With Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency built on a blockchain, gaining exponential popularity, blockchain technology shot to fame in 2008. Blockchain, however, has its roots in the early 1990s thanks to the work of Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta and the Merkle Tree, which were developed in the late 1980s. Haber and Stornetta imagined a system that operated on a chain of blocks that was cryptographically safe and prevented tampering with the timestamps of the documents.
After that, there was no turning back once Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Currency System" went viral. But the rise of Bitcoin also served as a soft barrier for blockchain technology. Beyond digital currency and the banking industry, blockchain applications were not very well known until recently.
Step by step
Solved in 2 steps