A Study on Blockchain Technology: Its Applications & Future Trends

Now a days, Blockchain technology is popular and it provides a wide range of applications due to its special features like immutability, persistency [1]. In this technology, all the records are maintained in an ordered set which once added become immutable. By knowing the benefits of blockchain technology, industries are spending a lot to adopt this technology which makes their architecture decentralized along with the benefits of reducing the transaction cost with security benefits. The preliminary area that demonstrates the importance of blockchain was crypto-currency and this area keeps on growing with the invention of more crypto-currencies [2]. Apart from this, blockchain illustrates its importance in other areas with the implementation of Smart Contracts (SC's). SC is a digitally signed agreement between the non-trusted parties without any external intervention [3]. Researchers and academicians are continuously carrying out research on identifying more areas of blockchain applicability but still, there is a lack of systematic review on this technology. This paper aims to present a systematic review of the state of art blockchain technology, its suitability areas, and future scope. This paper provides an overview of blockchain architecture in Section 2, followed by a discussion on its applications in Section 3. Section 4 covers hashgraph, while Section 5 examines the directed acyclic graph. The hybrid model is explored in Section 6, and the applications of blockchain are discussed in Section 7. Section 8 focuses on the adoption of blockchain in emerging domains such as federated learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and privacy-preserving computation, along with its potential future scope. Finally, the conclusions are presented in Section 9.