A Data-Driven Survey of Blockchain Technology: Architecture, Consensus Mechanisms, Cross-Domain Applications, and Decentralization Metrics
Main article
Abstract
Blockchain technology has evolved from a single-purpose payment ledger into a general-purpose distributed-systems infrastructure that now underpins decentralized finance, supply chain monitoring, healthcare data exchange, energy markets, education credentialing, and Internet of Things (IoT) coordination. Despite this momentum, applied researchers face a fragmented picture: published surveys frequently bundle architectural primitives, consensus mechanisms, and application case studies without providing a structured, quantitative view of how the technology is actually used across domains, or of how decentralized real platforms are when assessed with explicit metrics. This article addresses that gap. It synthesizes the architectural foundations of blockchain systems, classifies the principal consensus mechanisms into proof-based and voting-based families, surveys eight application domains with concrete deployment examples, and analyses the distribution of recent research output across these domains. We also evaluate decentralization quantitatively using the Nakamoto coefficient across nine major platforms, highlighting that headline market capitalization is a poor predictor of effective decentralization. The discussion translates these results into design guidance: practitioners should select a consensus family on the basis of the trust assumptions of the target deployment, treat scalability and energy consumption as first-order constraints rather than tunables, and use decentralization metrics as part of the platform-selection workflow rather than as a marketing aftertho
