In the latest sign that the technology behind bitcoin is being embraced by the corporate world, IBM says it’s exploring how the cryptocurrency’s shared ledger system can be used in fields from banking to the Internet of Things.

“It’s a completely novel architecture for business–a foundation for building a new generation of transactional applications that establish trust and transparency while streamlining business processes,” wrote Arvind Krishna, senior vice president and director of IBM Research, in a blog post Wednesday. “It has the potential to vastly reduce the cost and complexity of getting things done.”

The notion of a blockchain was first developed by Bitcoin’s pseudonymous inventor Satoshi Nakamoto to record transactions in the currency without the need for banks or any central authority. All transfers of Bitcoin are announced to the currency’s network of users, and Bitcoin miners are rewarded with newly generated coins for bundling those transactions into specially formatted records called blocks. New blocks need to satisfy certain mathematical properties when taken in conjunction with those already generated, and the complete historic transaction record is known as the blockchain.

Rival cryptocurrencies like Litecoin and Dogecoin each have their own blockchains, and various projects have experimented with using blockchains to store data besides financial transfer records. A project called Namecoin uses its blockchain to record Internet domain name registrations, and the Ethereum project allows its blockchain to store simple programs called “smart contracts” that can automatically transfer funds when certain conditions are met.

To IBM, which has seen data processing systems evolve from the mainframe-based systems of the 1960s and ‘70s to today’s distributed SQL databases, the blockchain concept might just be the next big thing in sharing data. The company says blockchains future blockchain-based systems could make it significantly easier to share records and execute all kinds of transactions, including those based on more traditional currency.

“We always have our eye out for the next innovation around these things,” says IBM Middleware CTO Jerry Cuomo. “When you look at blockchain—that notion of a decentralized database that is peer-to-peer and based on shared ledger and public and private key cryptography with smart contracts—it kind of turns the model on its side a bit.”

Cuomo says IBM’s working on proof-of-concept projects with clients in a variety of industries to explore how blockchain technology can make their businesses more efficient.