Since the advent of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, blockchain, as their underlying technologies, has drawn a massive amount of attention from both academia and the industry. This ever-evolving technology inherits the “genes” of distributed systems, offering significant advantages of immutability, transparency, auditability, and tamper-resistance. These benefits help blockchain re-establish public confidence, and hold the significant promise of reliable information sharing and value transfer. Therefore, blockchain has become the foundation of crucial strategic deployments in countries across the world, and the fundamental basis for building the next generation Web 3.0 — “Internet of value”. In this article, we will start with unraveling the essential ingredients of blockchain technology, and showing the characteristics of each of these ingredients in the context of distributed systems. We will then present the core technical challenges that need to be addressed prior to unleashing its full potential, including its performance, scalability, and cross-chain interoperability. Finally, we will introduce the recent developments of blockchain systems, and discuss the future trends of the blockchain ecosystem.