A Survey of Decentralized Storage and Decentralized Database in Blockchain-Based Proposed Systems: Potentials and Limitations.

Blockchain technology has geared towards many fields and utilities. Blockchain, as an efficient data storage, is one of the use cases that aims to provide a trustable and immutable data storage. This study provides a systematic review and evaluation of peer-reviewed publications aimed at pointing out the potential of blockchain as a data storage and/or queryable distributed database. The study presented herein shows that the undertaking of using blockchain technology as a storage or database technology is increasing exponentially due to the decentralization, immutability, and security that blockchain offers. The methodology used to conduct this study encompassed searching in several scientific databases and selecting related publications indexed in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) ranking. The outcomes of the selected studies have been extracted, synthesized, and presented. As a conclusion of this analysis, we have detected that blockchain suffers from many challenging limitations, such as the absence of a well-defined data indexing structure, data retrieval methods and queries, significant response times, and storage capacity and performance limitations.