IBM, JP Morgan, and others build the Open Ledger Project, a blockchain for business services, overseen by the Linux Foundation
Tech and Banking Giants Ditch Bitcoin for Their Own Blockchain — Several major companies from across both the technology and financial industries—including IBM …
Context & Ripple Effects
Three months after IBM announced it was developing blockchain technology and would open source the work, the effort now has a home and a name: the Open Ledger Project, governed neutrally under the Linux Foundation and co-founded by IBM, JP Morgan, and firms from both tech and banking. The headline move is subtraction as much as addition — the members are explicitly building their ledger without Bitcoin, taking the distributed-ledger design and leaving out the cryptocurrency and its anonymous participants.
That choice makes this the founding document of the enterprise-blockchain wave. Everything in the related coverage runs through it: IBM's supply-chain record-keeping platform, the Microsoft- and Intel-backed Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, the 75-bank payments alliance JPMorgan helped seed, and the UBS-led settlement venture all treat the ledger as corporate plumbing to be permissioned and owned, not an open monetary network.
First-order effects
- The Linux Foundation gains a flagship enterprise project and a governance template — vendor-neutral stewardship — that lets rivals like IBM and JP Morgan co-develop shared infrastructure they could not build bilaterally.
- Bitcoin loses its default status as the enterprise entry point to distributed ledgers: the biggest names in tech and banking are signaling that future business deployments will run on permissioned chains with known participants.
Second-order effects
- Competitors respond with parallel consortia rather than joining: within fifteen months Microsoft, Intel, JP Morgan, Reuters, and UBS form the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, fragmenting the standards landscape into Ethereum-based versus Open Ledger camps.
- Banks split their bets across use cases instead of one ledger — JPMorgan, RBC, and ANZ pull more than 75 banks into a payments-testing alliance, while UBS leads a $60M+ company to settle cross-border trades on a token-based ledger, each bypassing the shared standard this project was meant to establish.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enterprise blockchain matures as a set of competing consortium silos — IBM's LedgerConnect for financial services, bank-owned settlement utilities — rather than converging on one interoperable ledger, trading Bitcoin's openness for control and recurring platform revenue.
- The deeper structural shift is that distributed-ledger technology becomes absorbed into existing financial infrastructure, with incumbent banks and vendors owning the networks — the opposite of the disintermediation Bitcoin's design implied.
The trend: Enterprise blockchain is consolidating around corporate-run permissioned consortia that adopt the ledger's architecture while abandoning cryptocurrency's open, decentralized model.