Recent Advances of Blockchain and Its Applications

Blockchain is an emerging decentralized data collection, sharing, and storage technology, which have provided abundant transparent, secure, tamper-proof, secure, and robust ledger services for various real-world use cases. Recent years have witnessed notable developments of blockchain technology itself as well as blockchain-enabled applications. Most existing surveys limit the scopes on several particular issues of blockchain or applications, which are hard to depict the general picture of current giant blockchain ecosystem. In this paper, we investigate recent advances of both blockchain technology and its most active research topics in real-world applications. We first review the recent developments of consensus and storage mechanisms and communication schema in general blockchain systems. Then extensive literature review is conducted on blockchain-enabled Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing, federated learning, and several emerging applications including healthcare, COVID-19 pandemic, online social network, and supply chain, where detailed specific research topics are discussed in each. Finally, we discuss the future directions, challenges, and opportunities in both academia and industry.