Guest Editorial: Blockchain and decentralised solutions for social good

Abstract

Social good can be defined as actions or tools that provide some sort of positive impact on people and society. In recent years, the scientific community has seen an increase in research relating to social good. In terms of technology, Blockchain, distributed ledger technologies and decentralised technologies in general such as the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), have had a positive impact towards improving social good, such as by introducing transparency, trust and security in supply chains, data sharing and other social good applications.

The aim of this Special Issue is to address the following question: ‘How does Blockchain impact the social good, and how can decentralisation improve ICT industries?’ In particular, blockchain technology can be a driver of innovation and have positive effects on our society, industry, legal systems and economic/financial systems by introducing trust among untrusted parties. Additionally, decentralised technologies can help democratise how services are delivered, therefore increasing the interoperability, transparency and security of Internet services. Lastly, the impact, future and limitations of all these technologies have different effects across specific domains, like industry, economy, society, law, etc.

A wide variety of research is being conducted to explore and discover possible challenges and opportunities to exploit blockchain and decentralised solutions for social good. This Special Issue is focused on research ideas, articles and experimental studies related to ‘Blockchain and Decentralized Solutions for Social Good’ that will advance knowledge concerning the application of the aforementioned technologies in the wide spectrum of social good.

This Special Issue is composed of four peer-reviewed papers of excellent quality.

Zichichi et al. propose a system for complex queries over Distributed Hash Tables or Distributed File Systems. The system makes use of a hypercube peer-to-peer overlay which manages the queries to be done on data. Each layer of the hypercube corresponds to specific keywords that are associated with the underlying data. Additionally, the paper proposes to introduce a governance layer to improve the decentralisation and scalability of the system. In particular, the governance layer is built using a Decentralised Autonomous Organization that manages rewards and organizational decisions by leveraging smart contracts. Lastly, the authors show the application of the system to geodata storing and retrieval. Thanks to a thorough evaluation, the authors show the benefit in terms of the performance of the hypercube overlay network, the overall time required to perform complex queries and the cost of the smart contracts.

Bapatla et al. propose PharmaChain, a supply chain network specifically designed to prevent the circulation of counterfeit pharmaceuticals. Pharmachain is divided into five logical components: IoT sensors to be installed on transport trucks, an Ethereum-like blockchain to keep track of important data, cloud storage for secondary data, a Chainlink component to monitor real-time data and store it on the blockchain network or cloud storage and a web application that acts as a medium between the users and the data stored. The authors also describe the whole supply chain system and provide high-level implementation and technical details of the smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. Lastly, the authors thoroughly evaluate the proposed supply chain system, validating its functioning, and showing the blockchain-related costs in terms of cryptocurrency and time required to complete the execution of the various operations.

Jia et al. devise a blockchain-based, decentralised and cross-organizational big data sharing system. The blockchain is employed so that the system is tamper-proof, anonymous, traceable and trustful. Additionally, data probes are used as bridges to connect multiple sources of heterogeneous data, automatic data discovery and data sharing. The system contains two important processes. The first one is the identity identification process, in which a data provider, a data requester and a data probe all manage to obtain a verifiable identity in a decentralised way. A pointer to the file containing the whole identity is stored on the blockchain, so it is publicly available, and does not require much storage. Afterwards, a data provider can issue authorisations to requesters, with which they can access the data through the probe. Based on a real implementation, the analyses show that the system proposed has increased accuracy and reduced cost by more than half.

Elbaghdadi et al. propose an approach to share images using a combination of blockchain, InterPlanetary File System Protocol and visual cryptography. The proposed architecture aims to solve the problem of sharing images under privacy constraints in distributed systems. To meet the privacy constraints, images are encrypted and decrypted using the RGB (Red, Green and Blue) colour decomposition principle. The encrypted images are stored on IPFS to ensure high availability, and the blockchain is employed to store IPFS content identifiers. This pattern ensures data privacy and immutability in a distributed fashion. The simulation of the proposed architecture shows high effectiveness results of the proposed solution in terms of security while maintaining lossless encryption.

All of the papers selected for this Special Issue show the importance of applying blockchain, and decentralised solutions in general, for social good. Thanks to the countless application scenarios, and the constant need to democratise and decentralise Internet services, blockchain and decentralised technologies will remain a source of inspiration for new techniques in the years to come.