It’s plain to see on the CordaCon agenda for this coming Thursday that IBM is an event sponsor and partner of enterprise blockchain firm R3. The same day there’s an R3 strategic partnership announcement by R3’s CEO, which is most likely about IBM.
So here’s a little speculation about the nature of the partnership [Update: this article was written a couple of days before the formal announcement, and the speculation was only partially correct]. My first candidate would be hardware encryption, an area where IBM has expertise. Last year R3 started a new technical push beyond blockchain focusing on enabling confidential computing with its Conclave project. The aim is for companies to collaborate in data sharing without revealing information to competitors. That’s useful for fraud detection, market insights and more. R3’s CTO will be talking about confidential computing at the conference this morning.
Confidential computing leverages hardware enclaves, which ringfence the data from prying eyes. Three of the key hardware providers are Intel, IBM and AMD. R3 already has a long standing partnership with Intel for its SGX offering. But IBM has a chip as well.
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