IBM (International Business Machines) has signed a 5-year, $740 million contract with the Australian government to use Blockchain for technology improvement and data security purposes, according to a Bloomberg report. Blockchain is a “digitized ledger that cannot be changed once a transaction has been recorded and verified. All parties to the transaction, as well as a significant number of 3rd parties maintain a copy of the ledger (i.e. the blockchain), which means it would be practically impossible to amend every copy of the ledger globally to fake a transaction” (CoinTelegraph).
The contract will see that IBM provides technology like Blockchain and other automation/artificial intelligence (AI) to Australia’s federal departments, like home affairs and defense. Harriet Green, IBM’s Asia Pacific head, suggested that the new partnership between the two will move Australia up to “the top three of digital governments in the world”. Bloomberg also reported that she told them that the partnership will “give Commonwealth citizens access to the world’s greatest technologies across many, many government agencies”.
There is strong emphasis on prioritizing the assurance of data security for all citizens. Blockchains central offering of immutable and encrypted ledger is a mainspring breakthrough. This partnership can also be quite a large step in the process of Australia’s future being paperless. Australian Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) has designated $530,000 for upcoming Blockchain research.
Huobi, the world’s fourth largest cryptocurrency exchange, confirmed that is has launched trading on their new Australian platform. The CEO of Huobi is quoted saying they are “keen to partner with the growing number of Australian Blockchain projects looking to list in a maturing market”. It is only a matter of time before more companies follow suit.
IBM has been growing steadily and expanding in their involvement with Blockchain. In the past week, its platform was used successfully to power five live operations with trading initiatives expanding across 20 companies, as well as five banks.
