Welcome message from the Editors-in-Chief

Welcome to IET Blockchain. It is a great pleasure and privilege to serve as its Founding Editors-in-Chief. Together with IET Chief Executive Nigel Fine, we announced the launch of IET Blockchain in the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in July 2020. We look forward to making this journal the leading outlet for the Blockchain research community.

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published the whitepaper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” introducing a “peer-to-peer version of electronic cash” known as Bitcoin. Since then, blockchain technology that runs Bitcoin has developed into one of today's most exciting innovations with potential to impact every industry from financial, management, and healthcare, to manufacturing, information technology, and energy.

At its core, blockchain is a decentralized, immutable, public ledger that permanently records transactions between two parties without third-party authentication. This creates digital trust that opens the door to disruptive innovations in many areas including digital twin, artificial intelligence, data management, network science, and privacy-preserving. When researchers and public realized that blockchain could be used for more than cryptocurrency and has the great potential to enable innovative digital services, there was a surge of interest in how blockchain could impact other industries.

We expect IET Blockchain to become one of the premier venues to publish cutting-edge research and latest achievements to promote multidisciplinary, unbounded digital innovations of blockchain technology. Accordingly, we have invited a team of world-class researchers to serve on the editorial board, which comprises experts from internationally renowned universities and organizations such as Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Florida, Oxford University, Imperial College, Technische Universität Berlin, University of Helsinki, University of Oslo, University of New South Wales, Indian Institute of Technology, Tsinghua University, Peking University, Tongji University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), IBM, and several others.

The inaugural issue of the IET Blockchain journal covers a wide range of topics, as an evidence of the strong potential of Blockchain and its diverse applications. Research articles in this inaugural issue not only discuss about the core technologies of Blockchain, such as smart contracts, consensus algorithms, and online bootstrapping but also demonstrate the stellar performance of Blockchain in a number of applications, including unmanned aerial vehicles, railway signalling, and supply chain management.

We have been expanding our editorial board, and now have 60 editors from all over the world, covering the broad spectrum that the journal's scope represents. We would like to thank these editors for their guidance and hard work. We encourage potential Guest Editors to organize Special Issues. We also welcome concerns or suggestions to improve our journal.

Finally, we would like to thank the production team for IET Blockchain and of course the many peer-reviewers who make the journal possible. Last—but not least—we would like to thank you the authors and readers of IET Blockchain for your support in submitting to and referencing work in the journal. We look forward to serving you and the wider blockchain research community in 2021 and beyond.