Advances in Blockchain Challenges and Opportunities

Dear Colleagues,

The aim of this Special Issue on “Advances in Blockchain Challenges and Opportunities” is to cover the latest advancements in Blockchain technologies regarding addressing challenges and discovering opportunities. Blockchain technologies have been developed very fast, especially in the last couple of years. Blockchain technologies have brought opportunities to and have renovated various fields, such as Smart Grid energy system, real estate, consumer electronics, art, gaming, charity, education, etc. NFTs, DeFi, Web 3.0 and Metaverse have been taking headlines and attracting various interests in the past three years. Decentralization, the native feature of Blockchain technologies, makes it much easier for every individual to achieve dreams and make profits without having to join an organization or relying on a third party. Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million via Sotheby's in 2021. Many digital artists are selling their NFTs via NFT platforms to live a better life. However, Blockchain technologies are facing tremendous challenges recently. In 2022, Bitcoin price crashed about 80% from its all time high. Many altcoins’ values went to zero. A total of over 100 DeFi projects have been either scammed or hacked in only three years. FTX, the second largest Crypto exchange in the world valued at $32 billion filed bankruptcy in November 2022. Many investors have lost their life-time savings into cryptocurrencies.

We invite contributions from academics, policymakers and practitioners on the following topics (but is not limited to):

• Blockchain-based IoT sensor infrastructures
• Blockchain-based senor networks and digital twins
• Use of Blockchain in digital health sensor networks
• Energy efficiency and cryptocurrency mining
• Decentralized finance (DeFi), ecosystem and security
• Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), Decentralized Autonomous Corporation (DAC), governance and regulation
• Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Metaverse and platforms
• Privacy preservation, zero-knowledge proof, FPGA acceleration, secure multi-party computation
• On-chain analysis, de-anonymization, dark deep web
• GameFi, Play2Earn, consensus and incentive systems
• Blockchain-based Web 3.0 applications

Dr. Wenlin Han
Dr. Barbara Guidi
Dr. Gora Datta
Prof. Dr. Ahmed Banafa
Guest Editors

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