The Significance of Blockchain in Big Data

The World Economic Forum (WEF) defines blockchain as a technology that allows people to transfer assets to one another in a secure way without any intermediaries. It enables transparency, immutability, and autonomous execution of business rules. What this essentially means is that Blockchain is a distributed database system which acts as an “open ledger” to store and manage transactions. Each record in the database is known as a “block”, and it contains details like transaction timestamp and a link to the previous and the next blocks. The development of Blockchain technology is regarded as one of the most significant events over the past few years. Blockchain offers enhanced security and data quality and has the potential to change the way the world approaches Big Data entirely. Originally developed to improve the integrity of Bitcoin – the famous cryptocurrency, Blockchain is seeing investments flow in from banks, private businesses, and even government organizations. So much so that the WEF estimates that the contracts on Blockchain alone could equal 10 percent of the global GDP by the year 2025.