Drawing the Boundaries Between Blockchain and Blockchain-Like Systems: A Comprehensive Survey on Distributed Ledger Technologies

Bitcoin’s success as a global cryptocurrency has paved the way for the emergence of blockchain, a revolutionary category of distributed systems. However, the growing popularity of blockchain has led to a significant divergence from its core principles in many systems labeled as “blockchain.” This divergence has introduced complexity into the blockchain ecosystem, exacerbated by a lack of comprehensive reviews on blockchain and its variants. Consequently, gaining a clear and updated understanding of the diverse spectrum of current blockchain and blockchain-like systems has become challenging. This situation underscores the necessity for an extensive literature review and the development of thematic taxonomies. This survey seeks to offer a comprehensive and current assessment of existing blockchains and their variations while delineating the boundaries between blockchain and blockchain-like systems. To achieve this objective, we propose a holistic reference model for conceptualizing and analyzing these systems. Our layer-wise framework envisions all distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) as composed of four principal layers: data, consensus, execution, and application (DCEA). In addition, we introduce a new taxonomy that enhances the classification of blockchain and blockchain-like systems, offering a more useful perspective than existing works. Furthermore, we conduct a state-of-the-art review from a layered perspective, employing 23 evaluative criteria predefined by our framework. We perform a qualitative and quantitative comparative analysis of 44 DLT solutions and 26 consensus mechanisms while discussing differences and boundaries between blockchain and blockchain-like systems. We emphasize the significant challenges and tradeoffs encountered by distributed ledger designers, decision-makers, and project managers during the design or adoption of a DLT solution. Finally, we outline crucial research challenges and directions in the field of DLTs.