The governance technology for blockchain systems: a survey

Abstract

After the Ethereum DAO attack in 2016, which resulted in significant economic losses, blockchain governance has become a prominent research area. However, there is a lack of comprehensive and systematic literature review on blockchain governance. To deeply understand the process of blockchain governance and provide guidance for the future design of the blockchain governance model, we provide an in-depth review of blockchain governance. In this paper, first we introduce the consensus algorithms currently used in blockchain and relate them to governance theory. Second, we present the main content of off-chain governance and investigate two well-known off-chain governance projects. Third, we investigate four common on-chain governance voting techniques, then summarize the seven attributes that the on-chain governance voting process should meet, and finally analyze four well-known on-chain governance blockchain projects based on the previous research. We hope this survey will provide an in-depth insight into the potential development direction of blockchain governance and device future research agenda.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

blockchain governance / off-chain governance / on-chain governance / voting

Guocheng Zhu received the Bachelor degree in 2019 from the School of Computer Science, Xidian University, China. He is currently working toward a Master degree at the Key Laboratory of Aerospace Information Security and Trusted Computing (Ministry of Education), School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, China. His research interests mainly include applied cryptography and blockchain technology

Debiao He received the PhD degree in applied mathematics from the School of Mathematics and Statistics, Wuhan University, China in 2009. He is currently a Professor of the School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, China. He has authored or coauthored more than 100 research papers in refereed international journals and conferences, such as IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, and Usenix Security Symposium. His main research interests include cryptography and information security, in particular, cryptographic protocols. He is in the Editorial Board of several international journals, such as ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research & Practice, Frontiers of Computer Science, and IEEE Transactions on Computers

Haoyang An received his BS degree in information security from Hefei University of Technology, China in 2019 and received his MS degree in computer science (dual degree) from Central China Normal University, China and University of Wollongong, Australia in 2021. He is currently a PhD candidate at Wuhan University, China. His research interests include cryptography and blockchain

Min Luo received his PhD degree in computer science from Wuhan University, China in 2003. He is currently a Professor at the School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, China. He has published papers in international conferences/journals, such as S&P, ACM TRETS, IEEE SYST J, and IEEE TVT. His research interests mainly include applied cryptography and blockchain technology

Cong Peng received his PhD degree in applied mathematics from the School of Mathematics and Statistics, Wuhan University, China in 2021. He is currently an Associate Professor of the School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, China. His research interests mainly include applied cryptography and data security

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Acknowledgements

The work was supported by the Shandong Provincial Key Research and Development Program (No. 2021CXGC010107), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 62172307, U21A20466, 62272350), the New 20 Project of Higher Education of Jinan (No. 202228017), the Special Project on Science and Technology Program of Hubei Provience (Nos. 2020AEA013, 2021BAA025) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 2042023KF0203).

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests or financial conflicts to disclose.

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