On Jan.11, 2019, SV Insight held its third Blockchain Connect Conference in San Francisco, the theme of this event was ‘Academic’. In this global Blockchain conference, Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, David Chaum, cryptographer & founder of DigCash, Dawn Song, Co-founder of Oasis Labs & Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley, etc. shared their insights about the overall development of blockchain in 2018, as well as challenges and opportunities in 2019. This event also attracted executives and investors from top IT and financial companies including Intel, Oracle, Vmware, Tencent, Deloitte, Ant Financial, Lightspeed, etc.

SVInsight jointly released the Report of 2018 Global Blockchain Academic Research and Trends (abbreviated as report following) with Ontology Research Institute, U Network and Chongdong.

Based on criteria such as numbers of citations and journal influence factors, SV Insight research selected a group of top global academic papers from SCIE database. The academic teams behind these papers are from leading global research institutions including University of Cambridge, Cornell University, The University of Hong Kong, etc.

The report consists of two parts, the latest development of blockchain infrastructure development in 2018, and the application of blockchain in industries.

Screenshot of “2018 Global Blockchain Academic Research and Trends”

With regard to the development of blockchain infrastructure in 2018, the report presented three keywords: Scalability, Storage and Privacy & Security. The report also shared insights on the challenges and future research directions of the three key areas.

For example, for Scalability, Sharding and Layer 2 technology have been the two most popular research topics.

In 2018, Sharding and Layer 2 technology were officially implemented. Test net and the initial stage of POC have been launched.

But challenges still exist. For example, provisioning sharding for smart contract is the most difficult part in blockchain sharding technology. How to offload smart contracts execution from the main chain onto Layer 2 is the challenge for state channel.

In regard to the application of blockchain in industries, SV Insight research team focused on analyzing the academic papers and exploring the insights and solutions proposed by global academic research teams.

SV Insight research team found that 48% of these papers are discussing the application of blockchain in industries. And five industries are most discussed. They’re Healthcare, IoT, Security, Energy and Finance.

Furthermore, the report looked into details of each of the industries, to see

How blockchain can be applied to address the issues in the industries What solutions the academic researchers have proposed Whether there are still challenges still moving forward.

Finally, the report shared an assessment framework to help industrial players make decisions on whether blockchain was suitable to apply in certain business scenarios.

Following are the related screenshots:

Screenshot of “2018 Global Blockchain Academic Research and Trends”

Screenshot of “2018 Global Blockchain Academic Research and Trends”