Summary

In this chapter, we’ve gained deep insight into blockchains and how they operate. We covered many concepts that are important to understanding how blockchains truly work, such as immutability, forking, validation, transactions, nodes, the different consensus mechanisms, gas fees, and processing fees.

Then, we broke down how blockchains power decentralization and applications that are deployed to blockchains, such as DAOs, DeFi apps, NFT platforms, and so on. We also went through some topics such as scalability involving interoperability, consensus, and sharding. These are the hottest topics in blockchain technology since experts are working on them to try and scale blockchains for millions of users.

In the next chapter, we will understand what makes Rust the perfect fit for building blockchains and we will learn some Rust concepts hands-on before diving into building our own blockchain using Rust.