Discover a series of articles written by Sébastien Bourguignon and published in the French newspaper Les Echos Solutions to know everything about Blockchain! A short history of Blockchain, How it works, ICO, the new way to fundraise for startups, Ethereum and smart contracts and Differences between public and private Blockchains. Through these 5 articles, discover what’s really behind the buzzword everyone is talking about.

Part I : A short history of Blockchain

For a few months now, no matter what business sector you speak about: Banking, Finance, Insurance, Energy, Retail, Music, everyone is talking about a new technology. Blockchain, even named « the trust machine » by The Economist, is spoken of as a new industrial revolution, promising a future, totally decentralized internet. It’s presented as the technology able to uberize Uber! But to understand Blockchain, you first need to talk about Bitcoin, the first implementation of this technology. Read the article (in French)

Part II : Blockchain, how it works

As we have seen before, Blockchain is the underlying technology of Bitcoin, or at least, Bitcoin is its first implementation. Today, there are other implementations of this technology. Therefore, we should talk about blockchains instead of blockchain. Like every new technology, each blockchain has its own principles and specificities. Read the article (in French)

Part III – Blockchain and ICO, the new way to fundraise for start-ups

Since the beginning of 2017, more than 2 billion dollars have been raised thanks to blockchain, mainly through Ethereum. Some new fundraising records have contributed to the promotion this new kind of fundraising. After explaining how Blockchain and Bitcoin work, we focus on the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) revolution for startups.

FileCoin, a startup developing a solution in cloud storage about blockchain, raised more than 250 million dollars in cryptocurrency. Another example: Brave, a company implementing a new web browser based on Chromium (the Google open source project), raised 35 million dollars in less than 30 seconds. Read the article (in French)

Part IV : Ethereum and smart contracts

There are different blockchains and Bitcoin is the major one. However, there is a second well-known blockchain for monetization: Ethereum, its token is Ether. It has the same characteristics as Bitcoin with two main added functionalities.  It gives the ability to develop decentralized programs – smart contracts – and to store more data. Read the article (in French).

Part V : What is the difference between private and public Blockchains ?

Previously, we mentioned public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. But another kind of blockchain exists , only accessible by identified and authorized members from the network and which can be used with a central review body. In this latter case, we don’t talk about blockchain anymore but about DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology). So what are the main differences between public and private blockchains? How to choose between these two options? Read the article (in French)