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

Abstract

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.

Dynamics of Blockchain Implementation - A Case Study from the Energy Sector

“…After an initial literature search with literature databases (EBSCOhost, Google Scholar) we found Yli-Huumo's [49] overview as an identifier for research gaps. Based on that we formulated preliminary research questions and initiated the search for a suitable framework.…”

Exploring blockchain technology and its potential applications for education

“…This block contains all the transactions that occurred during this time. It is "linked" to the original block in the network through the digital signature (Yli-Huumo et al 2016). The consensus stage is achieved through the use of a consensus algorithm.…”

“…The output bears no apparent relationship to the input. The process is hard to reverse because, given just the output, the input is impossible to determine (Yli-Huumo et al 2016). Furthermore, the newly generated block is strictly following the linear sequence of time.…”

Blockchain and Privacy Protection in the Case of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): A Delphi Study

“…The author decided to focus his search on the main terms closely related to the topic of this thesis, namely blockchain (also called "distributed ledger" technology by some part of the ecosystem, the term "Bitcoin" was avoided on purpose, as it only presents one use case of blockchain technology) and the GDPR (which includes "privacy" and "data protection regulation") [33], [34]. Literature about the research methodology (see Methodology -Background) was collected as well but is not an integral part of this main review.…”