Blockchain ecosystem - technological and management opportunities and challenges

Blockchain is increasingly deployed in a broad range of sectors, ranging from banking and finance to manufacturing to energy to transportation, and so on. While many technological and business related blockchain developments and challenges have been identified, many of these engineering and management challenges have not been addressed. The ongoing interest in this topic is also partly evidenced by the large number of submissions we received in this special issue. Of the 200 submissions, only 39 articles were eventually accepted after several rounds of rigorous reviews (i.e., acceptance rate of 19.5%). In this editorial, we report on the findings from the first 36 articles on a broad range of topics (e.g., supply chain, financial technology, Internet of Things, smart city, healthcare, security, privacy, and blockchain building blocks such as consensus algorithms). Hopefully, the findings reported in these 36 accepted articles will provide sustainable solutions for existing and future blockchain systems and platforms.