This is the first installment in a three-part series. Blockchain-based applications will revolutionize the way people and organizations interact with each other and the Internet of Things (IoT) — and rightfully so. Based on the foundational principles of trust, blockchain has the potential to solve real-life business challenges within every sector. Permissio

Since its appearance in 2009, the concept of the blockchain has expanded past its initial use as the base of bitcoin into many other areas. By its nature, this distributed database provides the perfect platform for the management of cryptocurrency. But its features have attracted the attention of experts interested in a broad array of other applications. Pos

Since it first appeared in 2009, the bitcoin network has grown significantly. The digital currency’s recent surge in value has sparked discussions within the security space about the benefits of blockchain, a technology that promotes the type of trust that is sorely lacking in some digital transactions. Today, people are exchanging real money for cryp

The fintech industry is changing due to both internal forces and external demands. Both financial institutions and their customers are wary of changes that can affect security and, therefore, the state of their money. Financial industry chief information security officers (CISOs) need to be aware of these key trends and understand how they affect their busi

We all remember the devastating WannaCry ransomware attack that struck organizations around the world in May 2017. The attack spread at a rate of almost 3,600 computers per hour, or about one per second. When all was said and done, the ransomware infected more than 300,000 devices. Many victims simply paid the ransom to retrieve their locked files. This only

Sometimes you could be forgiven for thinking that the incessant overuse of the word ‘disruptive’ these days could do with some, well, disrupting of its own. So much is written, presented and marketed around apparently ‘disruptive’ use of technologies like AI, IoT and of course blockchain, when much of it could perhaps be better described as foundation innova

The definition of fintech, or financial technology, has grown in leaps and bounds thanks to all the disruption it has brought. Any services, aside from mainstream banking and financial tools, that aim to improve personal or commercial finance through innovation, education, banking, investment, payment, advisory or blockchain can be classified as subsets of

Blockchain news is seemingly everywhere these days, and for good reason. The technology behind bitcoin holds a lot of promise for all sorts of use cases — some of them having nothing to do with digital payments. Over the course of last year, a lot of ideas regarding the technology were tried out, but “during 2017, many of them will be discarded,̶

There is much chatter about blockchain and how it could impact the way we do business today. Arvind Krishna, senior vice president at IBM Research, said that “over the past two decades, the internet has revolutionized many aspects of business and society … Blockchain could bring to those processes the openness and efficiency we have come to expec

Every business and social transaction is carried out by people. People are known by their identities. Hence, identity drives every business and social interaction. In today’s digital age, an individual’s identity is not defined by a single attribute such as a name, address or user ID. Rather, it is a collection of attributes including, but not li

Financial institutions, real estate brokers, law firms and other organizations with an interest in trust-based transactions will be swarming blockchain in 2017, and you can bet regulators will be right behind them. The end of 2016 marks blockchain’s evolution from niche curiosity to corporate up-and-comer as institutions seek ways to benefit from reduc

When I became Global Blockchain Lead for Security Services at IBM in January 2016, I had no idea what kind of year awaited me. Just a few highlights: In February, IBM introduced developer services on the Bluemix cloud to enable rapid creation and monitoring of blockchain applications. In April, IBM launched a new set of highly secure blockchain services on

 Blockchain.info, the world’s most popular Bitcoin wallet and Block Explorer service went down this week due to a DNS Hijacking attack. Crypto-currencies continue to be a privileged target of cyber criminals, Bitcoin wallets and services provided by many companies operating in the industries have been targeted by criminal organizations as never before.

Most people know alternative currencies such as bitcoin make use of a distributed transaction ledger technology called blockchain. But what isn’t well-known is how numerous businesses are investing heavily in blockchains for noncurrency applications. Blockchain Technology Poised to Grow Last month, the Linux Foundation announced a major new initiative

Ethereum is a system for decentralized applications that uses blockchains, but in a completely different manner than how they are used in bitcoin. The Basic Framework Ethereum has at its core a way to apply arbitrary rules for ownership, transaction formats and state transition functions — taking both the state of a blockchain and a transaction for that chai