What is blockchain?

Blockchain can do for business what the internet did for communication

Every second of every day, businesses exchange value with suppliers, partners, customers and others. By value, we mean goods, services, money, data and more.

Each exchange of value is a transaction. Successful transactions need to be fast, precise and easily agreed on by parties participating in the transaction.

Blockchain for business provides a way to execute many more of these transactions — a much better way.

How does blockchain work?

As each transaction occurs – and the parties agree to its details – it’s encoded into a block of digital data and uniquely signed or identified.

Each block is connected to the one before and after it — creating an irreversible, immutable chain.

Blocks are chained together, preventing any block from being altered or a block being inserted between two existing blocks.

What makes blockchain for business better for business?

It’s distributed

Blockchain creates a shared system of record among business network members, eliminating the need to reconcile disparate ledgers.

It’s permissioned

Each member of the network must have access privileges. Information is shared only on a need-to-know basis.

It’s immutable

Consensus is required from all members and all validated transactions are permanently recorded. Even a system administrator can’t delete a transaction.