The COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected almost all aspects of human life, various sectors of business, and regions of the world. The flow of human activities halted for several months, and are now being carefully redefined to align with guidelines and recommendations to avoid the spread of the novel coronavirus. In contrast to other pandemics the world has witnessed in the past, the technological advancements of the current era are a boon that can play a key role in safeguarding humanity. In this work, we begin by highlighting general challenges that have arisen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Next, to gauge the applicability of blockchain as a key enabling technology, we identify potential use cases to meet current needs. Further, for each use case, we present a high-level view of how blockchain can be leveraged and discuss the expected performance. Finally, we highlight the challenges that must be addressed to harness the full potential of blockchain technology and discuss plausible solutions.

Blockchain is one of the disruptive technical innovation in the recent computing paradigm. Many applications already notoriously hard and complex are fortunate to ameliorate the service with the blessings of blockchain and smart contracts. The decentralized and autonomous execution with in-built transparency of blockchain based smart contracts revolutionize most of the applications with optimum and effective functionality. The paper explores the significant applications which already benefited from the smart contracts. We also highlight the future potential of the blockchain based smart contracts in these applications perspective.

The world is going through a fundamental transformation with the emergence of the intelligent information era.The key domains linked with human life such as healthcare, transport, entertainment, and smart cities are expected to elevate the quality of service with high-end user experience. Therefore, the telecommunication infrastructure has to meet unprecedented service level requirements such as ultra high data rates and traffic volume for the prominent future applications such as Virtual Reality (VR), holographic communications, and massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC). There are significant challenges identifiable in the communication context to match the envisaged demand surge. The blockchain and distributed ledger technology is one of the most disruptive technology enablers to address most of the current limitations and facilitate the functional standards of 6G. In this work, we explore the role of blockchain to address formidable challenges in 6G, future application opportunities and potential research directions.

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