Financial firms put blockchain on their technology roadmaps

Even though it’s relatively still early days for blockchain, companies are asking plenty of questions. Some are even experimenting. ITWeb, a news site in South Africa, spoke with Richard Feldmann, global director of financial services, Red Hat, and covered Red Hat Summit last month in San Francisco, including a look at blockchain.

Blockchain has been a hot topic this year. A blockchain is a peer-to-peer system with no central authority or database managing the transaction flow. As a distributed, decentralized transaction ledger saved by each node in the network, blockchain has the potential to change how financial institutions manage their data, applications, transactions, and business processes.

It his interview with ITWeb, Feldmann told ITWeb that the current complex hub-and-spoke clearing mechanisms used for securities and derivatives have not yet been digitized and could be great use cases for blockchain. He presented scenarios that he believes appear ripe for blockchain adoption, such as processes in which value is exchanged, marketplaces such as stock exchanges and peer-to-peer networks, the article said.

According to the article, Red Hat CTO Chris Wright told attendees during a panel at Red Hat Summit that conversations are ongoing with customers who are trying to gauge blockchain’s future and the best use cases for the burgeoning technology. During the panel, Wright noted that Red Hat’s strategy is to be the underlying infrastructure that enables the adoption of distributed ledger technology in the enterprise.

Red Hat is collaborating with BlockApps, a provider of Ethereum blockchain enterprise software and a Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform, to make blockchain applications scale for hybrid cloud environments, with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform serving as the foundation for the BaaS solution. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is an container platform for customers to deploy and manage on their own in an infrastructure of choice. The BaaS solution is designed to help developers build applications that combine the capabilities of the blockchain in hybrid cloud environments, and help organizations create production-ready Ethereum applications more easily.