Blockchains – related technologies – and the world of cryptocurrencies represent a vibrant rapidly changing area in industry and, increasingly, in academia. The underlying, decentralized structure of these technologies constitutes one of their core concepts. Accordingly, all nodes lay at the same level, so that there is no place for privileged actors as, for instance, trusted payment verifiers like in the traditional financial counterparts for these systems.
These technologies are disruptive because they allow for the emergence of trust among a priori untrusted parties. Blockchain has reshaped the way of thinking decentralized systems, and has attracted researchers from the most varied areas, starting to establish a strongly interdisciplinary community which attempts to tackle the multiple open problems triggered by this technology. As result, the aim of this special issue is to collect a series of innovative works in this emergent and growing field, at the edge of natural and social sciences and engineering, to provide a landscape of research progresses and application potentials in related areas.
Guest editors
Bruno Gonçalves, Data For Science, Inc., bgoncalves@gmail.com
Marco Alberto Javarone, University College London, UK, marcojavarone@gmail.com
Claudio J. Tessone, University of Zurich, Switzerland, claudio.tessone@business.uzh.ch