Blockchain-Based Digital Services

Blockchain is successfully applied to digital currency for serving as a public ledger for transactions by means of a mechanism that ensures distributed consensus among independent participants operating in an untrusted peer-to-peer network. The potential implications of blockchain and, more in general, of distributed ledger technologies (DLT) go far beyond the financial sector: Indeed, it is widely recognized that they have a great potential to create new foundations for socioeconomic systems by efficiently establishing trust among people and machines, reducing cost, and increasing utilization of resources. Among the various novel application scenarios that are built upon distributed consensus, decentralized applications (DApps) have emerged as a new model for building massively scalable services and have been popularized by some blockchain implementations such as Ethereum, where DApps are often referred to as smart contracts.

Blockchain can bring huge advantages in novel distributed service scenarios, for which it may play the role of the enabling technology that guarantees a tamper-proof execution of contractual obligations among the parties involved in the services. However, classical public blockchains have several technical barriers that make them unsuitable for mass adoption in service scenarios with demanding requirements such as: controlled membership and access, identity management, performance at scale, resilience, security and confidentiality, consensus mechanisms involving different roles, supportability overcoming immutability of smart contracts, integration with enterprise information systems, and governance.

This Special Issue calls for original research and review articles on all novel aspects of the blockchain technology that enable the design and implementation of emerging distributed services and applications. The submissions, from 12 up to 25 pages, may also be manuscripts that extend prior published work, provided they contain at least 40% new material, and that the significant new contributions are clearly identified in the introduction.

Prof. Dr. Domenico Sacca
Dr. Antonino Rullo
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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