Bankers, Diamond Brokers and Shippers

can transact with trust.

The global digital economy depends on trust, not faith. Transactions—from real estate and securities to supply chains and logistics—often have dozens of participants, multiplying the chances for error, delay and fraud. Fortunately, a new technology has arrived that will do for trusted transactions what the Internet did for information.

Blockchain brings together shared ledgers with smart contracts, enabling the secure transfer across any network of any asset—whether physical (like a shipping container), financial (like a bond) or digital (like music).

With blockchain, researchers, retailers and traders around the world are ensuring that all parties can transact with trust.

With IBM, Maersk is creating solutions to digitize global trade, including a collaboration on blockchain to build trust and transparency into global supply chains.

Thanks to an application that startup Everledger runs on IBM’s z Systems Cloud, blockchain can track a diamond’s provenance from mine to finger.

For Walmart China, a blockchain pilot is following the journey of pork from farm to table, enabling tracking of details such as farm origins, factory data, expiration dates, storage temperatures and shipping information to better ensure food traceability, transparency and safety.

CLS is partnering with IBM to build distributed ledger technology to reduce risk and improve liquidity across the $5-trillion-per-day global foreign exchange market. The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation is using the technology to permanently record and automate the sharing of secured data records of financial agreements.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is exploring the use of blockchain for the secure exchange of sensitive medical data such as electronic patient records, clinical trial data and health data from mobile devices.