As a technology pioneering innovation, blockchain attracts companies of every size, funding and geography. According one study by PwC, 84 percent of executives surveyed said their companies are “actively involved” with the technology.  We’ve seen companies in every industry — from supply chain to healthcare — drawing on their subject matter expertise in the field and bringing major players together.

As a startup, you have the advantage of moving swiftly to develop your blockchain solutions, but you may need the additional support of deep technical experts and a scalable enterprise-grade platform. By finding the right partner, you can leverage the latest features of IBM Blockchain Platform and The Linux Foundation’s open source Hyperledger Fabric, and lean on our own expert lab services to bring the right players to the table.

Deploy the IBM Blockchain Platform across multiple environments

We’d like to support your blockchain startup story. With a full blockchain technology stack including intuitive developer tools and an unmatched services team, we have everything your startup needs to make your blockchain idea come to life. Here is a step-by-step guide:

1. Choose the right blockchain framework

The success of a solution starts with the right blockchain framework that provides the appropriate permissions, flexibility, and performance to support the use case. We’ve co-created and chosen Hyperledger Fabric as our underlying distributed ledger framework because we believe in its immutability, provenance, and transparency.

To build on the framework, we’ve created the IBM Blockchain Platform VS Code extension — a free integrated developer environment with everything you need to get started building out your blockchain use case. It’s filled with tutorials, code samples, and testing functions to help you along the development process.

2. Pick a multicloud enterprise platform

We believe that cloud and data residency requirements shouldn’t be a barrier to growing a blockchain network, so we’ve created the IBM Blockchain Platform to support multicloud and flexible deployments. We offer pay-as-you-grow pricing based on the amount of resources allocated.

This means you can focus on building your network and developing your application, while maintaining complete control of and optimizing the resource utilization of your network.

3. Lean on technical experts

While many industries and ideas are ripe for a blockchain solution, solutions can’t come to life without the right technical experts. Aim to have a blockchain technical expert on your team who can speak to blockchain architecture and flesh out your blockchain proof of concept (POC).

We offer a six-week pro-bono Digital Mentorship Program to blockchain startups who want to consult with a technical expert. We’ve seen that the startups who come ready with a blockchain POC excel at achieving their funding and getting partners on board. Additionally, we offer an Accelerator Program to help progress blockchain startups to their final MVP builds.

4. Partner to gain more support

Partnering with us opens up opportunities for co-marketing and additional credits. Startups that qualify for Partner with IBM can access additional resources as well as help shape our platform through feedback.

The bottom line — if you’re disrupting your industry with blockchain we want to support your use case. As we continue supporting innovation and grow blockchain as a technology, we’d like to hear from you — the ones making it all happen.

From time to time, we invite industry thought leaders, academic experts and partners, to share their opinions and insights on current trends in blockchain to the Blockchain Pulse blog. While the opinions in these blog posts are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of IBM, this blog strives to welcome all points of view to the conversation.

How to get started with IBM Blockchain now