- Public, digital database of crypto currency transactions. - Constantly updated and backed up across millions of machines. - Transactions are permanent, irreversible, and viewable by anyone. 1. **Distributed Ledger Tech** - Balances, Activities, Transaction History - Excel spreadsheet distributed across multiple participants in the network and synchronized. Altering is impossible. Who owns how much 2. **Smart Contracts** - If then functions, based on a single source of truth - Building novel business models on DLT 3. **Digital Assets** - Digital Scarcity ## Layers ![[Pasted image 20211212124903.png]] Nodes and validators maintain the network Needs to run open source software of the network on their machines, on cloud or premise with each participant contributing to the network.