By Julia Chang, Forbes
If you’ve been skimming the financial news over the past few months, you may have noticed the word “blockchain” touted as the wave of the future. You may have even clicked on a story or two — but still been fuzzy on what exactly the terminology means. That’s not surprising, considering that blockchain sounds more like a new type of Lego piece or the name of a hot fashion house than a technology that could transform the way we make transactions online. It gets a bit complicated but, in a nutshell, blockchain is a digital method of record-keeping that makes information easily visible and accessible, which means there is no central authority required to keep track of all the stages of a transaction from start to finish. Blockchain is still probably a few years away from having a real, everyday impact on your life, but with companies like IBM and Microsoft working hard to develop the technology, the future may be here before you know it.
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