A Survey on the Scalability of Blockchain Systems

In the past decade, crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin and Litecoin have developed rapidly. Blockchain as the underlying technology of these digital crypto-currencies has attracted great attention from academia and industry. Blockchain has many good features, such as trust-free, transparency, anonymity, democracy, automation, decentralization and security. Despite these promising features, scalability is still a key barrier when the blockchain technology is widely used in real business environments. In this article, we focus on the scalability issue, and provide a brief survey of recent studies on scalable blockchain systems. We first discuss the scalability issue from the perspectives of throughput, storage and networking. Then, existing enabling technologies for scalable blockchain systems are presented. We also discuss some research challenges and future research directions for scalable blockchain systems.