But more than ten years ago, a new idea came onto the scene challenging the established model with a decentralised approach: distributed ledger technology. This allows crypto-assets or crypto-tokens to be transferred without a central organisation. Instead, trust between the asset holder and the beneficiary is established via a cryptographic consensus mechanism.
Bitcoin was the first of these crypto-tokens and is the most prominent example. Since it first emerged, a whole zoo of crypto-assets based on different consensus mechanisms and transfer protocols has been invented. There is a lot of creativity, IT brilliance and entrepreneurial spirit.