In the last few years, Blockchain technology has generated massive interest among governments, enterprises, and academics, because of its capability of providing a transparent, secured, tamper-proof solution for interconnecting different stakeholders in a trustless setup. However, as the popularity of this technology was also associated with cryptocurrency markets, particularly Bitcoin, it has seen a lot of debates and subsequent misconceptions and myths turning around the globe. At the same time, governments as well as various enterprises, have started exploring the capacity and the capability of Blockchain technology across several application sectors, including supply chain management, banking & finance, digital identity management, land record management, health & wellbeing and eVoting, among others. In January 2021, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeiTY), Government of India, published the first draft of the "National Strategy on Blockchain" that highlights 17 potential applications that are of national interest.

Against this backdrop, this subject will cover the basic design principles of Blockchain technology and its applications over different sectors. The course starts with the fundamental cryptographic concepts that are required to understand the components and working principles of Blockchain. It covers the design principles of both permissioned and permissionless models of blockchain, their consensus mechanisms, and the deployment considerations. With these basics, the course discusses the fundamentals behind the distributed ledger technology and smart contracts. Finally, it talks about various blockchain applications including digital identity management, supply chain management, applications for good governance and Fintech applications.

Additionally, the course also provides tutorials on setting up blockchain applications using one of the well-adopted permissionless blockchain platforms - Ethereum, and one permissioned blockchain platform - Hyperledger. The tutorials cover the basic primitives in setting up a blockchain development environment and building applications on top of it.