Distributed Ledger

A Distributed Ledger is a set of financial records kept by a decentralized network of nodes who store and share identical copies of data that functions as a bookkeeping.

Blockchain technology is a subset of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). A network of decentralized nodes, who store and share data, can function as a ledger, and is referred to as a ‘distributed ledger.’ Distributed ledgers may be public and permissionless, or private and permissioned, with different networks incentivizing nodes to store data in different manners. While blockchain can serve as a type of distributed ledger and the industry often uses the terms ‘blockchain’ and ‘distributed ledger’ interchangeably, blockchains do not exhaust DLT—there are some emerging non-blockchain DLT architectures.