• The Centre is considering a proposal to set up a Centre of Excellence for blockchain technology in Hyderabad to drive innovation.

• As per the official statement, the Centre of Excellence, proposed to come up at C­DAC’s Hyderabad unit, will be the first one by the government for blockchain technology
• The proposal has been submitted by C­DAC Hyderabad, along with the Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT) and Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI), Mumbai.
•  It had been decided to begin work on applications of blockchain technology.
• “We plan to use blockchain to digitise and secure land records for Telangana. Once we successfully deploy it, we can then think of scaling it,” said the official.
•  IT firms such as Infosys, TCS, Wipro and Cognizant had made significant investments in blockchain technology, while banks had already started using the technology.

• By allowing digital information to be distributed but not copied, blockchain technology created the backbone of a new type of internet.

• Originally devised for the digital currency, Bitcoin,  (Buy Bitcoin) the tech community is now finding other potential uses for the technology.

• The blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.

• A block is the ‘current’ part of a blockchain, which records some or all of the recent transactions.

• Once completed, a block goes into the blockchain as a permanent database. Each time a block gets completed, a new one is generated.

• There is a countless number of such blocks in the blockchain, connected to each other (like links in a chain) in proper linear, chronological order.

• Every block contains a hash of the previous block.

• The blockchain has complete information about different user addresses and their balances right from the genesis block to the most recently completed block

The Hindu, Investopedia.