Human voice or speech is a contactless, non-invasive biometric trait for human recognition, easy to use with minimal computer complexity and inexpensive to implement. Speaker recognition (SR) has turned out to be a magnificent approach using speech as the central premise since decades. Its broad range of usages, like forensic speech verification to identify culprits by law enforcement authorities and access control to mobile banking, mobile shopping, etc., has made it a lucrative area of research. Also, the ease of use and dependability of SR will significantly assist people with disabilities in securely accessing and reaping the benefits of digital-era services. Additionally, the emergence of numerous deep learning methods for feature extraction and classification, has helped SR to achieve tremendous progress. This paper presents a comprehensive study on the progression of SR for decades till the present, including integration with Blockchain and challenges. It covers most of the factors that influence SR performance such as fundamentals and structure of SR, different speech pre-processing techniques, various speech features, feature extraction techniques, traditional and neural network-based classification techniques and deep learning-based SR toolkits. As a consequence, in this digital Blockchain era, it will help to design robust and reliable recognition-based services for mankind.