Growth of Blockchain

Blockchain technology has evolved tremendously since the invention of bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. Before the advancements in Blockchain technology, many researchers discussed about the previous generation of blockchain and their limitations, which lead to the evolution of the latest era of Blockchain 5.0. The newest era of blockchain is supposed to have a huge impact on every industry, which includes the financial sector, media, government, law, etc. in terms of security, reliability, and transparency. The evolution of blockchain can be explained by considering the following generations of blockchain.

Blockchain 1.0: Bitcoin

Blockchain 1.0 as a first-generation technology evolved from the term Digital Ledger Technology (DLT), which provides all the participants with a distributed network to resolve the issue of double spending. Double-spending problem can cause disruption in the network if some users trade with the same currency more than once. Thus, in early 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin, which utilizes Blockchain technology to store and share the data transactions among multiple users with security, verifiability, and efficiency. Blockchain technology uses various cryptography and consensus mechanisms to discard the centralized network and facilitate users in consensus to validate the transactions which further keeps data records safe and protected. In Blockchain 1.0, there is a mining mechanism involved to mine or validate the data transactions to resolve the security issues of centralized systems

Blockchain 2.0: Smart Contracts

Blockchain 2.0 as a second-generation technology emerges, combining several technologies such as smart contracts with PoW consensus mechanism to resolve the issues of Blockchain 1.0. A smart contract can be defined as a self-executable code running on the blockchain-based on predetermined conditions or rules. One of the main advantages of a smart contract is that it cannot be tampered with or altered, i.e., it is impossible for a malicious attacker to manipulate a smart contract. This reduces the cost of verifying intervention and prevents the fraudulent activity of attackers. An open-source platform, i.e., Ethereum blockchain, is used to deploy smart contracts using a Solidity programming language. In the second era of blockchain, miners compete to validate the transactions, but they get the reward in the form of Ether, i.e., the currency of Ethereum

Blockchain 3.0: DApps

The new era of Blockchain 3.0 also includes smart contracts but with some additional technologies such as sharding and Decentralized Apps (DApps). DApps mainly work in the backend of Ethereum to provide users and applications connectivity with the smart contract in a distributed manner, thus, eliminating the need for a centralized server in the blockchain network. Furthermore, the third-generation blockchain uses several consensus mechanisms such as PoW, Proof-of-Stake (PoS), and Proof-of- Authority (PoA), which can be considered beneficial while implementing the smart contract in the blockchain. Furthermore, Blockchain 3.0 does not involve any miner and their transaction fee for validating the transactions as they use a built-in mechanism, which further decreases the transaction costs for the users

Blockchain 4.0: Industry 4.0

The main requirement of Industry 4.0 is to acquire cybersecurity and innovative technologies such as supply chain management, the Internet of Things (IoT), and AI. This is the main reason to introduce a new age of Blockchain 4.0 with the advancements in technologies to serve businesses with better security, privacy, transparency, and data integrity. Therefore, InterValue is being used to build a platform for Blockchain 4.0. The main aim of InterValue is to develop an enhanced version of DAG with improved scalability, increased usability, and reliability with Blockchain 4.0. Some industries that can benefit from using Blockchain 4.0 are supply chain management, health management, approval workflows, IoT data collection, financial sectors, and conditional payments. This version makes blockchain 3.0 disposable in real-life scenarios

Blockchain 5.0

All the previous generation of blockchain has tried to make its implementation secure, transparent, reliable, and scalable for the network. But, still, multiple industries in different fields could not utilize it in their applications to that extent. This is the reason for the evolution of Blockchain 5.0 so that various organizations can utilize it in their application with enhanced scalability, economy, high security, transparency, and confidentiality. Relictum Pro is the first-known implementation of Blockchain 5.0. It is implemented on a network in which multiple smart contracts can be executed for transactions, which proves to be more secure than any other previous era of blockchain. Many organizations are simultaneously working to improve Blockchain 5.0 and its features with Relictum Pro, which has several benefits as compared to previous generations. We have seen how the advancement in technologies can improve the utilization of blockchain for industries in multiple sectors