Today Business Insider reported that IBM is working on blockchain solutions for dozens very large global clients. The client businesses range from retail chains to banks to food suppliers to trading companies to payment providers to international shippers. IBM is demonstrating that blockchain goes far beyond cryptocurrencies.
Using blockchain allows companies to micro-track both physical and digital assets. Such as, physical products can be tracked from factory to point-of-sale. For example, a consumer could verify everywhere his “fresh” salmon had been by scanning a bar code attached to the fish. He would be able to see its journey from a fisherman’s boat to the packing plant, to the transit route point, to his local grocery fresh food department. Or a cut of beef could be tracked from farm, to butcher shop to tabletop. This micro-level product traceability will also allow food companies to quickly track down the location of food borne contamination so they can stop outbreaks before the spread. Every time a product shipment entered a new transit point would be recorded. If a particular head of lettuce from a particular store is identified to have caused salmonella then following the blockchain will allow the supplier to identify the few points where the product could have been contaminated. Blockchain solutions will also make it much more difficult to falsify inventory tracking data.
Although typically cryptocurrency block chains are on a public ledger that allows anyone to view its activity, the IBM designs probably will not be fully public. Cryptocurrencies need to have a public ledger, but private blockchains are under no restriction to be public. The company’s and consumer’s needs will dictate if their blockchain will be fully public, fully private, or some mix of both. For example, a consumer who wants to buy that same piece of salmon from a particular river, and know how long it was in transport before it was displayed for landed in his grocery store will have to be able to view that data on a public blockchain. But a payment processor might have no need (or no desire) to make their payment transaction details public and so those would be kept on a private centralized blockchain.
The awareness of the potential uses of blockchain is growing and IBM already has its fingers deeply into the pie.
