Blockchain - overview
The Blockchain Professional Interest Community (PIC) at IBM Research seeks to spearhead relationships with external academic communities by hosting workshops and conferences, coordinating seminars, and mentoring new researchers. The primary mission of the Blockchain PIC is to increase IBM Research’s participation and visibility among the global blockchain research community. The Blockchain PIC also serves as a platform for coordinating activities related to blockchain research within IBM Research.
Our ultimate goal is to accelerate the development of technologies that create a single shared ledger for recording non-alterable transactions from beginning to end, thereby reducing vulnerabilities associated with the use of multiple ledgers.
The Blockchain PIC is part of the Solutions and Mathematical Sciences Pillar at IBM Research.
Hyperledger Fabric
Several novel Blockchain features contributed to the Hyperledger project were a result of break-throughs that were acheived at IBM Research (transactional anonymity, endorsers vs validators, chain-code confidentiality, etc.). Some of the broader areas of focus here are as follows:
- Distributed Computing : Performance and Scalability Aspects, Distributed Systems Consensus Protocols, Novel ways to reach consensus (e.g. Endorsers vs Validators)
- Data Management – Data partitioning, Data synchronization (w/ ext. DB), File-systems (replicated storage), Checkpoint/Archive methods, etc.
- Security and Cryptography –Transactional anonymity/confidentiality, Chain-to-chain txns, etc.