In early December, the Venezuelan President announced the creation of a national cryptocurrency. At the end of the month, Nicolas Maduro provided the coin with oil and in addition promised to strengthen its position with diamonds and gold. Following Venezuela's technology, on the basis of which the cryptocurrency works, Sierra Leone became interested. On March 15, the country held the first round of elections, the votes of which were counted with the help of blockchain.The development of the vote counting system was engaged in CEO of Agora startup Leonard Gammar. According to him, in the future the company intends to extend the product to other African countries, and then to the rest of the world.The company notes that the blockchain is the only technology that can make elections transparent and honest.

built according to certain rules, a continuous chain of blocks (connected list) containing information. Most often, copies of block chains are stored on many different computers independently of each other.Transaction block is a special structure for recording a group of transactions in the Bitcoin system and similar ones. A transaction is considered complete and reliable ("confirmed") when its format and signatures are checked, and when the transaction itself is grouped with several others and recorded in a special structure — a block. The contents of blocks can be checked because each block contains information about the previous block. All blocks are built in one chain, which contains information about all operations ever performed in the database. The very first block in the chain-the primary block-is considered as a separate case, since it does not have a parent block