IBM Blockchain

What is IBM Blockchain?

IBM Blockchain is a game-changing technology venue that allows companies to streamline their operations, cut costs, and enhance efficiency while maintaining the highest level of security and privacy.

What distinguishes IBM Blockchain from other blockchain solutions is its ability to scale up to meet the demands of enterprise-level applications. With its broad range of different tools, services, and blockchain models, IBM Blockchain empowers developers to create and manage the logistical aspect of their businesses effortlessly.

IBM Blockchain is transforming businesses’ operations by fostering real-time collaboration with increased trust and transparency. The transformative power of IBM blockchain is already being harnessed across diverse sectors, ranging from agriculture and gastronomy to finance and healthcare.

Like any other blockchain, IBM Blockchain is a distributed ledger system that uses advanced cryptographic techniques — such as digital currencies or cryptocurrency, to name a few — to create an unalterable record of transactions, making it resistant to fraudulent activities.

Who created IBM Blockchain?

IBM Blockchain is the brainchild of IBM Research, a distinguished division of IBM that is renowned for its cutting-edge technology innovations.

Drawing upon their vast expertise in distributed systems, cryptography, and blockchain, the IBM Research team set out to create a highly secure and scalable blockchain solution.

The result of their efforts is a genuinely outstanding platform with a vast ecosystem of different prominent on-chain solutions, services and models.

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Where is IBM Blockchain located?

IBM Blockchain is a cloud-based service that currently has 46 physical data centers around the world. IBM Blockchain’s physical storage has top-tier security. Users can be sure that their data is protected against fire, loss, and theft, with compliance with all security regulations.

IBM’s data storage locations can be found everywhere around the globe, including Asia, the US, and Europe.

How does IBM Blockchain work?

At its core, IBM Blockchain works on the same fundamental principles as any other distributed ledger technology. However, IBM’s platform is designed to address the unique needs of enterprise-scale applications, delivering unparalleled performance, scalability, and security.

The platform is built on the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain development platform, an open-source project that the Linux Foundation maintains.

IBM offers three deployment options for its blockchain solution:

1. On-premises
2. Third-party cloud
3. Hybrid multi-cloud, empowered by Kubernetes

This flexibility allows businesses to tailor their blockchain deployment to their specific needs, leveraging the power of cloud computing while maintaining control over their data.

Developers can use various tools to create and deploy applications on IBM Blockchain, including a VSCode extension (COBOL programming with VSCode) and a range of other development tools.

IBM’s blockchain solution has been designed to make it easy for developers to get up quickly, with a range of pre-built templates and smart contract libraries available to streamline the development process.

IBM Supply Chain Intelligence Suite

IBM Supply Chain Intelligence Suite is a powerful service offered by IBM that helps organizations gain greater visibility and control over their supply chain operations. Powered by artificial intelligence, this solution offers three key benefits: common situational awareness, actionable insights, and smarter workflows.

• With common situational awareness, IBM Supply Chain Intelligence Suite enables organizations to gain a unified view of their supply chain operations, breaking down data silos and improving team collaboration. This unified view makes it easier to identify bottlenecks, mitigate risk, and optimize operations for greater efficiency and profitability.
• Actionable insights by IBM Supply Chain Intelligence Suite take things a step further, providing detailed analytics and insights that enable businesses to make informed decisions based on real-time data. These analytics and insights include predictive analytics, anomaly detection, and trend analysis, allowing companies to proactively address issues and identify opportunities for growth and improvement.
• Finally, smarter workflows help streamline supply chain operations and reduce the need for manual intervention.

Blockchain Transparent Supply

Creating an efficient and transparent supply chain is one of the most significant challenges enterprises face across virtually all industries. According to a survey by APQC and Supply Chain Management Review, over 78% of participants identified increased visibility of real-time end-to-end product movement as the most significant benefit of blockchain technology.

IBM’s blockchain solution offers clients a range of tools to address supply chain issues in various market scenarios, including volatile demand, globally diversified supply chains, and more.

IBM Blockchain Transparent Supply is a comprehensive solution that provides clients with core capabilities and add-on modules to meet their specific needs. Its key features include end-to-end supply chain tracking, smart contract management, and secure document sharing. By leveraging blockchain technology, businesses can create a more efficient and transparent supply chain, reducing costs and mitigating risk.

Case studies

Farmer Connect & Coffee industry

Farmer Connect’s entrance into the coffee industry has been revolutionary. The company has brought much-needed transparency to the notoriously complex coffee supply chain by connecting coffee growers and customers. Farmer Connet uses IBM blockchain to bridge the gap between consumers and smallholder coffee farmers.

Dave Behrends, the company’s founder, believes that traceability is the future of coffee, and Farmer Connect has made it a reality. Through blockchain technology, end customers can trace their coffee back to its origin. This level of transparency gives customers peace of mind and helps small farmers get a fair price for their beans.

The impact of Farmer Connect’s technology has already been felt, with European retail giant HEMA launching a new traceable coffee line in partnership with the company.

