Where Is Current Research on Blockchain Technology?—A Systematic Review

By Jesse Yli-Huumo, Deokyoon Ko, Sujin Choi, Sooyong Park, K. Smolander. PLoS ONE, 2016

2,064 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Blockchain is a decentralized transaction and data management technology developed first for Bitcoin cryptocurrency. The interest in Blockchain technology has been increasing since the idea was coined in 2008. The reason for the interest in Blockchain is its central attributes that provide security, anonymity and data integrity without any third party organization in control of the transactions, and therefore it creates interesting research areas, especially from the perspective of technical challenges and limitations. In this research, we have conducted a systematic mapping study with the goal of collecting all relevant research on Blockchain technology. Our objective is to understand the current research topics, challenges and future directions regarding Blockchain technology from the technical perspective. We have extracted 41 primary papers from scientific databases. The results show that focus in over 80% of the papers is on Bitcoin system and less than 20% deals with other Blockchain applications including e.g. smart contracts and licensing. The majority of research is focusing on revealing and improving limitations of Blockchain from privacy and security perspectives, but many of the proposed solutions lack concrete evaluation on their effectiveness. Many other Blockchain scalability related challenges including throughput and latency have been left unstudied. On the basis of this study, recommendations on future research directions are provided for researchers.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems, Management Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/35ce7c6e65f77e1b09dfc38243c10023642b9e46

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Citations in the corpus

Survey on blockchain for Internet of Things (2019, methodology): “For example, it takes 10 minutes to initially complete a transaction in PoW mechanism, about an hour for six blocks to be generated and conﬁrmed [109].”
EduCTX: A Blockchain-Based Higher Education Credit Platform (2017, methodology): “The PoW is a consensus protocol used in the Bitcoin network and it uses computing power as a mechanism to determine the chosen peer [3], [43], [46].”
Blockchain technology in agri-food value chain management: A synthesis of applications, challenges and future research directions (2019, methodology): “[17] proposed an SLR on blockchain technology by highlighting current research topics, challenges and future research directions from a technological perspective.”
Performance Analysis of Hyperledger Fabric Platforms (2018, background): “From these challenges, a comprehensive study on research topics on blockchain in [8] has shown that the main limitations and challenges that have not been extensively evaluated are latency and throughput.”
Blockchain in Industries: A Survey (2019, background): “such as security [79]–[83], consensus protocols and algorithms [84], [101], [108], scalability [89], [103], software engineering issues [92], [93], and current research in the field [88].”
Exploring blockchain technology and its potential applications for education (2018, background): “It is “linked” to the original block in the network through the digital signature (Yli-Huumo et al. 2016).”
Blockchain in government: Benefits and implications of distributed ledger technology for information sharing (2017, background): “So far, most literature is focused on the technology level, addressing the technological challenges of using BCT for peer to peer (P2P) processes (Yli-Huumo et al., 2016) or on the opportunities offered to redesign transaction and information exchange processes in the private domain.”
Towards Post-Quantum Blockchain: A Review on Blockchain Cryptography Resistant to Quantum Computing Attacks (2020, background): “A detailed description on the inner workings of the previously mentioned blockchain components and algorithms is out of the scope of this paper, but the interested reader can find further information in [2], [22]–[28].”