The blockchain technology was described in 1991 by the research scientist Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta. They wanted to introduce a computationally practical solution for time-stamping digital documents so that they could not be backdated or tampered. They develop a system using the concept of cryptographically secured chain of blocks to store the time-stamped documents.

In 1992, Merkle Trees were incorporated into the design, which makes blockchain more efficient by allowing several documents to be collected into one block. Merkle Trees are used to create a ‘secured chain of blocks.’ It stored a series of data records, and each data records connected to the one before it. The newest record in this chain contains the history of the entire chain. However, this technology went unused, and the patent lapsed in 2004.

The first decentralized blockchain was conceptualized by a person (or group of people) known as Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. Nakamoto improved the design in an important way using a Hashcash-like method to timestamp blocks without requiring them to be signed by a trusted party and introducing a difficulty parameter to stabilize the rate at which blocks are added to the chain. The design was implemented the following year by Nakamoto as a core component of the cryptocurrency bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for all transactions on the network.