Ledgers in Crypto: Recording Every Transaction

Ledger is a record of financial transactions that cannot be changed, but only supplemented with new transactions.

What is Ledger?

Applied to the world of cryptocurrencies, a ledger is known as a record-keeping system. The registry keeps track of the balances of the various participants and all of the transactions that take place. The identities of the participants remain anonymous.

Public Ledgers were used much earlier than the advent of digital assets, but became more popular after the cryptocurrency markets revived. Each party involved in a cryptocurrency transaction can verify the data in the registry.

Blockchain is a basic type of distributed ledger technology that records a list of financial transactions or blocks that cannot be changed, making them immutable. Ledgers are generally decentralized, meaning they are not controlled by a single central authority.

After a block reaches full capacity, new blocks are added to the registry – and selected members of the network, known as full nodes, also keep a copy of the Ledger. In this way, they oversee the network, the people who use it, and whether transactions are genuine.

The specifics of blockchain require that every transaction be recorded on the network – and here, too, security concerns can arise. The concern is that hackers, governments and security services can track public records and information about network participants.