IBM

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is a U.S.-based information technology company.
== Overview ==
IBM was founded in 1911 with the merger of three technology companies: the International Time Recording Company, the Computing Scale Company of America, and the Computer-Tabulating-Recording Company. Originally the company made scales, clocks, and punch card machines. Later, it made typewriters and computation machines. During World War II, the company manufactured weapons for the U.S. government. After the war, IBM resumed its focus on the design and manufacture of tabulation machines, which became the basis for modern computers. In contemporary times, it is known as an information technology, big data, and fintech company. It designs, develops, maintains and sells cloud data management services, computer hardware and software, and blockchain-based technology. In 2018, Forbes listed IBM as the 6th largest tech company in the world.
== Blockchain ==
IBM has been among the first leaders in enterprise-level adoption and development of blockchain technology. In 2016, the IBM Institute of Business Value conducted a survey of 200 banks in 16 countries to guage the interest of banking institutions in blockchain technology. The company was among the first to join the Open Ledger Project, later renamed the Hyperledger Project.
In early 2021, IBM reportedly was scaling back its blockchain initiatives in the face of lackluster results in those endeavors. In a brief January 21 statement the company reported a six percent decline in revenues for the previous year, although the company's public statement did not mention blockchain business lines.
 
=== IBM Food Trust ===
IBM launched the IBM Food Trust network based on Hyperledger Fabric August 2017 after first publishing proofs of concept for it in October 2016. In the roll-out of IBM Food Trust the company worked with retailer Walmart, food products company Nestle, and consumer goods giant Unilever. In 2018, Frank Yiannas, Vice President of Food Safety at Walmart, said that with Food Trust, "We can take a jar of baby food and see where it was manufactured and trace back all the ingredients to the farms!” 
=== Blockchain World Wire ===
In September 2018, IBM announced on its website that it had brought its Blockchain World Wire (BWW) payment network out of beta. The company, which partnered with Stellar, says that the BWW can clear and settle cross-border payments in seconds. 
IBM announced on March 18, 2019, that six banks had signed letters of intention to use BWW to issue fiat-based stablecoins, pending their regulatory approvals in their home countries. IBM indicated that three of the banks are Bank Busan (South Korea), Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation (Philiippines) and Banco Bradesco (Brazil). 
Already at the time of the announcement, BWW was using Stronghold’s U.S. dollar-backed coin currently as an on-ramp for U.S. dollars, and BWW had payment locations in 72 countries, with 48 currencies and 46 “banking endpoints” according to IBM. Also according to IBM, BWW lets banks use Lumens (XLMs), the native Stellar currency, for transactions between otherwise difficult to settle fiat currencies. 
=== TradeLens ===
IBM partnered with Danish shipping conglomerate A.P. Moller–Maersk Group (or Maersk for short) to create a distributed ledger platform for supply chains called TradeLens in early 2018. By the end of October, the project had partnered with only one other company, Pacific International Lines (PIL), the 17th largest shipping company in the world by cargo volume. Coindesk reported that month that the project had had difficulty convincing other carriers to join the platform.
=== Cryptocurrency Custody ===
In March 2019, IBM announced that it had partnered with the New York-based Shuttle Holdings to launch the beta version of a new cryptocurrency cold storage software product. This product will be designed for institutional investors, and will hold private keys of customers in secure, offline devices for storage.
== References ==
Category: blockchain
Category: fintech
Category: digital assets
Category: distributed ledgers
Category: definitions
Category: CryptoMarketsWiki