In the space of 30 years , blockchain has been catapulted to the forefront of tech from virtually nowhere . At first , it seemed a niche concept that would have little benefit , before being rightly recognised as a potential game-changer in supply chain , finance and society in general .
In the space of 30 years , blockchain has been catapulted to the forefront of tech from virtually nowhere . At first , it seemed a niche concept that would have little benefit , before being rightly recognised as a potential game-changer in supply chain , finance and society in general .
2008 2013 2017-Present
A developer or team of developers using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper that conceptualises the cryptocurrency bitcoin , establishing the blockchain as the public transaction ledger used for bitcoin . This lit the flame for the cryptocurrency market , which would explode over the next decade .
Five years after the white paper was published , early bitcoin enthusiast Vitalik Buterin created Ethereum . He thought bitcoin needed a scripting language for application development and , failing to establish a consensus among the bitcoin community , built his own blockchain-based platform . It utilises smart contracts and is the platform on which NFTs are built , for example .
Supply chain professionals begin to leverage the power of blockchain . Instead of coins , supply chain blockchains ‘ tokenise ’ a variety of transactionrelated data , creating unique and readily verifiable identifiers for purchase orders , inventory units and bills of lading . Every participant in the chain has their own unique digital signature , which is used to ‘ sign ’ tokens moving through the chain .
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