In ‘An Introduction to Blockchain’, the MVNOs Series team explores what Blockchain is and what it can do. The report starts with a crash course on Blockchain basics, before moving the focus to its wide-ranging benefits, its synergies with other emerging technologies, and the impact it could have on the telecoms ecosystem across-the-board.

In the short space of a couple of years, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have gone from frontier technologies used by shadowy figures on the edges of the World Wide Web to being courted at the highest levels of government and corporate finance.

To many, the emergence of functioning decentralised currencies not tied to any national bank or state authority has the potential to revolutionise money, banking and fiscal organisations at all levels.

But for many businesses and tech insiders, the concept of digital money isn’t the most interesting part. It is what lies beneath the surface of Bitcoin, Ethereum and all the others, the technology that drives them, that offers real cause for excitement.

For many, the real revolution starts with Blockchain.

Blockchain is the foundation on which cryptocurrencies are built. What really excites people about it is that its main functions and capabilities – simultaneously and securely logging and registering transactions across a shared self-authenticating network – have potentially groundbreaking applications far beyond the narrow confines of cryptocurrencies.