Due to its inherit properties and ability to achieve a distributed consensus among untrusted parties, blockchain has been considered as one of the pillars in the next technological revolution. As such, blockchain has seen successful applications in several industrial sectors ranging from finance and the creation of crypto currencies (e.g., Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many others), as well as in healthcare, entertainment, smart cities, supply chain, energy trading, among others. However, despite the advantages provided by blockchain technologies, current blockchain designs still suffer from one key aspect, that is the secure design of blockchain for supporting distributed computing systems with high fault tolerance, such as in the presence of malicious nodes or when nodes are not available to achieve consensus. Recognising that many next generation applications can be distributed in their topology, and that distributed nodes possess more capabilities for local decision-making, one promising solution is to utilize distributed mechanisms/protocols and powerful artificial intelligent technologies for achieving joint decisions among the participants. Several consensus mechanisms have been proposed in order to deal with fault tolerance in distributed systems, such as Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) and Crash fault tolerance (CFT), however both BFT and CFT were designed to run in stable environments, with fixed consensus thresholds. 

As such, in order to better support novel distributed blockchain applications that have high fault tolerance, we calls for novel top quality research on the progress and exchange experience in blockchain research, including fundamental theories, basic models and algorithms, as well as different use-cases and applications. Besides, through sharing the understandings and research attempts for blockchain technique from different perspectives, this special section aims to inspire more researchers of both industry and academic communities to make efforts on this research direction, and together prompt its advancement in the field. 

The topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Theories of next-generation blockchain and distributed ledger technology;

• Distributed consensus and fault tolerance mechanisms;

• Security, privacy, and trust of blockchain and distributed ledger technology;

• Decentralization, scalability, and security trade-off schemes for next-generation blockchain and distributed ledger technology;

• Performance analysis and optimization for next-generation blockchain

  and distributed ledger technology;

• New Smart contract and chain code frameworks for next-generation blockchain and distributed ledger technology;

• Emerging Applications and services based on next-generation blockchain;

• Wireless blockchain systems for Future Internet of things (IoT)/social networking/crowdsourcing and crowdsensing/edge and cloud computing;

• Mobile edge computing for blockchain empowered network;

• The integration of AI, data analytics, and blockchain for next-generation communications and networks;

• New Protocols and algorithms for next-generation blockchain and distributed ledger technology.

Lei Zhang   

University of Glasgow, UK

Lei.Zhang#glasgow.ac.uk

Yue Gao 

University of Surrey, UK

yue.gao#surrey.ac.uk

Jiawen Kang 

Webank-NTU Joint Research Institute, Singapore    

kjwx886#163.com

Zehui Xiong  

Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore    

zehui_xiong#sutd.edu.sg

Paulo Valente Klaine 

University of Glasgow, UK                

Paulo.ValenteKlaine#glasgow.ac.uk

http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hepfcs

Select the manuscript type as "Next Generation Blockchain: Theories, Algorithms and Applications". 

The template will also be found at this site.