Blockchain challenges and opportunities: a survey

TLDR

Blockchain offers decentralization, persistence, anonymity, and auditability across diverse applications, yet no comprehensive survey covers its technology and use cases. The authors conduct a comprehensive survey of blockchain technology to address this gap and outline future research directions. The survey organizes blockchain into a taxonomy, reviews consensus mechanisms, applications, technical challenges, and recent solutions.

Abstract

Blockchain has numerous benefits such as decentralisation, persistency, anonymity and auditability. There is a wide spectrum of blockchain applications ranging from cryptocurrency, financial services, risk management, internet of things (IoT) to public and social services. Although a number of studies focus on using the blockchain technology in various application aspects, there is no comprehensive survey on the blockchain technology in both technological and application perspectives. To fill this gap, we conduct a comprehensive survey on the blockchain technology. In particular, this paper gives the blockchain taxonomy, introduces typical blockchain consensus algorithms, reviews blockchain applications and discusses technical challenges as well as recent advances in tackling the challenges. Moreover, this paper also points out the future directions in the blockchain technology.