“IBM is not really interested in cryptocurrencies,” said the company’s senior technical staff member of web and blockchain open technologies, Arnaud Le Hors, at Blockchain Expo Europe this afternoon.
The opener seemed to show IBM’s intent to bring a clear distinction between cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology itself, where its focus is on rolling enterprise applications on an unmatched scale.
While acknowledging Bitcoin and its creators as the pioneers of blockchain technology (“we have to give them credit”), Le Hors used his keynote spotlight at the Amsterdam RAI conference centre to reaffirm the company’s intent to bring full-service blockchain solutions to the masses while underlining the company’s motivations for entering the space.
“What got us started was the realisation that underneath was a technology that is much more broadly applicable [than cryptocurrency].”
“Businesses require lots of tracking; ledgers have existed for 500 years and they are nothing new
“Blockchain for business is taking this notion of the ledger into a new era, the notion of one ledger for all the transactions across all businesses,” he said.
Le Hors said IBM went through an exercise to find out how to make blockchain “usable” for businesses, ultimately deciding that four factors would prove key drivers, including participants being able to choose which assets to share; having a clear idea of who they are dealing with; the ability to give provable endorsement; and privacy and confidentiality.
These ideas spawned the idea to develop a solution in the context of enterprises, he says, with blockchain fitting into the current “race-for-innovation” zeitgeist; “Blockchain has the potential to reduce the friction, it takes us to a different level when talking about optimising business workflows.”
While IBM now claims to have over 400 blockchain projects on the boil built on Hyperledger technology – spanning finance, public sector, retail, insurance, logistics and manufacturing – none are yet fully out in the wild. Le Hors says the company is “still learning” about the technology but “there are use cases in every industry you can think of”, including those that cross multiple industries.
Interestingly, IBM’s view of industry regulators, which have always widely been considered parties more likely to bar the technology’s adoption, are that they are the ones who much more likely to be open to it, given the ability to be able to monitor certain activities among all companies operating in their sector.
“Regulators are the driving forces,” said le Hors.
Interested in hearing leading global brands discuss subjects like this in person? Find out more at the Blockchain Expo World Series, Global, Europe and North America.
