Blockchain Research Trends

This paper examines roughly 128,000 academic publications on blockchain and cryptocurrency research published between 2013 and mid-2026, drawn from the OpenAlex database. It looks at how many papers appear each year, what topics they tend to cover, how often they get cited, which countries produce them, how many are freely available, etc. Annual output appears to have grown about 117x over the period, zero-knowledge proof and DeFi research seem to have grown fastest, NFT research likely peaked around 2023, and China and India together account for roughly a quarter of all output.