Blockchain – The Trustless Technology

Blockchain is a distributed ledger or database, which stores data in the form of ‘blocks.’ Each block contains information about the previous block, thus forming a ‘chain.’ Using cryptographic encryption, the data on the Blockchain is made virtually tamper-proof and can only be appended. Any edits in the data cannot be made even by the originator of the data.

Blockchain involves?peer-to-peer?networks that validate each transaction based on the consensus of its participating members (referred to as?nodes). Instead of relying upon a central authority, ‘trust’ within the Blockchain ecosystem is established through mathematical processes known as the consensus mechanism.

Any industry that involves large amounts of data, accessed by multiple stakeholders, can benefit from Blockchain implementation. It enables secure sharing and storage of data, and streamlined processes, where taking approvals or arriving at consensus are bottlenecks. However, the current consensus mechanisms deployed by popular Blockchains are resource-intensive, which significantly impact the scalability of the solutions developed based on this technology.