced industry professional. His research interests focus on blockchain technologies, large-scale distributed systems and artificial intelligence.

Igumenov Aleksandr
aleksandr.igumenov@mif.vu.lt

A. Igumenov is a lecturer at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, Vilnius University, Lithuania. Received the doctoral degree in informatics engineering from the Vilnius University in 2012. His main research interests include blockchain technologies, global optimization, high-performance and parallel computing, IoT and internet technologies.

Filatovas Ernestas
ernestas.filatovas@mif.vu.lt

E. Filatovas is a senior researcher and co-founder the Blockchain Group at the Institute of Data Science and Digital Technologies, Vilnius University, Lithuania. His main research interests include blockchain technologies, global and multi-objective optimization, evolutionary algorithms, high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and image processing.


Full article Related articles Cited by PDF XML
Full article Related articles Cited by PDF XML

Copyright
© 2019 Vilnius University
Open access article under the CC BY license.

Keywords
blockchain Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) Bitcoin blockchain platforms consensus protocols cryptocurrencies

Metrics
since January 2020
4225

Article info
views

1990

Full article
views

1342

PDF
downloads

331

XML
downloads


Share


RSS