Unleash the potential of Blockchain

In the last few years, blockchain technology has taken the world by storm through cryptocurrency. However, this isn't the only use case for the technology. A lot of work has gone into implementing blockchain in areas such as banking and financial services, but as the technology matures and its adoption increases, we need to understand the capabilities of blockchain and its potential in our society.

Blockchain at its heart is a way of storing records. In a normal system, these records are stored in a central location (think banks holding your banking records), however, with blockchain, everyone who is a part of the blockchain participates in maintaining and updating the records. What this means is that the storage of these records are now in a decentralized ledger with no need for a central administrator. When an event is recorded in the blockchain, each person (node) runs through the transaction and if the required nodes agree on the outcome (a consensus) then each node records the event on its copy of the ledger.

What this means is that once written onto the blockchain, that event cannot be altered or deleted in any manner, allowing us to have a better view of end-to-end transactions and complete traceability within the network. As each node has a copy of the data, decentralization of the data in such a manner would mean that damage to a single node won't affect the other nodes and the system can continue to function.