The Aite Group projects the blockchain market could be valued at $400 million by 2019. For that reason, some of the biggest names in banking, industry and technology have entered into the space to evaluate how this technology could change the financial world. 

IBM and Linux, for instance, have brought together some of the brightest minds in the industry and technology to work on blockchain technology through the Hyperledger Project. 

The Hyperledger Project is under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation, and seeks to incorporate findings by blockchain projects such as Blockstream, Ripple, Digital Asset Holdings and others in order to make blockchain technology useful for the world's biggest corporations. IBM has also contributed its own code to the project. 

According to John Wolpert, IBM's Global Blockchain Offering Director, when IBM and Linux began working together on the blockchain project, Linux made clear it wanted to "disrupt the disruption," in part with their findings, as well as the data gathered by projects such as Ripple, Ethereum and others exploring the blockchain.  

The Linux foundation announced its Hyperledger project on December 17, 2015. Just one day later, 2,300 companies had requested to join. The second-largest open source foundation in the history of open source had only 450 inquiries. 

"So, it's either going to be a holy mess or it's going to change the world," Wolpert said at The Blockchain Conference in San Francisco presented by Lighthouse Partners. As Wolford puts it, a team of IBMers is "on a quest" to understand and "do something important" with blockchain technology. 

"I don't know why we got this rap in the '70s, way back, that we are not cool, that we're kind of stodgy, and that is not the IBM of my experience," Wolpert, who founded the taxi service Flywheel, explained. "We're the original crazy people. The craziest people are the guys at IBM in the '60s and '70s -- you can imagine what they were doing in the '60s -- they are wild-eyed revolutionaries." 

Although this is not the image IBM markets, their work in quantum computing, quantum teleportation and neuro semantic chips count among some of the "cool stuff" IBM does, says Wolpert. IBM also approaches projects in the spirit of open innovation, and not proprietarily. 

"Our method of operations is open, and it's often our MO to back not-our-thing," he said of IBM since the 1990s. 

Wolpert cites Java as one such project: "You would not know about Java today if it weren't for IBM." 

As a "pretty young dude," Wolpert was in the room when IBM made a billion-dollar decision to back Linux over its own technology. He also cites IBM's work on XML as an example of IBM's dedication to open innovation.