Abstract

New Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) are changing the way in which the world works. These technologies provide new tools to face the issues of contemporary society (poverty, migrations, sustainable development challenges, governance, etc.). Among them, blockchain emerge as a disruptive technology able to make things in a completely different and innovative way. They can provide solutions where before there were none. Recently, these technologies have become subject of intense research and development by industry and academia. In consequence, a large amount of interesting works is published in many areas, proposing solutions, services, frameworks and applications based on these technologies. The research focusing on the previous challenges are especially interesting in current society. However, the proposals arrive at higher speed than society can assimilate them, and sometimes they are not properly exploited. Thus, this paper provides a comprehensive overview of the blockchain technology to identify what are its key attributes that enable to successfully address the social challenges. The review has been conducted from three point of views: service-delivery, resource-management and city-administration, and has been focused on the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, in order to cover the full agenda of current social issues. The contributions of this work are an exhaustive compilation of the existing research on blockchain technology to tackle the social challenges from several angles, and the identification of the key features and the conditioning factors of the practical applicability of the technology.

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