International Business Machines Inc. (IBM), the company which has given the world some of the best technologies and computing machines has reached another milestone. This time, the company has adopted blockchain technology to create smart contracts.
IBM has been working on blockchain technology for a while now. The research and development so far has been focused on developing bitcoin 2.0 related applications. In the coming months we can expect the company to release an open source software platform that enables users to create smart contracts on blockchain.
Blockchain is the technology that has been powering the bitcoin. It was originally developed as a decentralized ledger that keeps a record of all the bitcoin transactions happening across the bitcoin network. Blockchain technology was responsible to make digital currency a reality by solving the issue of double spend. The double spend issue was responsible for thwarting all the earlier attempts to create digital currency, until Satoshi Nakamoto introduced bitcoin.
Blockchain is known to be a secure, encrypted ledger that is virtually foolproof and anything once uploaded into the blockchain, stays indefinitely on it. This valuable property of blockchain has been utilized for other applications apart from verifying and recording bitcoin transactions. The non-transactional applications of blockchain has been designated as Bitcoin 2.0.
IBM’s blockchain based smart contracts will be using the basic bitcoin codebase, minus its own cryptocurrency. Also, researchers at IBM have taken extra care to ensure that all the information stored on these smart contracts will remain private. The new smart contract creation platform will also have an option for companies to incorporate they own set of business rules depending up the nature of contract.
Bitcoin and most of the other altcoins were developed as open source projects and the same has been followed by IBMs Smart Contracts software platform as well.