Development of a Blockchain Taxonomy

Abstract

Since its deployment in 2009 the Blockchain technology has been getting a lot of attention in research, media as well as various industries. In the beginning, only financial related use cases were discussed and implemented, as the first real life and well-known implementation was Bitcoin. Since then many different types of Blockchains evolved. However, it is still unclear what the basic characteristics of a Blockchain are and how those interact to form different types of Blockchains. With this research, we therefore propose a taxonomy of the Blockchain technology to help form a better understanding of the technology itself and guide future research on how to differentiate the multiple types.