A Comprehensive Survey of Blockchain: From Theory to IoT Applications and Beyond

As an innovated and revolutionized technology, blockchain has been applied in many fields, such as cryptocurrency, food traceability, identity management, or even market prediction. To discover its great potential, both industry and academia have paid great attention to it and numerous researches have been conducted. Based on the literature and industry whitepapers, in this survey, we unroll and structure the blockchain related discoveries and scientific results in many aspects. Particularly, we classify blockchain technologies into four layers and carry out a comprehensive study on the consensus strategies, the network, and the applications of blockchain. Different blockchain applications are put into the corresponding categories based on the fields, especially in Internet of Things (IoT). When introducing each layer, we not only organize and summarize the related works, but also discuss the fundamental issues and future research directions. We hope this survey could shed some light on the research of blockchain and serve as a guide for further studies.