Blockchains

Pingcheng Ruan is a Ph.D. graduate of the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore, under the guidance of Professor Beng Chin Ooi. He is the winner of the Best Paper Award at VLDB 2019 and the Research Highlight Award at ACM SIGMOD 2020. His doctoral thesis earned an Honorable Mention for the ACM SIGMOD 2022 Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award. His research interest focuses on blockchains, distributed systems, databases, and all other data processing platforms. In 2016, he graduated from the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Nanyang Technological University with a Bachelor's Degree with First Class Honors.

Tien Tuan Anh Dinh is an Assistant Professor in the Information System and Technology Design (ISTD) pillar at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. His research interests intersect with distributed systems, databases, and security. He earned a Ph.D. at the University of Birmingham, UK, with a focus on applying formal methods to verify security properties of P2P systems. He spent a few months, respectively, at Singtel as a research engineer and at Microsoft Research in the networking and systems group. He was a research fellow at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), working on cloud-based systems, and a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore (NUS), working on databases and security.

Dumitrel Loghin is a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore (NUS) also working in the Singapore Blockchain Innovation Programme (SBIP) and part of the Database Systems Research Group. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the NUS in 2017, his Master's degree in Advanced Computer Architectures from the Politehnica University of Bucharest in 2012, and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the same university in 2010. His research interests include parallel and distributed computing, blockchain and distributed database systems, advanced computer architectures, embedded systems, and general performance of computer systems.

Meihui Zhang is a professor at the School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), China. Before joining BIT, she was an Assistant Professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). She obtained her PhD from the National University of Singapore (NUS). Her main research interests include Big Data Management and Analytics, Large-scale Data Integration, Modern Database Systems, Blockchain Systems and AI. She is a winner of 2020 VLDB Early Career Research Contribution Award and 2019 CCF-IEEE CS Young Scientist Award. She is also a co-author of VLDB 2019 Best Paper, IEEE ICDE 2018 best paper runner up, and 2019 ACM SIGMOD Highlight Award paper. Meihui has served as Research Track Associate Editor of VLDB 2018-2020, VLDB 2023, SIGMOD 2021, SIGMOD 2023, ICDE 2018 and ICDE 2022-2023. She is serving as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) and Survey Track Editor of Distributed and Parallel Databases. She is a trustee of VLDB endowment.

Chapter 1 - Origin and Evolution.- Chapter 2 - Blockchains and Distributed Databases.- Chapter 3 - Blockchain State-of-the-art.- Chapter 4 - Blockchain Applications.