IBM-R3 Pact Shows Tech Trumps Tribe in Enterprise Blockchain

Oct 23, 2020 at 20:45 UTCUpdated Oct 24, 2020 at 07:54 UTC.News this week that R3 and IBM are working together raised eyebrows, because each entity has been on different and competing sides since the early days of enterprise blockchain.

Blockchain tribalism - R3's Corda competes with Hyperledger Fabric, the enterprise blockchain heavily backed by IBM - has been put aside in favor of commercial sense, it seems.

IBM's LinuxOne business is far bigger than its nascent blockchain concern, while many large banks that have vendor relationships with IBM use Corda.

The enterprise blockchain space, which attempts to retrofit Bitcoin's distributed ledger technology within the private settings of big companies, has evolved into three broadly separate camps: R3 Corda, Hyperledger and enterprise variants of Ethereum such as Quorum.

IBM has also experimented with other DLTs such as Hedera Hashgraph, and also with the Stellar blockchain, but the vast majority of Big Blue's blockchain efforts are focused on Hyperledger Fabric, which is the basis of the IBM Blockchain Platform.

"While there's some sort of tribalism within the blockchain community, it's not so in the broader technology community," said Cooper.

"They're not tribal, they want to see if they can deliver for clients. And if they can, the flavor of blockchain is not a concern for them."

"R3's decision to leave the table and to build their own ecosystem on one framework, helped them move a lot faster," said Levi, referring to the early days with IBM, Intel, Cisco, R3, Hitachi and others around the engineering whiteboard back in 2016."This is a great moment for our friends R3 and the Corda ecosystem, and for some of IBM's customers who rely on mainframes," he added.

"This is yet one more example of what we've been saying since our inception, which is that the enterprise blockchain space is really big and will continue to be served by more than one protocol," Behlendorf told CoinDesk via email.

"Congrats to R3 for their continued commercial success, it helps all of us in the enterprise blockchain space," Behlendorf said.