Blockchain is successfully applied to digital currency for serving as a public ledger for transactions by means of a mechanism that ensures distributed consensus among independent participants operating in an untrusted peer-to-peer network. The potential implications of blockchain and, more in general, of distributed ledger technologies (DLT) go far beyond the financial sector: Indeed, it is widely recognized that they have a great potential to create new foundations for socioeconomic systems by efficiently establishing trust among people and machines, reducing cost, and increasing utilization of resources. Among the various novel application scenarios that are built upon distributed consensus, decentralized applications (DApps) have emerged as a new model for building massively scalable services and have been popularized by some blockchain implementations such as Ethereum, where DApps are often referred to as smart contracts.

Blockchain can bring huge advantages in novel distributed service scenarios, for which it may play the role of the enabling technology that guarantees a tamper-proof execution of contractual obligations among the parties involved in the services. However, classical public blockchains have several technical barriers that make them unsuitable for mass adoption in service scenarios with demanding requirements such as: controlled membership and access, identity management, performance at scale, resilience, security and confidentiality, consensus mechanisms involving different roles, supportability overcoming immutability of smart contracts, integration with enterprise information systems, and governance.

This Special Issue calls for original research and review articles on all novel aspects of the blockchain technology that enable the design and implementation of emerging distributed services and applications. The submissions, from 12 up to 25 pages, may also be manuscripts that extend prior published work, provided they contain at least 40% new material, and that the significant new contributions are clearly identified in the introduction.

Prof. Dr. Domenico Sacca
Dr. Antonino Rullo
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Information is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Collaboration mechanism in blockchain
• Authentication and authorization in permissioned blockchains
• Security, privacy, and trust on blockchains
• Performance and scalability for blockchains
• Reliability analysis on blockchain-based services
• Oracles for blockchain
• Identity management in blockchain
• Service accountability
• Requirement engineering for blockchain-based services
• Engineering methodology for DApps
• Life cycle of smart contracts
• Security issues on DApps and smart contracts
• Interoperability between blockchains and enterprise information systems
• Blockchain-based services for society, business, industry, agriculture, logistics, etc.
• Blockchain analytics
• Blockchain governance
• Blockchain as a service
• Blockchain based access control
• Blockchain for the Internet of Things
• Open issues and trends in Blockchains and distributed consensus