‘We’re All in on Blockchain’, says IBM

“We are all in on Blockchain”: these were the words of IBM Director John Wolpert during the today Blockchain Conference in San Francisco. According to Wolpert the blockchain needs a more collaborative approach, which is not always guaranteed by the blockchain developers.

So it seems that the worldwide company IBM wants to ensure itself a leading role in the market solutions related to the blockchain.

In fact, IBM is working on the Hyperledger Project, an open-source blockchain led by The Linux Foundation. Presented in December, this project stars thirty companies including ABN Amro, CME Group, Red Hat and several blockchain startups.

“It’s amazing how many smart and genius people are behind bitcoin, but they miss some logic here. You don’t need to go from trusted to trustless on everything. I think that’s an honest disagreement. The Internet is a permissioned walled garden. Anyone heard of ICAAN [Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers]? It’s permissive, but it’s permissioned”, said Wolpert.

Hyperledger Project’s goal, he continued, is to be an evolution of the first generation projects such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, that gather all the best projects that leverage on the blockchain together with all the stakeholders that will potentially use such technology. This is necessary if we want to have a widely used transactional protocol.

“It has to be immutable and modular. It can’t be this is the consensus algorithm, this is the token, all of that has to be modular. It has to be scalable. Interledger-ing is important. You have to inter-op between chains and different things”, he said.

During his speech Wolpert also emphasized IBM’s experience in consensus algorithms and distributed computing during the last 30 years.

It’s thanks to such experience that IBM was able to conduct the Hyperledger Project, that Wolpert sees as the only way to bring all the different stakeholders to the same table and make them work together to build and open-source blockchain platform that can be used in many different areas, as it is for Linux.

“We’ve been doing projects on every kind of blockchain. We’ve been doing that for a couple years and now we have a whole unit. We announced [we worked with] the Linux Foundation […] At that point, we went all in on blockchain”.About the author: Amelia Tomasicchio is a writer and a journalist of Bitcoin-related news and articles. She started writing about Bitcoin in 2014 and she graduated in Rome with an essay about movie industry related to Bitcoin.