A Survey on the Application of SGX in Blockchain Area

As an emerging technology, blockchain is widely used in encrypted digital currencies and has an important impact in various fields such as finance, cloud storage, and Internet of things (IoT), etc. However, it faces various challenges in the process of its development and application: waste of resources, limited privacy protection, poor scalability, etc. Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), as a new trusted computing technology, brings solutions to the above challenges in the blockchain field. Based on the hierarchical structure of the blockchain, we are the first to systematically discuss the application status of SGX in the blockchian, including consensus layer, the ledger topology layer, the contract layer, and the application layer. Meanwhile, we summarize the advantages and challenges of SGX in the field of the blockchain, and look forward to the future development direction and the possible research topics.