IBM – together with a group of other companies – has announced the development of a new blockchain-based crude oil trade finance platform.
This group also includes Trafigura and Natixis bank that decided to join the creation of this new tool.
The platform was created by using code from the Linux Foundation-led Hyperledger project. Also, IBM’s BlueMix cloud hosting service is utilized.
Thanks to this trade finance platform, users can view transaction data on the blockchain that also hosts documentation and updates on shipments, deliveries and payments.
Natixis is also a member of the R3 distributed ledger consortium and isn’t new to blockchain-related trade finance applications because it also joined the “Digital Trade Chain” project a few months ago.
According to, Natixis’ head of global energy and commodities, Arnaud Stevens, the bank believes the technolgy as a high potential of bringing down expense and boosting procedural transparency.
These are his words:
“We want to use blockchain to optimize the antiquated arena of commodity trade finance. The current process is paper and labor intensive, we have multiple friction points with high processing costs and limited automation. Distributed ledger technology brings some much-needed innovation into our industry.”
This news is only the latest related to projects that aims at bridging of the blockchain and trade finance worlds.
Also, we have to say that this is an application that attracted much interest from a wide range of companies and governments worldwide, including Dubai.
In the meantime there are also several other worldwide banks that are continuing to push ahead with related projects focused on the blockchain and commodities trade.
A few days ago, in fact, Dutch bank ING is working on an oil trading pilot built on the Ethereum blockchain that has already conducted live transactions.
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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revealed today its intent to study Blockchain Healthcare Applications.
The American agency who approves and regulates medical products announced its decision in a press release published by IBM Watson Health, that will team together with the FDA.
IBM will study how data from electronic medical records, clinical trials and health data from devices can be better shared and audited by using the distributed ledger.
To do so, it is not clear if IBM and the FDA will use a private blockchain or the Bitcoin one. Details may be published during next months.
Initial tests will be focused on clinical trials and real-world evidence data related to oncological data.
However, the two companies positioned the trial as one that could one day mitigate the potential of patient privacy breaches during electric exchanges.
The official press release revealed:
“By keeping an audit trail of all transactions on an unalterable distributed ledger, blockchain technology establishes accountability and transparency in the data exchange process.”
According to the press release, the IBM and the FDA will work together for a two-years period and their goal is publishing their researches in 2017.
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Also, at the beginning of 2016, Chris Ferris, CTO at IBM, became the project leader of the aforesaid open-source blockchain project.
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“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.
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