If you’ve been paying any attention to technology news lately, you’ve probably heard of something called a Blockchain - a giant spreadsheet that’s distributed in many places in the Cloud and remembers every edit you ever make. Eager companies are proposing blockchains as the solution to all kinds of problems, from banking and legal transactions to shopping and food safety.

So it was only a matter of time before someone came up with the idea of applying blockchain technology to genomic data, as Kat Arney found out when she spoke to David Koepsell, CEO of the company Encrypgen at the Festival of Genomics. According to David, this could provide a solution to some of the privacy and access issues that concern people when it comes to maintaining control over our own genetic data.