Introduction to the Special Issue on “Blockchain Research and Applications for Innovative Networks and Services (BRAINS 2024)”

Abstract

Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) hold the potential to reshape any domain that depends on coordination among autonomous, mutually distrusting parties. Their reach extends well beyond finance and payments to telecommunication and energy networks, the brokering of distributed computing resources, the Internet of Things (from supply chains to V2X and Industry 4.0), and service platforms such as decentralized identity management. The BRAINS conference series is devoted to advances that make networks and services more secure and trustworthy while enabling new, genuinely distributed business models, and to the design challenges these systems raise. This special issue collects extended versions of selected papers from the 6th Conference on Blockchain Research and Applications for Innovative Networks and Services (BRAINS 2024), held in Berlin, Germany, from October 9 to 11, 2024. Following the tradition of the series, the authors of the selected contributions were invited to prepare substantially extended versions of their work for fast-track review in Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice. Each manuscript underwent further round(s) of rigorous peer review against the journal’s standards. The four resulting articles span a representative cross-section of the studies of distributed ledger technologies, from the scalability and storage limits of base-layer protocols to the tokenization of securities and the protection of sensitive citizen data.