Atea’s seafood provenance network

Atea, a prominent IT infrastructure provider in the Nordic and Balkan countries, has partnered with IBM Food Trust to revolutionize the Norwegian aquaculture industry with its seafood provenance network.

By integrating IBM’s Transparent Blockchain Supply solution, Atea provided greater transparency and traceability of seafood products —  a significant challenge for the industry.

The blockchain-based system enables stakeholders to track the journey of seafood products from farm to plate, providing information on their origin, transportation, and storage conditions.

Atea’s seafood provenance network can help ensure more sustainable and responsible aquaculture practices by offering real-time insights into the supply chain.

Sonoco and IBM

Sonoco, a global leader in sustainable packaging solutions, partnered with IBM to develop the PharmaPortal, a blockchain-based solution for secure and efficient medication supply chains.

PharmaPortal caters to the needs of the pharmaceutical industry, especially for temperature- and loss-sensitive products such as vaccines and medicines. The platform leverages blockchain technology to create a transparent, tamper-proof system that optimizes the pharmaceutical supply chain.

With PharmaPortal, distributors can make more accurate and real-time decisions, thus improving the lives of their customers by ensuring medication is delivered on time and in optimal condition.

The need for a blockchain-based solution and its relevance was very clearly demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has put insane pressure on pharmaceutical supply chains.

InventoryNet

InventoryNet is a noteworthy case study focused on enhancing supply chain processes through advanced technology. Unlike previously mentioned solutions, the platform is exclusively designed for B2B use cases, primarily focusing on logistics optimization and improving supply chain visibility.

Among other things, its advanced capabilities have resulted in a 10% reduction in excess inventory and a 10% decrease in the risks of counterfeiting while also increasing effective manufacturing capacity by 5%.

This innovative solution is ideal for businesses of all sizes across different industries looking to optimize their supply chain processes and stay ahead of the competition.

ConsumerGoodsNet

ConsumerGoodsNet is IBM’s proposed solution for the consumer goods industry, aimed at increasing transparency and traceability in the supply chain.

While there is no publicly available information on its real-world implementation, the model promises significant benefits, including a 35% reduction in counterfeits, a 50% reduction in supplier turnover, and a 7% increase in spend per customer.

While it remains to be seen how successful ConsumerGoodsNet will be in practice, the potential benefits make it an attractive solution for companies in the consumer goods sector looking to optimize their supply chain operations.

PharmaNet

PharmaNet is a proposed model for an end-to-end chain-of-custody network in the pharmaceutical industry.

While the solution model has yet to be implemented, it aims to improve supply chain efficiency by streamlining business operations and inventory management and providing useful features like shortages management, auto-replenishment, and anti-counterfeiting measures. This model can help reduce errors, increase transparency, and improve patient outcomes by tracking products from the manufacturer to the end user.

The pharmaceutical industry faces significant challenges in maintaining the integrity of its supply chain, making solutions like PharmaNet particularly valuable.

IBM Blockchain Platform

IBM Blockchain Platform is a complete enterprise-ready blockchain platform that provides all the necessary tools to design, develop, and deploy blockchain solutions quickly and easily.

One of the key features of the IBM Blockchain Platform is the Hyperledger Fabric support edition, which provides enterprise-level support and service-level agreements (SLAs) for clients developing solutions on Hyperledger Fabric, the leading open-source blockchain platform for businesses.

Hyperledger Fabric Support Edition

Hyperledger Fabric is a popular choice for enterprise blockchain applications because of its modular architecture, flexibility, and scalability. It allows developers to build private, permissible blockchain networks that are secure, efficient, and transparent.

With the IBM Blockchain Platform’s Hyperledger Fabric support edition, clients can leverage IBM’s expertise and resources to accelerate their blockchain projects and mitigate risks associated with developing and deploying new blockchain solutions.

IBM is a founder and premier member of the Hyperledger open-source community, using Hyperledger Fabric in its solutions and working with the community on behalf of its clients to incorporate changes or fixes.

The IBM Blockchain Platform’s Hyperledger Fabric support edition provides clients peace of mind by offering 24×7 support and SLAs for their blockchain solutions. In addition, IBM Certified Hyperledger Fabric images are included with IBM Support for Hyperledger Fabric, ensuring clients can access the latest, secure, and reliable versions of Hyperledger Fabric.

Case studies

Retail

The Home Depot has implemented IBM Blockchain technology to improve its vendor communication. With over 2,295 US, Canada, and Mexico stores, the retailer must guarantee that the right products are available at the right time.

The retailer’s implementation of IBM’s blockchain technology provides real-time visibility. Home Depot and its vendors can address the issue immediately if a variance occurs at any point in the supply chain.

The new process has significantly improved efficiency for vendors and The Home Depot team, allowing the retailer to focus on other ways to improve the customer experience within its stores.

Banking

Lygon, a consortium of Australian and New Zealand banks and technology firms, has digitized the paper-based process of issuing bank guarantees using blockchain technology.

