You would be forgiven if you thought the first blockchain to ever be developed was the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. While Bitcoin is the highest profile use case of blockchain—a transparent, immutable ledger platform—it is far from the first.
“Blockchain is just a shared database with time stamping,” says Stuart Haber, the man behind Surety, the first blockchain, which was first published in 1995. “It is a data structure and doesn’t have to be linked to a volatile currency.”
While confusion between the two technologies may still exist, some experts believe it’s only a matter of time before the blockchain ecosystem develops beyond Bitcoin.
