Applications of Blockchain Technology beyond Cryptocurrency

TL;DR

This paper reviews how blockchain technology extends beyond cryptocurrencies to various domains like IoT, healthcare, and voting, highlighting its security features, applications, challenges, and potential solutions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of blockchain applications outside cryptocurrency, emphasizing security mechanisms, challenges, and future research directions.

Findings

Blockchain enhances security in diverse applications

Proof-of-Work ensures blockchain integrity

Blockchain adoption spans multiple non-monetary systems

Abstract

Blockchain (BC), the technology behind the Bitcoin crypto-currency system, is considered to be both alluring and critical for ensuring enhanced security and (in some implementations, non-traceable) privacy for diverse applications in many other domains including in the Internet of Things (IoT) eco-system. Intensive research is currently being conducted in both academia and industry applying the Blockchain technology in multifarious applications. Proof-of-Work (PoW), a cryptographic puzzle, plays a vital role in ensuring BC security by maintaining a digital ledger of transactions, which is considered to be incorruptible. Furthermore, BC uses a changeable Public Key (PK) to record the users' identity, which provides an extra layer of privacy. Not only in cryptocurrency has the successful adoption of BC been implemented but also in multifaceted non-monetary systems such as in: distributed storage systems, proof-of-location, healthcare, decentralized voting and so forth. Recent research articles and projects/applications were surveyed to assess the implementation of BC for enhanced security, to identify associated challenges and to propose solutions for BC enabled enhanced security systems.