Blockchain technology—which creates a permanent and transparent record of transactions—has the potential to alleviate inefficiencies across industries.
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Download the infographicHuman progress has been a steady march against friction. From the introduction of money to replace barter and the gradual replacement of wax seals by digital signatures, we have seen steady progress facilitated by digital innovations.
Since the internet, some frictions fell while others rose. The friction of imperfect information, for example, took on added importance in an era that promotes transparency by business partners and consumers alike. New frictions like cybercrime threaten to cripple even the most successful organizations.
Today, three types of frictions predominate: information, interaction, and innovation. In varying degrees to different industries, they’re a drag on efficiency. A distributed ledger for business networks based on blockchain technology has the potential to eliminate these frictions.
Distributed ledgers can become the foundation of a robust system of trust, a decentralized platform for massive collaboration. With that, intermediaries will be shuttered. Assets that were once dormant can be exploited. Profit pools can shift and be redistributed. New services delivered on blockchain networks can accelerate access and liberate those that were once locked out of efficient value creation to fully participate in an all-in economy.
Distributed ledgers like blockchains are shared and write business transactions to an unbreakable chain that is a permanent record, viewable by the parties in a transaction. Blockchains shift the lens from information held by an individual owner to the cross-entity history of an asset or transaction.
Our research shows that once that happens, five attributes fundamental to blockchains have the potential to vaporize the frictions that hold us back today. In this paper, we explore those attributes and how blockchain can facilitate a new economic equation for organizations, trust, and value exchange.
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Meet the Authors:
Veena Pureswaran, Global Blockchain Research Leader, IBM Institute for Business Value, Peter J. Korsten, Partner and Vice President, Global Leader Thought Leadership and Eminence, Sarah Diamond, Global Managing Director, Brigid McDermott, Vice President, Blockchain Business Development, Jim Brill, Director, Marketing and Communications, Financial Services Sector, Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow, Vice President, Blockchain Technologies, Ramesh Gopinath, Vice President, Blockchain Solutions and Research, John McLean, CTO Europe and Vice President, Blockchain Technologies, Shanker Ramamurthy, Chief Technology Officer and General Manager, Strategy and Market Development, IBM Industry Platforms, James Wallis, Vice President, Global Payments Industry and Blockchain, Arvind Krishna, Senior Vice President, Cloud and Cognitive Software, IBM