Submission Deadline: 20 September 2023 (closed) View: 72
Blockchain technique has been widely investigated for the last decade as the foundation of a decentralized information-sharing platform because of its promising application prospect. In spite of the success of the existing blockchain architectures such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Filecoin, Hyperledger Fabric, BCOS, BCS, etc., the current blockchain-based application scenarios are still very limited. With the restriction on the consensus efficiency, blockchain fails to adapt to the scenarios which require high-speed transaction (e.g. online markets) or a large amount of data storage (e.g. video services); with the restriction on the security protection, investors of blockchain-based economic system (e.g. DeFi) are taking the risk of asset loss, which scares off the existing (and potential) investors; with the restriction on the privacy protection, involving sensitive data in the blockchain-based applications turns out to be a big challenge.
On the objective of solving the bottleneck problems of the blockchain techniques, blockchain architectures need to provide better scalability, security and privacy protection schemes. For better transaction performance, current research directions include improving the consensus mechanism, sharding the blockchain network and transaction system, proposing transactions with batches (layer-2) or in parallel, and promoting the interoperability. For better data storage capability, researchers mainly focus on the on-chain and off-chain collaboration storage, and storage provability. For better security protection, researchers reinforce the theory foundation of cryptographic technology; monitor and detect the potential attacking threats in real-time; and conduct code audit and vulnerability mining on smart contracts. For better privacy protection, researchers involved homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proof, MPC, and federated learning techniques into the blockchain architecture.
This special issue aims at collecting original research to provide better understanding and problem solving capabilities on the current performance of blockchain architectures. We solicit the following topics, but not limited to
• Cryptography theory and application technology
• Scalable and provable consensus algorithm
• Blockchain-based decentralized storage mechanisms
• Rollup and cross-chain protocols
• Parallel transaction architecture for blockchain
• Blockchain performance evaluation and measurement techniques
• Privacy protection schemes for blockchain
• Blockchain transaction supervision, regulation technology
• Dapp ecosystem security supervision and governance schemes
• Reliable and decentralized Oracle techniques for blockchain
• Transaction auditing and tracking algorithms
• Smart contract vulnerability detection and response techniques
• Smart contract language and compiling techniques
• Blockchain-based credible information sharing systems
• Blockchain-based social governance systems