A Survey of Blockchain Technology: Architecture, Applied Domains, Platforms, and Security Threats

Abstract

Blockchain technology is at the peak of hype and contemporary research area across the world. It is a distributed ledger that keeps records of transactions with verifiable and immutable structures and continuously grows with the new block of transactions. Blockchain provides better transparency, enhanced security and privacy, and true traceability over the traditional approaches. Due to its advanced and secure features, it is being used in various fields such as trade finance, digital transactions, the Internet of Things (IoT), the healthcare industry, and energy sector. Blockchain technology has a great impact in all its applied fields with the prominent features of privacy and reliability of data and transactions. This survey intends to present the architecture of blockchain, its potential applications, and practices in different domains other than cryptocurrency along with the platform of blockchain. This paper will explore some potential benefits of blockchain and some future directions and open challenges that are expected to come in future research.