Blockchain has attracted significant attention in recent years due to its potential to revolutionize various industries by providing trustlessness. To comprehensively examine blockchain systems, this article presents both a macro-level overview on the most popular blockchain systems, and a micro-level analysis on a general blockchain framework and its crucial components. The macro-level exploration provides a big picture on the endeavors made by blockchain professionals over the years to enhance the blockchain performance while the micro-level investigation details the blockchain building blocks for deep technology comprehension. More specifically, this article introduces a general modular blockchain analytic framework that decomposes a blockchain system into interacting modules and then examines the major modules to cover the essential blockchain components of network, consensus, and distributed ledger at the micro-level. The framework as well as the modular analysis jointly build a foundation for designing scalable, flexible, and application-adaptive blockchains that can meet diverse requirements. Additionally, this article explores popular technologies that can be integrated with blockchain to expand functionality and highlights major challenges. Such a study provides critical insights to overcome the obstacles in designing novel blockchain systems and facilitates the further development of blockchain as a digital infrastructure to service new applications.

近年来，区块链因其提供去信任性而彻底改变各个行业的潜力而引起了广泛关注。为了全面审视区块链系统，本文既对最流行的区块链系统进行了宏观层面的概述，又对通用区块链框架及其关键组件进行了微观层面的分析。宏观层面的探索提供了区块链专业人士多年来为提高区块链性能所做的努力的大局观，而微观层面的调查则详细介绍了区块链的构建模块，以加深对技术的理解。更具体地说，本文介绍了一种通用的模块化区块链分析框架，该框架将区块链系统分解为交互模块，然后检查主要模块以涵盖微观层面的网络、共识和分布式账本等基本区块链组件。该框架和模块化分析共同为设计可满足不同需求的可扩展、灵活和应用程序自适应的区块链奠定了基础。此外，本文探讨了可以与区块链集成以扩展功能的流行技术，并强调了主要挑战。此类研究为克服设计新型区块链系统的障碍提供了重要的见解，并促进区块链作为服务新应用程序的数字基础设施的进一步发展。