Advances in Blockchain Architecture and Consensus

Dear Colleagues,

Blockchain technology has emerged to provide solutions to trust and privacy challenges, which allows transactions take place in a decentralized manner. Blockchain has evolved to develop decentralized applications beyond financial transactions in different fields, such as legal, healthcare, supply chain, etc. At the core of blockchain technology, there is a decentralized consensus protocol that enables a group of agents to reach an agreement about a global state by accepting data transmitted across an open byzantine peer-to-peer network. Consequently, various blockchain architectures and consensus protocols proliferated.

However, with the rise of collaborative ecosystems for better customer services and the enormous amount of energy consumed by the underlying blockchain technology, there are still many challenges of blockchain technology such as architecture and consensus, and it becomes more difficult to foresee the uses of blockchain. We believe that the architecture and contracts of the blockchain should be further studied to cope with the more complex application environment of blockchain in the future.

This Special Issue of the Algorithms, entitled “Advances in Blockchain Architecture and Consensus”, aims at exchanging the latest innovations and developments in the architecture and consensus of blockchain. As such, we invite you to participate in this Special Issue with contributions related (but not limited) to the following topics:

• Blockchain architectures;
• Blockchain performance and scalability
• Blockchain consensus mechanisms;
• Blockchain standardization;
• Blockchain interoperability
• Blockchain data migration and management, including integration with other distributed decentralized database systems;
• Decentralized artificial intelligence;
• Smart contracts development and verification
• Trust, reputation, and distributed consensus;
• Security and privacy mechanisms for blockchain-based DApps

Prof. Dr. Shiping Chen
Guest Editor

Dr. Kaimeng Ding
Prof. Dr. Yanmei Zhang
Assistant Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Algorithms is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.