IBM announces Hyperledger Fabric-based Blockchain-as-a-service

It was a big day for IBM today, as it unveiled its first Blockchain-as-a-service. Unveiled at the Interconnect conference, this commercial blockchain service is based on the open-source Hyperledger Fabric 1.0, built by The Linux Foundation.

In a nutshell, IBM Blockchain allows customers to build their own secure blockchain networks. It took the company a year to bring it from the initial announcement to a finished product.

Blockchain is a technology built to track the movement of bitcoin. It is completely transparent, and virtually impossible to fiddle with. With IBM Blockchain, companies could build their own networks, share the information within them freely, without fear of anyone else seeing it or tampering with the data inside.

Jerry Cuomo, IBM's vice-president of blockchain technologies, told TechCrunch that IBM, together with a couple of other companies, noticed the need for a blockchain-governing technology.

"Some time ago, we and several other members of the industry came to view that there needs to be a group looking after, governing and shepherding technology around blockchain for serious business," Cuomo told TechCrunch.

Cuomo also added that there is no guarantee IBM’s blockchain service is impenetrable, but said that the company has taken some "serious safeguards" to protect it.

For starters, the ledger is isolated from the general cloud computing environment. Then, a security container for the ledger was built. Also, tamper-responsive hardware was introduced, which is capable of shutting itself down if it notices an attempted breach.

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