Aims and scope:

In recent years, the blockchain technology is having an ever growing popularity, in particular for what concerns its application cryptocurrencies. As a matter of fact, Bitcoin is currently the most known application of the blockchain technology, and a number of alternative cryptocurrencies have been defined and are currently used, e.g., Litecoin or Monero. However, the application of blockchain is not limited to cryptocurrencies. The immutability of the transactions and the absence of trusted intermediaries make the blockchain technology suitable to be applied in many research and business scenarios, and a number of blockchains are currently available on the market. For instance, permissioned blockchains are meant to address those business scenarios where transactions needs to be private, and their processing must be executed within a predefined group of known participants. Moreover, some blockchains (such as Ethereum or Quorum) allow the execution of Smart Contracts, thus paving the way to a very large plethora of new interesting applications of the technology in several fields, such as: Internet of Things, Cyber Physical Systems, Edge Computing, Supply Chain Management, Social Networks, and many others.

The aim of this special issue is to gather latest research results concerning blockchain technology and its application on relevant scenarios, such as the ones previously listed. Researchers, experts, and scholars from both industry and academia are encouraged to present their recent achievements and research directions in this area.


Topics of interest:

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Blockchain Technologies
* Blockchain foundations
* Consensus algorithms
* Smart Contracts
- Blockchain security
* Attacks on blockchain based systems
-Blockchain Operation and Governance
* Scalability of blockchain based systems
* Governance Models and Experiences
* Performance of blockchain based systems
* Interoperability of Blockchains
* Blockchain Standardisation
- Blockchain Analysis
* Transactions analysis
* Smart Contracts analysis
- Identity Management
* Privacy and anonymity on blockchain
- Lightweight protocols based on blockchain
- Energy consumption issues
- Blockchain Applications
* Cryptocurrencies
* Internet of Things
* Smart Property
* Cyber Physical Systems
* Cloud and Edge Computing
* Supply Chain Management
* Social Networking
* e-Health
* Industrie 4.0
* Media Production
* Education
* Government
* others

Guest Editors:

Paolo Mori, Institute of Informatics and Telematics, National Research Council of Italy, Pisa, Italy
Wolfgang Prinz, Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology, Germany
Laura Ricci, Computer Science Department, University of Pisa, Italy
Edgar Weippl, SBA Research, Wien, Austria