Towards trustworthy blockchain systems in the era of “Internet of value”: development, challenges, and future trends

SCIENCE CHINA Information Sciences . POSITION PAPER . May 2022, Vol. 65 153101:1–153101:11 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-020-3183-0 Towards trustworthy blockchain systems in the era of “Internet of value”: development, challenges, and future trends Hai JIN & Jiang XIAO* National Engineering Research Center for Big Data Technology and System, Services Computing Technology and System Lab, Cluster and Grid Computing Lab, School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China Received 5 November 2020/Revised 20 December 2020/Accepted 3 February 2021/Published online 18 October 2021 Abstract Since the advent of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, blockchain, as their underlying technologies, has drawn a massive amount of attention from both academia and the industry. This ever-evolving technology inherits the “genes” of distributed systems, offering significant advantages of immutability, transparency, auditability, and tamper-resistance. These benefits help blockchain re-establish public confidence, and hold the significant promise of reliable information sharing and value transfer. Therefore, blockchain has become the foundation of crucial strategic deployments in countries across the world, and the fundamental basis for building the next generation Web 3.0 — “Internet of value”. In this article, we will start with unraveling the essential ingredients of blockchain technology, and showing the characteristics of each of these ingredients in the context of distributed systems. We will then present the core technical challenges that need to be addressed prior to unleashing its full potential, including its performance, scalability, and cross-chain interoperability. Finally, we will introduce the recent developments of blockchain systems, and discuss the future trends of the blockchain ecosystem. Keywords blockchain, distributed systems, internet of value, challenges, development Citation Jin H, Xiao J. Towards trustworthy blockchain systems in the era of “Internet of value”: development, challenges, and future trends. Sci China Inf Sci, 2022, 65(5): 153101, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-020-3183-0 1 Introduction Today blockchain technology is widely acknowledged as the fundamental basis of building the “Internet of value” in the new era of Web 3.0. In a world where data increases exponentially over easily accessible mediums, to make information reliable and facilitate trustworthy value transferring services is of paramount importance. It leads to a rapid shift from exchanging information in the previous Web 2.0 era — the “Internet of information”. The core value propositions associated with blockchain lie in its ability to support building tamper-resistant information chains, facilitating data sharing, and empowering value exchange. This technologically fosters a trustworthy environment where you cannot do evil, achieves a high degree of credibility among trustless participating peers, and tremendously reduces the cost of trust. In the road map of the evolving development of distributed systems, Blockchain, an innovative paradigm with trusted ingredients, has drawn a massive amount of attention from both industry and the research community. Blockchain made its first appearance as the underlying technology of Bitcoin as a form of cryptocurrency1) during the 2008 financial crisis. For Bitcoin, it consists of a large number of computers worldwide to validate and record all financial transactions in a consensually shared ledger. Thus, it can allow transactions to have a public “witness” since transactions are added to an immutable distributed ledger with authenticity (i.e., immune to counterfeiting). Unlike past distributed systems where the “trust” established between transacting parties depends on a large number of intermediaries that authenticate the information, which is extremely vulnerable to a single point of failure, e.g., cyber-attacks * Corresponding author (email: ) 1) Bitcoin whitepaper. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf/. c Science China Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2021 info.scichina.com link.springer.com Jin H, et al. Sci China Inf Sci May 2022 Vol. 65 153101:2 or third-party interventions. Since its inception, blockchain technology is expected to play a pivotal role in coping with the erosion of public trust, allowing people to trust each other and transact in a peer-topeer (P2P) fashion, making the need for third parties such as central banks obsolete. The cover story of an October 2015 issue of the Economist magazine defined the blockchain as “the trust machine” [1]. As such, it transforms the conventional way of establishing trust with a centralized infrastructure through consensus and complex computer code. By itself, blockchain is a new generation of distributed systems by a conjunction of essential ingredients, including consensus protocols, distributed storage, P2P networks, cryptography, and smart contracts. Through recording transactions among parties that are mutually distrusted, it encompasses the beneficial features of decentralization, immutability, tamper-resistance, traceability, and collaborative maintenance. The distributed nodes in a blockchain system form a P2P network to complete transactions with each other. Each node in the blockchain is authenticated through cryptographic algorithms and owns an anonymous digital identity, which simultaneously enables both user privacy and system security. A consensus protocol determines the rules by which the blockchain data is generated and updated. The openness of blockchain enables its participants to freely access and interact with each other with little friction, ensuring immediate, across-the-board transparency. It provides an innovative technical means to allow new distributed models of value transfer and new forms of P2P human collaborations. Being the foundation of crucial strategic deployments in countries across the world, blockchain technology has brought immense impacts on society and the global economy. The past decade has shown its great promises for delivering automaticity and efficiency for the digital currency — “Blockchain 1.0”. Evolving far beyond the underpinnings of Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency, Ethereum opens up a new era of “Blockchain 2.0” in the form of irreversible real-life agreements enabled by programmable smart contracts. The application of blockchain technology is undergoing a transformation from a single field to a diversified area: from the earliest finance related to the digital currency, expanding to a diverse set of industry sectors, including faster and leaner global trade finance, cross-border commitment, transportation and logistics, superior transparency and traceability in the manufacturing supply chain, increased automation in public healthcare, and e-government services. Despite a growing number of blockchain systems and various industry-level or enterprise-leve (...truncated)