Distributed Ledger Technologies

The articles in this special section focus on distributed ledger technologies (DLT). DLT, of which blockchain is a popular example, are increasingly becoming a popular means to maintain transactional integrity and achieve consensus among competing parties in many modern distributed data exchanges. Indeed, a Gartner survey estimates that by 2020, DLT and blockchain will support the global movement and tracking of $2 trillion of goods and services annually. Unlike centralized files and databases, distributed ledgers rely on peering nodes to record, share, and synchronize transactions and data in their individually maintained local ledgers. In the case of blockchain, information is organized into blocks that are securely and transparently chained together. These blocks become immutable global knowledge among all peers using consensus algorithms to achieve data synchronization. The “append-only, globally accepted” transactions supported by blockchain technologies have given rise to both opportunities and challenges compared to traditional data storage systems. One of the challenges faced by current information sharing systems, and a key concept that makes DLT appealing is the support for the creation of large scale systems from nodes and components that do not trust each other. Being able to reach consensus and share a commonly verifiable ledger is a very powerful primitive, which is already being considered for data sharing applications in energy, pharmaceuticals, and many other domains.