Breaking The Chain – Directed Acyclic Graph ("DAG") Challenges Blockchain's Dominance

The meteoric rise of FinTech in recent years has exposed us to jargon that many of us (especially those less techy amongst us) have perhaps struggled to understand, as words such as "blockchain" and "Distributed Ledger Technology" (or "DLT") continue to dominate our computer screens and magazines.

These two words are often used concurrently, though this is not entirely accurate. As is often the case with new technical jargon, we grasp the basic concept but often miss the finer details. In truth, blockchain is DLT – but not all DLT is blockchain...

A Chip off the Old Block

Blockchain first hit our screens when Bitcoin, an early player in the DLT game, announced blockchain as the basis of its operation. In his now-legendary paper, Satoshi Nakamoto explained how Bitcoin intended to revolutionise aspects of financial services by (to put it very basically) using a public distributed digital ledger to register, via a series of blocks, a chain of transactions each