A Survey on Redactable Blockchain: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

While immutability is an important property of blockchain and can be utilized to build a credible data publishing platform, the same property can also be abused to disseminate illicit content and may violate requirements under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as well as other privacy regulations. Hence, there has been increased focus on designing redactable blockchain-based solutions, which is the focus of this survey article. Specifically, we survey the extant literature on redactable blockchain, and discuss the existing limitations and challenges prior to outlining a number of future research opportunities which hopefully will benefit the broader research and practitioner communities.