Cryptocurrency is a digital payment system that doesn't rely on banks to verify transactions. It’s a peer-to-peer system that can enable anyone anywhere to send and receive payments. Instead of being physical money carried around and exchanged in the real world, cryptocurrency payments exist purely as digital entries to an online database describing specific transactions. When you transfer cryptocurrency funds, the transactions are recorded in a public ledger. Cryptocurrency is stored in digital wallets.
For the first time in history, value can be sent anywhere in the world at the same speed as information, in a secure and trust-minimized way. A departure from conventional economic, political, and social systems run by a handful of large centralized institutions, digital currencies are powered by millions of peers within a globally distributed network, democratizing information and value in incredible new ways. Several digital currencies, each with unique comparative advantages, may radically transform legacy systems across nations and industries around the world, driving future economic growth and becoming more valuable as the keys to our digital, global economy.