Industrial Blockchain: A state-of-the-art Survey

Abstract As an underlying and backbone technology of Bitcoin, Blockchain attracted extensive attention worldwide in recent years due to its unique characteristics of decentralization, openness, immutability, anonymity, etc., which enables it to build a trust basis through recording the point-to-point decentralized transactions in an immutable way via the attached timestamp, thereby improving system efficiency and reducing the cost without relying on the central agent. As it is considered to be a potentially revolutionary technology, Blockchain has been introduced into various industrial fields including finance, supply chain, manufacturing, healthcare, energy, and smart city. In this paper, we conduct a state-of-the-art survey of industrial Blockchain in terms of published articles between 2017 and 2020, and worldwide Blockchain movement including North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region so far. We conduct a statistic analysis of the collected articles in terms of three dimensions, which are year of publication, leading research institutes and researchers, and article classification to present a multi-dimensional trend or conclusion. Besides, we analyse articles that are cited over a certain number of times in detail to investigate the hot research directions. Finally, the challenges, opportunities, and future perspectives are discussed to summarize the main obstacles of industrial Blockchain and identify the open research questions in the near future.