IBM, also known as International Businesses Machines Corporation, has announced their plans to adopt the blockchain technology and focus on the active development of decentralized systems.
Since the beginning of the blockchain hype train in 2015, IBM has consistently funded and supported the development of blockchain-based technologies in collaboration with other major corporations and financial institutions.
As the interest towards the blockchain technology from leading banks and financial establishments continue to rise, IBM plans to dedicate a significant portion of its resources and capital for the development of business transactions on a private blockchain network.
The IBM development team believes that the blockchain technology will grant corporations advantages over traditional databases in markets including securities trading, trade finance, retail banking, and maintenance of public records.
Criticisms From Bitcoin Experts
In the cryptocurrency industry, particularly the Bitcoin market, the term “blockchain” has become an irksome buzzword for many experts, investors, entrepreneurs, startups, and developers.
When the IBM development team and the corporation’s Portfolio Marketing IBM Systems vice president Pierre Liger announced the active development of enterprise-grade blockchain networks, Counterparty Foundation Community Director Chris DeRose and OB1 CEO Brian Hoffman immediately criticized the company’s desperate attempt of maintaining its relevance in the cryptocurrency scene.
DeRose emphasized the genuine denotation of the blockchain technology and its actual purpose in a decentralized network. DeRose stated, “If you think blockchain is big, you should check out Database. It’s going to revolutionize all the buzzwords.”
Essentially, the blockchain hype was created by the world’s leading banks and financial institutions to mitigate the damage Bitcoin has done to current vulnerable and inefficient banking systems by providing innovative, secure, cost-efficient, and decentralized mechanism of processing cross-border transactions.
The purpose of Bitcoin is to provide a decentralized and secure ecosystem in which anyone can transact anywhere at any given time without any boundaries and restrictions. Once this nature of decentralization is taken away, a blockchain network simply becomes a traditional database in which a central authority needs to protect the servers with its own computing power, making them vulnerable to security breaches and hacking attacks.
Given that banks and financial institutions have miserably failed in experimenting with the blockchain technology, IBM’s move towards the blockchain technology is an appropriate initiative to take from a business standpoint.