Tag: blockchain

While public blockchain networks, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, capture many daily headlines, looking back at 2018, private blockchain networks made headway and could prove to be a game changer in financial services, supply chain, government and healthcare industries.

And as business and technology leaders move closer to another year of high stakes digital transformations and the big IT decisions that power them, we’re taking a closer look at the technologies that will make the biggest digital business impact in 2019.

The emergence of blockchain cloud technology is no surprise. Blockchain distributed ledger solutions for secure transactional processing, the Internet of Things (IoT) and a number of other applications are ripe for major cloud brokers to provide a variety of Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) offerings. But what is a blockchain cloud in relation to other types of cloud platforms?

Innovation and great ideas can be instantly shared worldwide in the digital era, but even the most seamless electronic collaborations can’t replace the value of eye contact, a handshake and the chance to trade opinions and insights with respected peers face-to-face. That kind of information exchange is often inspiring, and Equinix and The Economic Council were looking to enable it when we recently partnered to host a delegation of German IT executives and members of the German and EU parliament in Silicon Valley.

Blockchain is one of those exciting innovative technologies that plays right into the Equinix DNA. We see a clear path on how Equinix will contribute to its successful adoption and deployment by enabling the global reach of blockchain systems, interconnecting blockchain supplier and consumer ecosystems, and integrating new blockchain technologies with existing legacy infrastructures.

The same characteristics that make blockchain essential for cryptocurrencies are what make it so valuable for the IoT. Blockchain gives users confidence that sensitive and valuable data can fly around global networks and remain completely safe and unalterable. Blockchain enables trust. And it can be more efficient with interconnection.

The insurance industry is well-known for its conservative nature, but that’s a characteristic that’s now having to evolve as the industry faces the digital age. For these reasons, trending tech topics such as artificial intelligence (AI), IoT and blockchain are rapidly becoming hot topics in these most traditional of boardrooms.

The major difference between the public and private blockchain is the consensus mechanism. In public blockchain, you do not trust any of the other members, so the amount of computation overhead that is involved in verifying or validating every transaction is quite high and time consuming. Whereas in a private blockchain there’s usually a greater amount of permission-based trust involved, so you can use simpler and faster consensus algorithms.

Like the rise of the internet, Blockchain has the potential to truly disrupt multiple industries and make processes more democratic, secure, transparent and efficient. Entrepreneurs, startup companies, investors, global organizations and governments have all identified as a revolutionary technology.

To ensure the legitimacy and security of each transaction using distributed ledger technology, a shared public ledger, or transaction record called the “blockchain,” is kept. Blockchain records and verifies all transactions across a public network of distributed participants in a chain that is open and visible to all.