The blockchain platform, powered by IBM, provides a contemporary, digital solution that all involved parties in the multi-bank guarantee process can use. By using blockchain’s distributed ledger technology, the platform standardizes and manages bank guarantees for all organizations involved, including issuance, amendments, cancellations, and claims.

The platform was successfully designed to minimize the risk of fraud, reduce the time to create a guarantee and simplify the workflow for all parties.

Energy & Transportation

Vertrax, a supply chain management company, partnered with Chateaux Software, an IBM Business Partner, to launch the Vertrax Blockchain, the first multi-cloud blockchain solution built on the IBM Blockchain Platform and deployed on AWS.

The Vertrax Blockchain provides transparency and visibility into the oil and gas distribution supply chain by utilizing innovative solutions like IoT sonar sensors. This technology allows real-time data sharing among supply chain participants to make critical supply chain decisions quickly.

The Vertrax Blockchain solves the problem of lack of visibility in the supply chain, particularly during disruptions, which can result in significant financial and reputation loss.

IBM Blockchain Services and Consulting

IBM Blockchain Services and Consulting offers an enterprise-grade distributed system for businesses that want to use blockchain technology. Their proven design methodology helps clients achieve positive business outcomes and build a scalable, multiparty workflow for their purposes.

IBM Blockchain Services has three primary design services: governance, business value, and technology.

The benefits of using IBM Blockchain Services and Consulting include increased operational agility and speed to value, cost takeout and risk mitigation, and new monetization opportunities.

With IBM Blockchain Services, businesses can optimize multiparty workflows around trusted data, automate reconciliation tasks, increase accountability, and minimize disputes.

Case studies

Vaccine distribution

IBM Blockchain Services and Consulting provides valuable enterprise blockchain services for healthcare and life sciences. It addresses crucial issues, including privacy, interoperability, and supply chain traceability, and offers solutions such as health credential verification, finding new suppliers, and ensuring medication efficacy.

The great need for good supply chains was especially felt during the coronavirus pandemic when millions of doses of vaccines had to be delivered all over the world unexpectedly. The logistic processes in the pharmaceutical industry were under unprecedented strain, which IBM solutions would have helped to cope with.

These solutions (PharmaNet, Sonoco, and IBM) provide reliable and accurate data for multiple parties to collaborate while maintaining data access control in vaccine distribution during covid pandemic.

IPwe

IPwe, an intellectual property (IP) transaction platform, has created the world’s first blockchain-powered patent platform. IPwe created the Global Patent Registry (GPR) to increase visibility and flexibility within the complex patent market for buyers and sellers by creating the framework for constituting patents as NFTs and storing the records on a blockchain network.

The GPR is a freely accessible registry, the first in the world, that combines IBM Blockchain technology with IBM Watson AI solutions to remove the barriers to understanding the critical aspects of patent information.

IPwe uses AI capabilities to analyze millions of patents circulating globally and generate summaries and reports to help users identify lucrative opportunities while steering clear of potential commercial risks. The technology helps remove the fundamental problems of inaccurate data, outdated ownership records, and a lack of transparency in the IP ecosystem.

An ecosystem to tokenize patents permits the intellectual property to gear as business assets, allowing patents more straightforward to license, sell and commercialize. IPwe and IBM seek to transform corporate patents with next-generation NFTs using IBM blockchain.

Golden State Foods

Golden State Foods, a large supplier to the Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) and retail industries, is partnering with its supply chain partners and IBM Food Trust to track and trace food freshness through a solution combining blockchain, cognitive analytics, and IoT.

Initially, the pilot program is limited to a few Golden State Foods’ client locations. Still, the solution may one day deliver newfound confidence and radically improved operations at a much larger scale.

The GSF blockchain solution converges various technologies through IBM Food Trust to track, trace, and monitor the freshness of the product as it goes through its supply chain journey. It also provides inventory visibility at all times throughout the shelf life of the item.

we.trade

we.trade is a digital platform that simplifies cross-border trading by connecting buyers, sellers, banks, insurers, and logistics organizations in a network that reduces counterparty risk, automate transactions, and integrates the end-to-end trade ecosystem.

Based on the open-source Hyperledger Fabric from The Linux Foundation, every transaction is recorded using distributed ledger technology, ensuring security and transparency. The wetrade blockchain fintech trade finance platform uses blockchain smart contracts to add AI expertise and automatically trigger typical user actions, such as sending a payment.

Working with IBM Services, the platform has quickly grown huge on the global market using iterative and agile development processes. Today, we.trade’s transaction volume is surging, and it’s expanding the network by adding more banks, insurers, and logistics companies.

Syniverse

Syniverse and IBM have collaborated to pilot a blockchain solution to improve the efficiency of clearing and settlement services for mobile operators. Syniverse and IBM complete successful blockchain solution pilot with Orange Group and MTS.

The solution leverages the smart-contract capability of blockchain technology to facilitate instant validation of wholesale billing and charging processes, reducing disputes and increasing operational efficiency.

The solution demonstrates the GSMA Unified Data Record (UDR), a global industry standard for charging settlements designed to support the proliferation of devices expected from 5G and IoT technology.

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