"Blockchain" and "distributed ledger technology." Many of us have been guilty of confusing these two terms and using them interchangeably. But even though their meanings overlap in a number of areas, and even though they've both reached similar levels of public notoriety since the 2017 cryptocurrency bull market, they aren't quite identical.
Yes, they both generally refer to a record of information that's distributed across a network, and yes, they both foster a greater degree of transparency and openness than had been enabled by earlier, centralized databases or digital records. But this is where the analogies end, since blockchains and distributed ledger technology (DLT) each come with their own important distinguishing features.