The tech is ‘coming to life,’ but will IBM’s blockchain initiative pay off fast enough?
Two recent announcements highlighted its involvement in collaborations in the jewelry and insurance trades that capitalize on an open-source software package
The technology's promise is "coming to life," said
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That has obvious uses when it comes to exchanging money, hence Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that tout the ability of bearers to complete major financial transactions without having to deal with banks or governments.
But in the trade, that's regarded as a blockchain 1.0 sort of use. Blockchain 2.0, and beyond, involves among other things logging and tracking the creation, movement and use of other types of goods in situations where it's useful to have permanent records.
The jewelry initiative, called TrustChain, is of a piece with that. It's a collaboration of companies up and down the supply chain, from refiners to retailers, that want to see to it that everything that goes into a ring, necklace or bracelet can be traced back to its source.
That sort of accountability matters not just for assuring customers the diamonds on their ring are genuine. These days the jewelry trade's under pressure to show that it's not getting its gold and gems from sources that use the proceeds to finance wars.
In the face of that, a business culture "that's mostly verbal agreements and paper-based is becoming untenable," suggesting the need for the sort of iron-clad, yet readily accessible record-keeping blockchain can provide, Cuomo said.
The insurance initiative, led by the
They need a faster and smoother way to trace money back to the individual policy. The banking group and its partners think a blockchain can provide it, and used the Hyperledger Fabric package
The package works as sort of a blockchain operating system, and fills in a gap in the original blockchain concept, Cuomo said.
With their focus on emulating cash trades, the original blockchain implementations facilitated anonymity. But in applications like the jewelry initiative, there are rigid outside-audit demands and with them comes the need for a system that works well "where the members are known," he said.
"They Googled 'enterprise blockchain' and found
He acknowledged, however, that for asset-tracking applications like the jewelry initiative there's still a "tricky area" to deal with when it comes to guaranteeing the accuracy of the initial log entry.
For that,
The validity of
Though the blockchain program relies on open-source software,
All told, more than 1,500 people at
He added that while "it will be a number of years before the non-cryptocurrency applications of blockchain will pay off," they're at a turning point that should see it begin to take off in 2018 and 2019.
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