The 5th International Congress on Blockchain and Applications (BLOCKCHAIN'23) will be held in Guimarães from 12th to 14th of July, 2023. This annual congress will bring together researchers and practitioners of blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies (DLT), who will share ideas, projects, lectures, and advances associated with those technologies and their application domains. This meeting will be co-located with the PAAMS’23 conference. Among the scientific community, the advance in next-generation blockchain and distributed ledger technologies is seen as a promising combination that will transform the production and manufacturing industry, media, finance, insurance, e-government, agriculture, energy, or even medicine. Besides, the combination of DLT with other cutting-edge disruptive technologies (AI, metaverse, quantum computing...) will will open up a multitude of amazing opportunities that entail an interesting challenge of research at the same time. The BLOCKCHAIN’23 congress is devoted to: promoting the investigation of next-generation blockchain and DLT technologies; exploring the latest ideas, innovations, guidelines, theories, models, technologies, applications and tools of blockchain/DLT combined with other cutting-edge technologies; and identifying critical issues and challenges that researchers and practitioners must deal with in future research. We want to offer researchers and practitioners the opportunity to work on promising lines of research and to publish their developments in this area.