A Survey on Blockchain Technologies and Research

Abstract

The explosion of blockchain projects in last couple of years shows the general interest in the blockchain technology. Looking towards the current state of the art regarding this technology it becomes clear that the main driver of innovation is the private sector. We believe that understanding main applications of the technology, academic contributions, and private solutions can reveal where the interest in the technology exists and where it can be missing. In particular, this work can help identify open source projects that can provide a framework with next-generation features as; lightning network, directed acyclic graph, mobile compatibility, or compute protocols. New applications of the blockchain technology are still being discovered regularly and in this study several blockchain development frameworks were found. However, in the academic world there are few references to operational, testing, and deployment framework related with the technology. With the expected growth of the technology, integration with preexisting solutions, legacy systems replacement, or new implementations, the need for testing, deploying, exploration, and maintenance is expected to intensify for the technology.