Blockchain Technology in the Chemical Industry.

This article presents a review of the application of blockchain and blockchain-based smart contracts in the chemical and related industries. We introduce the basic concepts of blockchain and smart contracts and explain how some of their features are enabled. We review several typical or novel applications of blockchain and smart contract technologies and their enabling concepts and underlying technologies. We classify the selected literature into five categories and discuss their motivations and technical designs. We recognize that the trend of decentralization creates a need to use blockchain and smart contracts to implement trust and distributed control mechanisms. We also speculate on future applications of blockchain and smart contracts. We believe that, in the future, blockchains with different consensus mechanisms will be studied and applied to achieve more efficient and practical decentralized systems. Also, blockchain-based smart contracts will be more widely applied to enhance autonomous distributed controls in decentralized systems.