Research challenges and opportunities in blockchain and cryptocurrencies

The blockchain is the underlying technology of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, and it has created much excitement in the technology and research communities. A blockchain is a distributed ledger collectively maintained by a peer-to-peer network of participants who in Bitcoin are known as miners. This key innovation enables cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin to operate in a decentralized manner with no intermediaries such as financial institutions. But the blockchain can be used to record things other than cryptocurrency transactions. While many of the concepts of Bitcoin build on what have been around since the 1980s and 1990s, the designer(s) of it have made important assumptions that make it work along with the use of an incentive protocol, leading to a major breakthrough from traditional academic thinking. In this paper, we present the state-of-the-art of blockchain and cryptocurrencies along with research challenges and opportunities that would be of interest to researchers getting into this exciting field.