A Survey on Off-chain Technologies

Abstract

Blockchain is a decentralized ledger with a secure and immutable chain structure. The advanced attributes of blockchain, including decentralization, anonymity, transparency, and zero trust support, have positioned it as a transformative technology across different areas of expertise, like medicine, finance, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Nonetheless, blockchain’s progress has been constrained in various aspects, revealing inefficiency, privacy, high transaction fees, and challenges with on-chain storage. To address these limitations, off-chain technology has emerged as a solution by moving computation and storage overhead away from the blockchain. However, a comprehensive survey on off-chain schemes is lacking in the current literature. In this article, we conduct a thorough survey on off-chain technologies. We first introduce the fundamental concepts and characteristics of both blockchain and off-chain technologies. Furthermore, we establish a thorough taxonomy of off-chain technologies based on distinct application scenarios. We put forth a series of evaluation criteria, based on which we seriously review and analyze the existing off-chain schemes to assess their strengths and limitations. Conclusively, we outline a list of open issues and propose promising future research directions based on our thorough review and analysis on off-chain technologies.