Blockchain applications, challenges and evaluation: A survey

Abstract

Blockchain is a promising technology, which may change the way of transactions and affect our lives in the future, and has attracted the attention of more and more scholars recently. This paper provides an overview of the important issues of blockchain and the aim is to lead researchers to comprehensive understand applications, challenges and evaluation from the technical perspective. The basic technology including authorization, incentive and consensus is presented, focusing on their latest methods. Then, a wide range of blockchain applications are described. Specially, some of the latest intersection and integration areas with blockchain are introduced. Moreover, research challenges of blockchain are summarized and analyzed. Finally, evaluation metrics of blockchain are presented and as far as we know, these metrics are first designed for evaluating blockchain performance.