The steering committee of the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project came very close to approving a vote to formally merge the blockchain codebases of its three founding contributors – IBM, Blockstream, and Digital Asset. However, an unnamed dissenting member has, for now, prevented the move that might unify a very exciting technology for IoT communications. IBM has been a vocal advocate for blockchain, and notably founded the ADEPT project with Samsung in January 2015. Although Samsung appears to have cooled on the technology, IBM has forged ahead – and sees it as a powerful tool to sell to new and existing business customers that use its extensive cloud platforms and software. With its Bluemix application PaaS, IBM will also be putting…