Blockchain technology holds transformative potential for Material Genome Engineering (MGE) by offering a decentralized, secure, and transparent framework for data sharing. Immutable ledgers provide tamper-proof provenance, ensuring trust in multi-institutional collaborations through precise tracking of data lifecycles. Smart contracts automate access control and enforce agreements upon consensus, enhancing efficiency and security while reflecting collective organizational decisions that require clear rules and aligned stakeholder interests. Unified protocols further enable conditional cross-platform interoperability, integrating heterogeneous data repositories and computational tools to support global-scale collaboration. Despite these advantages, challenges remain, including scalability limits, cross-system interoperability, computational and energy overheads, and institutional adoption barriers. To address these, this work investigates hybrid architectures that combine blockchain’s strengths in provenance and trust with centralized infrastructures optimized for high-throughput processing. This approach provides a pragmatic pathway to scalable, efficient, and secure solutions. Focusing on five critical stages-data integration, data trading and circulation, data-driven computation, governance, and security and privacy-we demonstrate how blockchain can underpin auditable and interoperable materials data ecosystems. The proposed framework aligns blockchain capabilities with the demands of modern materials research, enabling collaborative innovation and accelerating the discovery of next-generation materials.
- Ran Wang
- Fangwen Ye
- Cheng Xu
