• Preprint 282

Technical Report 282, c4e-Preprint Series, Cambridge

Blockchain Technology in the Chemical Industry

Authors: Xiaochi Zhou and Markus Kraft*

Reference: Technical Report 282, c4e-Preprint Series, Cambridge, 2021

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Highlights
  • Detailed introduction to blockchain and smart contract implementation
  • Systematic review of works applying blockchain and smart contract technologies in the chemical industry
Abstract

Graphical abstract This paper presents a review of the application of blockchain and blockchain-based smart contracts in the chemical and related industries. We introduce the basic concepts of blockchain and smart contracts and explain how some of their features are enabled. We review a number of typical or novel publications on blockchain and smart contract technologies and their enabling concepts and underlying technologies. We classify the selected contributions into five categories and discuss their motivations and technical designs. We recognise that the trend of decentralisation creates a need for using blockchain and smart contracts to implement trust and distributed control mechanisms. We also speculate on future applications of blockchain and smart contracts. We believe that, in future, blockchains with different consensus will be studied and applied to achieve more efficient and practical decentralised systems. Also, blockchain-based smart contracts will be more widely applied to enhance autonomous distributed controls in decentralised systems.

Material from this preprint has been published in Annual Review of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

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