Blockchain: Good, bad and ugly The technology promises transparency in multi-stakeholder business set-ups. What can go wrong? In January 2021, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, published a draft of the National Strategy on Blockchain, which mentions 17 different uses of national importance for blockchain technology. It is interesting to see that slowly, but steadily, the Government is focusing on the business value of this simple yet powerful technology, which has been much discussed over the last few years. Blockchain is not a new concept; the idea of using hash chains to secure pieces of data, or the concept of cryptographically secured distributed consensus has been around for some decades. However, Bitcoin, the widely debated cryptocurrency, was responsible for popularising blockchain by demonstrating its power in a decentralised set-up. Later, enterprises began finding various exciting business uses for this technology.