Blockchain Key Terms for Business Leaders

As an immutable public ledger tool that guarantees both transparency and autonomy, blockchain has become a major force in protecting personal privacy data. Thanks to its unique characteristics it eliminates the need for private information to be centralized through a third party. Therefore, blockchain has the makings of bringing trust to data and add transparency to the business environment. Last week Globant, a digitally native technology services company, published its 2019 Blockchain Technology Business Guide that highlights advantages of implementing Blockchain Technology to help drive business goals. Globant surveyed over 650 senior level decision makers in marketing, IT and operations about their priorities and goals for blockchain technology. Through their insight, the report aims to determine what steps organizations need to take to be ready to execute on blockchain. According to the report, 64% of organizations surveyed already see blockchain as a current tech initiative, however less than half of the surveyed organizations feel prepared to effectively use it. Despite the lack of readiness, 71%  of decision-makers believe that the implementation of blockchain technology will have a positive impact on customers' confidence in an organization's ability to protect their data. Therefore, even though there’s still some work to do and lot to learn before most of them can use blockchain to improve their internal operations, there are also all the reasons to put in a little extra effort. And there’s no better way to start, than becoming familiar with the following five key blockchain terms, that according to the report will prepare you and your business to keep up with the blockchain developments.Smart contracts help exchange money, property, shares, or anything of value in a transparent, conflict-free way while bypassing the services of a middleman. They also allow the users to view, validate, accept, or deny any changes to assets. The contract encodes business rules in a programmable language onto the blockchain while determining who is permitted to change an asset, what they can change, and under what circumstances.A blockchain asset is a natively digital asset like Bitcoin or a digitized traditional asset like digital gold, a stock or a title; where the record of ownership is recorded within a public or permissioned distributed ledger network. Or in other words, assets represent a form of ownership used in higher level definitions.Nodes are essential to blockchain functionality, establishing trust in the network and enabling cryptographic and transaction clearing, allowing it to function and survive. Node is often defined as a copy of the ledger operated by a participant of the blockchain network. If users want to be involved in the network and view or alter assets, nodes must be present, the report said.Traditional ledger is the bookkeeping or a computer file of economic transactions. In blockchain universe, it has the same meaning: an accumulation of all transactions and alterations within a blockchain asset. In a distributed blockchain ledger every transaction is recorded and can't be altered. A ledger is a record of all actions done on one asset, and requires permission to be viewed.Actors are the participants that allow blockchain systems to recognize users and let them see or modify an asset, the report said. At the business level blockchain technology has two primary actors: First, a human actor who interacts with the blockchain by creating transactions (also called the “User”). Secondly, human or system actor responsible for verification and validation of transactions, building new blocks, signing new blocks and publishing new blocks to the blockchain. This actor supports trust between the parties involved (also labeled as “Block generator”).