IBM Opens Blockchain Garage in New York City

IBM has announced the opening of a new office for blockchain coders in a New York City neighborhood better known for its art galleries and boutique stores than for computer programmers.

Headquartered in the SoHo offices of Galvanize, the workspace is the latest of IBM’s Bluemix Garages, physical workshopping destinations that provide a venue for its technology consulting services.

The opening comes amid a broad push by the company to expand its expertise in the blockchain industry.

Earlier this month, IBM announced the massive Watson Centre at Marina Boy in Singapore. Designed to house 5,000 computer scientists in the Asian-Pacific region, the location also included a new IBM Garage.

Then, just last week IBM announced that Mizuho Financial had successfully tested a digital currency-based blockchain settlement system created at the newly opened IBM Garage in Tokyo.

These Garages, and others located in San Francisco, London, Toronto and Nice, are also part of an industry-wide competition for cloud computing providers to capitalize on interest in blockchain.

For example, last month, Amazon Cloud Services announced that it would begin working to offer a blockchain experimentation environment for enterprises. Further, in March, Microsoft’s cloud computing service, added five blockchain startups to its blockchain-as-service platform.

According to IBM’s own numbers it is adding about 20,000 developers per week to its Bluemix cloud platform.

New York City image via Shutterstock