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.
Highlights
Currency transactions between persons or companies are often centralized and controlled by a third party organization
RQ1: What research topics have been addressed in current research on Blockchain? The main research question of this mapping study is to understand the current research topics on Blockchain
After reading all the selected papers and creating classifications based on the findings, we identified that a majority of the papers were related to the technical challenges and limitations presented by Swan [1]
Summary
Currency transactions between persons or companies are often centralized and controlled by a third party organization. Making a digital payment or currency transfer requires a bank or credit card provider as a middleman to complete the transaction. A transaction causes a fee from a bank or a credit card company. Blockchain, mostly known as the technology running the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, is a public ledger system maintaining the integrity of transaction data [1]. Blockchain technology was first used when the Bitcoin cryptocurrency was introduced. Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency payment system that consists of a public transaction ledger called Blockchain [4]. Bitcoin has gained the attention of various communities and is currently the most successful digital currency using Blockchain technology [6]
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