A Survey of State-of-the-Art on Blockchains: Theories, Modelings, and Tools

TL;DR

This survey comprehensively reviews recent theoretical models, analytic tools, and essential mechanisms in blockchain research, highlighting gaps and future directions to guide researchers and practitioners.

Contribution

It provides a detailed classification of recent high-quality research on blockchain theories, models, and tools, addressing a gap in comprehensive understanding.

Findings

Identified key theoretical models and analytic tools used in blockchain research.

Highlighted open issues and future research directions in blockchain development.

Reviewed recent high-quality research outputs related to blockchain mechanisms.

Abstract

To draw a roadmap of current research activities of the blockchain community, we first conduct a brief overview of state-of-the-art blockchain surveys published in the recent 5 years. We found that those surveys are basically studying the blockchain-based applications, such as blockchain-assisted Internet of Things (IoT), business applications, security-enabled solutions, and many other applications in diverse fields. However, we think that a comprehensive survey towards the essentials of blockchains by exploiting the state-of-the-art theoretical modelings, analytic models, and useful experiment tools is still missing. To fill this gap, we perform a thorough survey by identifying and classifying the most recent high-quality research outputs that are closely related to the theoretical findings and essential mechanisms of blockchain systems and networks. Several promising open issues are also summarized finally for future research directions. We wish this survey can serve as a useful guideline for researchers, engineers, and educators about the cutting-edge development of blockchains in the perspectives of theories, modelings, and tools.