ABSTRACT
The fourth industrial revolution encompasses the latest technologies and communication networks in smart automation. One of the imposing innovations in Industry 4.0 is blockchain. This technology will play a significant part in the creation of factories in the 21st century. Owing to its features such as decentralization, trustworthy operations, low operational cost, and so on, blockchain can offer considerable enhancements to new applications. According to some forecasts, the blockchain market is set to grow further in the coming years. In our chapter, we will provide a guide for the scientific community looking for state-of-the-art blockchain algorithms and protocols. The goal is to provide a picture of research on blockchain protocols and algorithms to enable more consistent treatment. To this end, we investigate a wide range of blockchain algorithms and protocols’ papers met in literature to understand their properties in a comprehensive classification under different criteria in the form of a tree structure.
Our chapter brings blockchain algorithms and protocols to academia and industry actors and highlights the differences between them. In addition, it is proposed that these actors who wish to suggest blockchain protocols or algorithms in the future should take notice of these latter.
