Research advances on blockchain-as-a-service: architectures, applications and challenges

Abstract Due to the complexity of blockchain technology, it usually costs too much effort to build, maintain and monitor a blockchain system that supports a targeted application. To this end, the emerging “Blockchain as a Service” (BaaS) makes the blockchain and distributed ledgers more accessible, particularly for businesses, by reducing the costs and overheads. BaaS combines the high computing power of cloud computing, the pervasiveness of IoT and decentralization of blockchain, allowing people to build their own applications while ensuring the transparency and openness of the system. This paper surveys the research outputs of both academia and industry. First, it introduces the representative architectures of BaaS systems, and then summarizes the research contributions of BaaS from technologies for service provision, roles, container and virtualization, interfaces, customization and evaluation. The typical applications of BaaS in both academic and practical domains are also introduced. At present, the research on blockchain is abundant, but research on BaaS is still in its infancy. Six challenges of BaaS are concluded in this paper for further study directions.