Blockchain as a Service

Chapter 1. Introduction to the Report

Blockchain has made quite a splash in the world of business. There are great debates taking place these days about how cryptocurrency, a tokenized monetary system built on blockchain, will impact everyday banking and finance. Meanwhile, blockchain—a distributed ledger technology (DLT) that underlies cryptocurrency—can be applied in many other ways to solve problems that have plagued organizations for years. To spur organizational adoption of blockchain, a great many technology providers and leading businesses have begun offering cloud-based Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS).

BaaS is now possible thanks to the cloud and web application programming interfaces (APIs). Authorized developers can now integrate most systems without even being able to see or modify the source code for—or even knowing what programming language was used for—the systems being connected.

Now, cloud providers are offering cutting-edge, highly complex services like artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain. The first example I saw of one such AI API was at South by Southwest, the music/film/technology event held in my current hometown of Austin, Texas. IBM was demonstrating a robot that I could direct with my mind (yes, really!) simply by wearing a computer/brain interface on my head and training the robot, starting by thinking the words “forward,” “backward,” and “stop.” I was amazed, and asked the IBM rep, “How did you do this?” They answered, “A few lines of JavaScript.” ...