Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions with a market cap of $14 billion, today announced a partnership with BlockApp, a provider of blockchain enterprise software.
Using Red Hat’s OpenShift container-based application platform, BlockApp’s STRATO acts as a developer sandbox for testing blockchain applications, offering adjustable consensus formation algorithms and transaction verification rules such as instant, round-robin signature pool, proof of work and proof of stake.
Commenting on the partnership, Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager of OpenShift at Red Hat, publicly stated:
“Red Hat is excited to team up with BlockApps to give OpenShift users who are innovating with various blockchain technologies a blockchain-as-a-service offering… developers will have access to tools and applications so they can more quickly develop and take advantage of the power of blockchain apps.”
While blockchain tech used to be the playground of a small enthusiastic community made famous by bitcoin, things are quickly changing. IBM, Microsoft, Nasdaq, almost all world banks, accounting firms, insurance firms, even energy companies, are all announcing one blockchain project or another, sponsoring hackathons, conferences, daily reports, painting an energizing picture of a world rush to take advantage of this breakthrough invention.
Blockchain is the growth engine of Silicon Valley, commentators say. “Not since Prometheus bequeathed the gift of fire upon humanity has a technology captured the imagination of a people” – commented FT today. “We are on the ground floor of one of the most significant transitions in human history,” said Chris Taylor, a senior dispatcher at NRG Energy, a Fortune 250 company.
Reading blockchain related news you won’t be faulted for wondering whether there is anything blockchains can’t do. They can issue stocks with no middle men, clear loans or bank transfers, store diamond records or house owner records, allow your washing machine to communicate with your power grid or your electric car to charge automatically.
But, as Anton Hofland, CEO of 2024Sight stated, there are limits. Blockchains work best when no human input, or very minimal human input, is required. Humans are unreliable. They can lie, defraud, manipulate, forget, make mistakes. Machines, on the other hand, do what they are told. They don’t lie, unless you tell them to, they don’t forget, they make no mistakes.
The blockchain promises to smartify all these machines and give them primitive intelligence. It will allow them to communicate, to speak to each other, in a way we tell them to, about things we want them to, but before you get too excited remember we are only at ground zero. Companies like Redhat and BlockApp have only began to build the infrastructure, the backbone of this new system.
