Beyond Bitcoin and money transactions, IBM intends to further develop blockchain technology

Author: ManjiMasha

IBM says it is working to make blockchain technology, which originated from and popularized by bitcoin, more accessible to both financial and non-financial businesses. Specifically, the company has launched a blockchain service called "blockchain-as-a-service," which can also be described as a set of tools for "creating, deploying, running and monitoring blockchain applications on the IBM Cloud."

In the past few years, the idea of ​​blockchain technology outside of Bitcoin has attracted the interest of many forward-thinking companies. Blockchain applications are also called "distributed ledger technology." This technology does not require the establishment of a centralized database, like Bitcoin, where every transaction in a particular system has a cryptographic hash that everyone can view.

All the traditional financial companies and start-ups that want to establish partnerships with banks and stock exchanges are the first to realize that decentralized ledgers can make money transactions more reliable and safer. If all parties can double-check transfers (even if they don't know what is being transferred), then in theory, intentional or unintentional errors will be reduced. Recently, nine banking institutions including JP Morgan, BBVA, and Credit Suisse have established a partnership with a company called R3 to work together on decentralizing some databases. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January this year, Mastercard officials said they were seriously studying how to apply blockchain concepts to credit card networks.

But IBM's blockchain efforts aren't just for potential financial industry clients, they're also meant to attract logistics users. IBM spokesperson Holli Haswell told Ars that the best use of distributed ledgers outside of finance is in the transportation industry. If a company's business is shipping food from one county to another, and if the food goes bad, the company that signed the contract can "apply a contract solution, look at the blockchain, and look at the temperature of the container during transportation." In this scenario, the goods being shipped would be labeled with electronic tags and sensors that record temperature, location, and any other statistics that can be written into a distributed ledger.
“All parties involved in a transaction can share this single source of trust, and it can be applied to many different industries,” Haswell said of blockchain technology.

Haswell added: “When all parties involved in an interaction have an up-to-date ledger that reflects recent transactions and changes, companies can cut out middlemen and make transactions faster. Speed, visibility and having an immutable record are the main reasons why blockchain technology can be applied in many industries.”

IBM also said it has made significant efforts to develop blockchain standards for Hyper Ledger, an open-source Linux Foundation project. Although an IBM spokesperson declined to say how much money the company has invested in the effort, the company did say that 35 researchers and software engineers have written 44,000 lines of code for the Hyper Ledger project.

JPM compiled from

Ars Technica, IBM Wants to Move Blockchain Tech Beyond Bitcoin and Money Transfer, by Megan Geuss.