Blockchain is an emerging technology. Thanks to its immutability; transparency; and the consensus mechanism, along with other clever designs such as blocks chained with the hashes of the previous blocks, the technology allows untrusting parties to trade with each other. In this chapter, we explained the basic concepts of two popular public blockchain platforms—bitcoin and Ethereum. Most of the discussions were about bitcoin, which is the mother of the technology. We also talked about Ethereum in detail, which extended bitcoin and introduced the concept of smart contracts. The introduction of smart contracts makes the Ethereum platform generic and allows us to develop applications beyond bitcoin's cash payment use case. The concept of an enterprise blockchain, along with one of the examples, Hyperledger, was mentioned as well. In addition, we briefly touched on the evolution of blockchain to give readers an idea on trends in the blockchain industry.
In the next chapter, Chapter 2, STO – Security Token Offering, we will discuss the concepts of ICO and STO in detail.
