What is cryptocurrency? A beginner's guide to digital money

You’ll discover the technology behind cryptocurrencies: blockchain and beyond. 

For over a decade, cryptocurrencies have been revolutionizing the global payment landscape. They have provided solutions to long-standing issues in traditional finance and fundamentally changed the economic field, such as offering low transaction costs, financial inclusion and unrestricted market hours. 

But what is a cryptocurrency? It’s actually a digital currency, meaning a specific type of money and a way of transacting. However, instead of being heavily dependent on an authority or a government to decide how much of that money will be printed, they come up with their own ways of distributing themselves through a decision made from the start called a crypto protocol. Cryptocurrencies are built with protocols that ensure their functionality, using encryption algorithms and functions, hence the term "crypto."

When it comes to digital transactions, the traditional financial system is mostly a collection of entries in a data set. When we transact, we depend on trust regarding the security and privacy of personal data. Cryptocurrencies, however, from their very beginning are based on a timestamp system that only gets stronger with every transaction: blockchain technology. This innovative technology has multiple applications and has changed how traditional data is entered and processed. With blockchain technology, transactions are recorded as linked blocks, each representing a set of validated transactions. Each step of this process, validated by multiple users, also strengthens the blockchain.

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