This whitepaper aims to explore a policy-based approach to applying blockchains, or more generally Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to a limited geographical or market region. To do this, we first lay out the problems that DLTs face, and the mitigation strategies that the market is adopting to deal with these limitations. The DLT space is undergoing rapid expansion and the number of projects has become so great, that it is a challenge to list them all. The technologies that are listed are meant to be a high-level survey, but so many are named in the sections that follow that a ‘definitions’ section might easily exceed the length of the rest of this paper. We therefore encourage the reader to explore each one on their own and independently evaluate, which approach applies best to their specific needs.
The only definition that we would like to make in this paper is that of blockchains and distributed ledgers, as we use both terms with slightly different meanings. Blockchains were the first technological structures to solve the double spend problem and they rely on a massively replicated ledger that is appended by adding transactions in blocks. Each block is cryptographically linked to the previous block with the use of a cryptographic primitive called a secure hash.
