On Tuesday, 10^th October, 2023 a Lecture Discussion titled “Blockchain and Future Technologies” was delivered by Dr. Basit Shafiq. He is currently serving as an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at LUMS. Dr. Basit Shafiq received his Master’s, and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University, USA. His research interests include information systems security and privacy, distributed system and cloud computing.

At the very outset, the guest speaker introduced the concept of Blockchain to the participants. Dr. Basit Shafiq informed that Blockchain is basically a distributed ledger that enables security, transparency auditability, and immutability. According to him. Blockchain finds its practical usage in Cryptocurrency, smart contracts, Web 3.0 and projects such as Fertilizer Subsidy Management. Blockchain is a sequence of Blocks which holds a complete list of transactions’ records like a conventional ledger. Blockchain is a decentralized public ledger for which a trusted third party is no longer needed to validate each transaction. Consensus algorithms in blockchain are used to maintain data consistency in a distributed ledger. Similarly, it is nearly impossible to delete or rollback transactions once they are included in the blockchain. Last but not the least, all transactions in a Blockchain can be easily verified and tracked. The workshop was enriching, very useful and interactive. It provided an opportunity to the participants to learn new trends in technology for using the concept of Blockchain in their respective fields.