The Independent Republic

Before examining how Stellar (XLM), INS Ecosystem (INS) and ArcBlock (ABT) are all related, let’s take a quick lesson on IBM, the company that brought computers into our lives, even if nobody born after the 90’s would know that.

IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) is a US-based international level technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States, with operations in over 170 countries. The company originated in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) and was renamed “International Business Machines” in 1924.

IBM manufactures and markets computer hardware, middleware, and software, and provides hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is also a major research organization, holding the record for most patents generated by a business (as of 2018) for 25 consecutive years. Inventions by IBM include the automated teller machine (ATM), the PC, the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, the SQL programming language, the UPC barcode, and dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). The IBM mainframe, exemplified by the System/360, was the dominant computing platform during the 1960s and 1970s. So, how’s all that relative to blockchain and what all that has to do with Stellar (XLM), INS Ecosystem (INS) and ArcBlock (ABT)?

It is no surprise that in an era where technological advancement leads almost every industry into adapting blockchain based solutions, IBM is one of the first and leading companies behind the scene.

The current community surrounding blockchain is focused on innovative platforms providing alternative monetary solutions such as Bitcoin, for example, but blockchain is not only about money and here comes IBM to prove that.

The whole economy of Dubai is a blockchain created by IBM, we don’t talk about it in the crypto sphere since we can’t exchange or hold Dubai’s native currency in our digital wallets. IBM is a well-established company with pre-history on innovative ideas around technology at almost every possible branch of it. Their platforms are solid, professional and don’t need github and community workers to go live.

IBM is responsible for more than a dozen active blockchain based platforms that you can’t find in CoinMarketCap. Most of them are using IBM’s native blockchain Hyperledger to fuel their respective solutions and that is why these projects are not mentioned or traded in the ‘crypto sphere’. They’re not under ‘testing’, but they’re proven and already working with major industrial companies to solve global problems each and every one of them may be experienced in the past years.

Besides Dubai’s economy, IBM is responsible for Walmarts’ Food Safety, Northern Trust’s Private Equity, and SecureKey’s Trusted Identities. They’re also playing a major role in the construction of the first fully IoT based smart city on the planet in Singapore during the next decade.

As like all that is not enough, IBM showed an interest towards the crypto sphere as well, backing several really interesting and innovative ideas and platforms that many of you shall be already familiar with. Let’s start with Stellar (XLM).

Stellar is a very well accepted project in the crypto scene and if you read our latest article on it you’ll quickly understand why.

Not only Stellar managed to climb in the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap in less than a year, due to the IBM partnership, but it is now going into unexplored for the platform and even for the community waters.

Stellar is behind SDEX (Stellar Decentrali\ed Exchange), a cryptocurrency market comparing the lowest prices around and presenting immediate options for buyers who are looking to purchase Stellar or other major currencies and tokens. The platform is run on the Stellar Network, which is one of the fastest, if not THE fastest at the moment, cheapest and most reliable networks in the crypto sphere.

At the same time, their 2018 goals include a series of new ICOs launched directly by and hosted on the Stellar Network, avoiding the monopoly titan Enterprise Ethereum Alliance had for some time, where ERC-20 tokens and most of the new ICOs were launching under the Ethereum Network’s wings.

Sounds promising? Just hold tight.

Therefore Stellar is not the only project backed by IBM, and being a fast, scalable and reliable solution for the new emerging market will definitely attract a lot of newcomers and new ICOs into the Stellar Network, but IBM is ‘cooking’ more of these projects into the crypto sphere as technology evolves, money flows into the scene and industries are taking DLT seriously day by day. Taking IOTA only as an example, where industry’s finest players including Microsoft, BOSCH, Volkswagen, Samsung… to mention a few are already behind the project, IBM realizes that this is not a child play sector anymore.

A recent platform backed by IBM is the INS Ecosystem, the first and largest decentralized grocery market. Set up by a group of the biggest Russian grocery distributor companies. Backed by Rothschilds and IBM, INS establishes easy partnerships with A’ class grocery firms including a big portion of the brands that are currently distributed by the Dutch analog Unilever, including Unilever itself.

INS, who has a 50 million token supply, aims a market cap worth of $300 bn by 2020 based on their partnerships alone. If you’re not good at ‘quick math’, let me spoil the price for one INS at that point for you. One INS is estimated to cost around $6000 at that time, not to mention the infinite possibilities to reach even higher standards since individual investors and other grocery firms would not like to be left behind.

Most of the micro-investors in the cryptocurrency scene are having their first contact with the financial black hole through the innovation blockchain technologies offer and newer generations who grew up with Microsoft and Apple are most likely to skip their eyes hitting on IBM. That is a huge mistake from their side and a huge advantage for old, big and serious investors that are as familiar with the financial scene as they would know the back of their hand.

Finishing up, IBM seems to be ahead of the game once again and we will see a series of IBM backed ICOs both in the crypto scene and ‘outsider’ blockchain based technologies ‘popping’ up this year. One of them will be ArcBlock.

Performance is one of the main challenges facing current blockchain solutions. The blockchain that bitcoin uses is designed to handle seven transactions per second, and Ethereum can only handle a few more. As of December 2017, a simple CryptoKitties application can slow Ethereum and increase transaction fees dramatically.

According to ArcBlock’s White Paper: “The ArcBlock Token (ABT) is native to the ArcBlock platform. To achieve high-performance transactions, we built an optimized blockchain dedicated to ArcBlock’s own token services and the public ledger. The design goal is to achieve >100,000 Tx/s, which is more than adequate for a wide range of applications. In the future, this blockchain could be improved for broader purposes.”

Exactly like Stellar, ArcBlock plans on creating an ecosystem for both ICOs and established platforms. Being a 3d generation blockchain platform itself, ArcBlock could outperform not only Ethereum but probably every blockchain network combined having enormous scalability, minimal fees, no mining and more than 100,000 transactions per second running through their network.

Do we see some kind of a pattern here besides the fact that IBM backs all these projects? Most definitely. And that would be a vision where both new and old platforms could integrate into newer networks meant from scratch to support the current levels of demand for usage of this technology, generated over the last years and especially during the last months.

Let me know what you guys think uppon the matter in the comments below.

Reporting for The Independent Republic, Ross Peili