Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. I am not a financial advisor. What follows is my personal, subjective, biased opinion.

The News

On its flagship conference ‘Think,’ IBM unveiled what they claim to be the world’s smallest computer. It is one of their ‘5 in 5,’ five innovations, which they believe will significantly change our lives for the better in the next five years.

Equivalent in processing power to a device from 1990, the computer will also be able to connect to the internet and to communicate with blockchains.

The Facts

While this announcement has circled around every major news outlet, I recommend you check out the official release by IBM above, which has all the info in one place, and none of it taken out of context. Here’s what we know so far:

The whole device will measure about 1 mm by 1 mm, which is smaller than a grain of salt.

It will cost less than 10 cents to manufacture.

Its silicon carrier will be fitted with several hundred thousand transistors, an LED and photo detector, some static RAM, and a photo-voltaic cell for power.

The computer will be able to “monitor, analyze, communicate, and even act on data.”

In the picture, the device seen on the person’s fingertip is not the computer itself. It is a set of 64 motherboards for 64 different computers, with two actual, mainboard-mounted devices shown in the bottom-left corner.

The Commentary

First, if you doubt IBM’s capability to achieve this, know that last year, they were already able to store one bit of data on a single atom. The company has also released an animated video of what the device looks like in detail:

Second, the company hasn’t added blockchain capabilities for extra media attention, as one might assume. IBM has embraced the technology for a while. Just take a look at how many talks at Think are about blockchain in a variety of contexts.

In this instance, they see the mini computer as a perfect weapon against counterfeiting and product fraud, which costs the economy $600 billion per year, since the device can act as a sensor and communicate.

Placed inside a product box, say a shoe carton, a cereal box, or even a handbag, the computer could help verify when the product is first opened. Once light falls into the open case, the photo sensor detects it and changes an encrypted message on the device or in the packaging. It then sends an update to a blockchain, where the status is changed from ‘unopened’ to ‘opened’ and now transcribed on a public, secure ledger. Forever.

The customer can then check the current status via the blockchain, or directly in the packaging, if the device is wrapped in it. Other options include invisible messages made visible with a drop of water, or scanning a QR code.

Luxury goods, medication, foods, especially baby foods, all of these see a tremendous amount of counterfeiting and are ripe for solutions that prohibit placebos. With one of the more dynamic giants in the IT industry moving into this space, current blockchain startups dealing with similar problems will have to step up their game, some of which are:

Chinese startup WaBi, which is starting with baby foods,

Waltonchain, which is focused on clothing and retail stores,

Modum for the pharmaceutical industry,

Ambrosus targeting food and medicine,

VeChain beginning with liquors and luxury goods,

Eximchain for supply chain management,

OriginTrail for full supply chain tracking and transparency,

and ShipChain for tracking shipments.

Of course it’s impossible to say who will carve out what share of the market for themselves at this point. What we can say, however, is that a lot of people are racing towards creating a world where product authenticity is as good as guaranteed.

Even if we take current developments with a grain of salt (ha!), we can be excited for what’s to come.

Keep it crypto,

Nik