Blockchain (The Internet of Transactions) may be a recent entry to the technology landscape. However, it has quickly become an essential iteration in the evolution of peer-to-peer communication and distributed computing. Originally developed as a way to protect digital currency, Blockchain technologies now support any digital asset, from signal data to complex messaging, to the execution of business logic through code. Blockchain technologies are rapidly forming a new decentralized internet of transactions.
§2026 Update
I wrote this in 2018, near the top of the first big blockchain wave. The “blockchain for everything” froth of 2018 cooled off, but the substance underneath kept building. A few of the things this post pointed at are now running systems rather than whitepapers.
Stablecoins turned into a payment rail. The “internet of transactions” idea is most concrete here: dollar-pegged stablecoins move serious volume for settlement and cross-border payments now, and in July 2025 the US passed the GENIUS Act, a federal framework for stablecoin issuance.
Real-world assets are getting tokenized. BlackRock launched a tokenized US Treasury fund (BUIDL) in 2024, and its CEO has said publicly that he expects every financial asset to end up tokenized.
Enterprise blockchain consolidated. The scattered Hyperledger projects came together under LF Decentralized Trust, launched by the Linux Foundation in 2024 with more than a hundred members. The Cloud Native, vendor-neutral framing in the Cloud section below is roughly how that played out.
The AI section is the other half. In 2018 I framed blockchain as a way to guarantee the integrity of the data and logic feeding AI. That integrity question, where a model’s data and decisions actually came from, is a live problem, and verifiable, tamper-evident records are one of the answers.
Original article below. Everything from here down is the post as originally written. The 2026 Update above covers what’s changed since.
§Transactional Integrity and Security
Blockchain provides the ability to ensure the integrity and immutability of data; its origin, destination, and occurrence, as well as computational logic. Blockchain delivers mathematically-sound proof, through consensus-based validation of public or privately shared ledgers. Defined protocols allow consensus to replace central trust, rejecting compromised nodes and data that is incompatible with the agreement of the majority.
§Decentralization and Distribution
Blockchain technologies employ decentralized peer networks, using well-defined algorithms and protocols to distribute transactions and proof of their integrity. Blockchain’s decentralization removes the need for any single point of trust and prevents any single point of failure.
§The Cloud
The Cloud was once nearly synonymous with select vendors offering a variety of managed services. While many of the services managed by leading vendors were often open source applications, readily available to anyone, value was provided through vendor proprietary orchestration and interconnectivity. The recent advances of Cloud Native technologies and standards in containerization and container orchestration have paved the way for new vendor-neutral frameworks to emerge. Blockchain frameworks have been quick to support and extend this new Cloud Native ecosystem making vendor lock-in unnecessary for rapidly deploying new implementations.
§AI/ML
Artificial Intelligence has traditionally placed its trust in logic designed and implemented by knowledge engineers. The most radical advancements in recent AI technologies are now in the field of Machine Learning. The new breed of intelligent systems not only make decisions based on data but have likely derived their existing knowledge from it. Blockchain technologies ensure the integrity of transactions containing data and logic destined for AI decisions or reinforcement learning. Blockchain allows AI to advance knowledge and implement decisions rooted in transactional and data integrity.
§Develop
Read my article on how to “Deploy a Private Ethereum Blockchain on a Custom Kubernetes Cluster” to get you started in building custom Blockchain solutions.
§Selected Reading
- How does the Blockchain Work? (Part 1) by Collin Thompson
- How Does the Blockchain Work? by Michele D’Aliessi
- On Public and Private Blockchains by Vitalik Buterin
- What is the Difference Between Public and Permissioned Blockchains? by Nolan Bauerle