IBM Joins HACERA to Create the Blockchain Equivalent of the ‘Yellow Pages’

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by Polina Chernykh · 3 min read
IBM Joins HACERA to Create the Blockchain Equivalent of the ‘Yellow Pages’
Photo: Patrick / Flickr

The companies have joined hands to launch an initiative that will help blockchain-related businesses get wider exposure and easily find each other via a secure decentralized platform.

Tech giant IBM has announced it partnered with the blockchain development company Hacera to develop a platform that would list all blockchains and blockchain-related businesses. According to an announcement on Thursday, HACERA will lead this project, while IBM has joined it as a founding member.

Called Unbounded Registry, the project looks like a blockchain alternative to Yellow Pages, a massive catalogue of businesses with yellow pages that was popular in the US. Created in the 1830s, Yellow Pages had a strong impact on commerce, helping millions of companies to grow their businesses.

“As the number of blockchain consortiums, networks and applications continues to grow we need a means to list them and make them known to the world, in order to unleash the power of blockchain,” said Jerry Cuomo, IBM’s Vice President Blockchain Technologies.

“The Unbounded Registry, built on blockchain technology, provides a decentralized means to register, look up, join and transact across a variety of blockchain solutions, built to interoperate with all of today’s popular distributed ledger technologies.”

The project is built on Hyperledger Fabric and supports all major digital ledger communities, such as Ethereum, the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth, Stellar Network, Cosmos, Quorum, Corda, and others. There are already over 70 networks in the registry, including IBM’s Batavia, Hacera’s BT, Microsoft, Everledger, Huawei, Intel, Oracle, Finastra, and SAP.

The Unbounded Registry will address the most common issues in the sector, including the discoverability of blockchain networks and applications, a catalogue of domain-specific functions and services, and reserved naming for blockchain apps and networks. In addition to helping networks attract more users and connect with each other, the new registry is expected to drive the adoption of the distributed ledger technology.

“By working with HACERA and other members of Unbounded Registry, we see a future where consumers and providers of blockchain services will be able to discover each other and begin transacting in a more secure way and where technology providers and consumers can innovate and integrate to create limitless and unbounded possibilities,” Cuomo concluded.

As Unbounded is a permissioned blockchain system, members will have to apply and get approval before joining the catalog. The companies, however, have not yet developed specific standards for getting accepted into the registry.

As a leader in the blockchain space, IBM is constantly investigating new applications of the technology. As per recent research by IPRdaily, IBM is now the main innovator in this field after Chinese gaint Alibaba.

A few days ago, the company teamed up with Stellar to launch Blockchain World Wire, a new project aimed at facilitating international payment settlements between banks around the world.

Earlier this month, a blockchain startup called Hu-manity announced it will use IBM’s blockchain platform as the foundational technology for its project that will let users manage the commercial use of their personal data.

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