Exploring Blockchain Technology through a Modular Lens: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey introduces a modular framework for analyzing blockchain systems, combining macro and micro perspectives to facilitate scalable, flexible, and application-specific blockchain design, while highlighting key technologies and challenges.

Contribution

It presents a novel modular analytical framework for blockchain systems, enabling detailed component analysis and guiding scalable, adaptable blockchain development.

Findings

Decomposes blockchain into key modules: network, consensus, and ledger.

Provides insights into integrating technologies to enhance blockchain functionality.

Identifies major challenges in blockchain design and development.

Abstract

Blockchain has attracted significant attention in recent years due to its potential to revolutionize various industries by providing trustlessness. To comprehensively examine blockchain systems, this article presents both a macro-level overview on the most popular blockchain systems, and a micro-level analysis on a general blockchain framework and its crucial components. The macro-level exploration provides a big picture on the endeavors made by blockchain professionals over the years to enhance the blockchain performance while the micro-level investigation details the blockchain building blocks for deep technology comprehension. More specifically, this article introduces a general modular blockchain analytic framework that decomposes a blockchain system into interacting modules and then examines the major modules to cover the essential blockchain components of network, consensus, and distributed ledger at the micro-level. The framework as well as the modular analysis jointly build a foundation for designing scalable, flexible, and application-adaptive blockchains that can meet diverse requirements. Additionally, this article explores popular technologies that can be integrated with blockchain to expand functionality and highlights major challenges. Such a study provides critical insights to overcome the obstacles in designing novel blockchain systems and facilitates the further development of blockchain as a digital infrastructure to service new applications.