IBM’s Blockchain Patent Sale to Circle Offers a Rare Bright Spot After a Historic Rout
Published on 07/29/2026 at 05:20 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
IBM shares climbed 5.61% on Tuesday to close at €200.15, extending a tentative recovery that has seen the stock gain 10.82% over the past week. The catalyst for the latest leg higher came from an unexpected corner: Circle Internet Group, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, has acquired the bulk of IBM’s blockchain patent portfolio.
The deal, announced July 27, covers more than 680 patent families and nearly 1,000 granted patents worldwide. The technologies span blockchain fundamentals, banking, insurance, supply-chain verification, and secure cloud operations. Circle said the acquisition makes it the largest holder of blockchain patents in the United States, though it declined to disclose financial terms. The enlarged portfolio is intended to support Circle’s core projects — USDC, the Circle Payments Network, and Arc, a new enterprise blockchain — while both companies said they would explore “commercial opportunities” together without offering specifics.
For IBM, the sale monetizes a technology it built up over more than a decade. PatSnap, an analytics service, counted IBM as holding 790 US blockchain patents as recently as December 2025 — more than triple the roughly 200 held by Bank of America, the next-closest American company. The transaction provides a rare piece of positive news for a company that has been reeling since one of the worst single-day routs in its 115-year history.
The Shadow of July 14
On July 14, IBM shares collapsed 25.2% in a single session, wiping out roughly $68 billion in market capitalization. The selloff surpassed even the Black Monday crash of October 1987 in percentage terms, making it the largest one-day loss in the company’s history. The trigger was a warning from CEO Arvind Krishna that the second quarter would come in “worse than expected.”
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The numbers that followed confirmed the damage. In April, IBM had reported a 51% jump in Z-mainframe revenue and guided for overall growth above 5%. The reality was starkly different: infrastructure revenue fell 7%, and total growth limped in at just 1%. Krishna blamed a “Z weakness” and delayed customer investment decisions. He also pointed to an unusual dynamic in which corporate clients shifted their quarterly budgets heavily toward servers, storage, and memory to hedge against expected price increases on scarce hardware. IBM had anticipated some supply-chain effects, he said, but not the magnitude of the budget reallocation.
The gap between management’s earlier guidance and the actual results has drawn scrutiny from law firms including Hagens Berman and Bleichmar Fonti & Auld, both of which are investigating potential violations of US securities law. BFA Law is specifically examining whether IBM misled investors about the pace of large business deals and the outlook for its Z-mainframe line, following the quarterly report on July 14 in which the company acknowledged a decline in transaction-processing revenue. The legal overhang remains a real risk even as the acute market panic has subsided.
A Stock in Recovery Mode
Since hitting a 52-week low of €175.14 on July 23, IBM has clawed back 13.95%. The stock now sits 12.76% below its 50-day moving average of €228.76, indicating the path back to trend is still long. The relative strength index stands at 42.8, outside oversold territory but far from signaling strength.
The gap to the 52-week high of €292.85, reached in early June, underscores how much ground remains to be recovered — nearly a third of the stock’s value is still missing. The dividend yield of roughly 3% offers some comfort for defensive investors, but the narrative has shifted decisively from growth to damage control.
Analyst Divergence and the Quantum Bet
Wall Street remains split on IBM’s prospects. BofA has maintained its buy rating, arguing the company is “well positioned” once execution issues are resolved. HSBC downgraded the stock to “Reduce,” while Goldman Sachs warned that the quarterly numbers “fully confirm the bearish software scenario.” Several other houses — including Morgan Stanley, Susquehanna, Citi, and BMO Capital — have cut their price targets. The average analyst target now stands at €215.69, implying roughly 8.1% upside from Tuesday’s close.
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To counter the narrative of a fading hardware cycle, IBM is leaning heavily into future technologies. The company recently announced the acquisition of HRL Laboratories, targeting silicon-spin qubits as part of a push to lead in quantum computing. IBM has pledged to invest more than $10 billion in quantum technology over the next five years. In the meantime, the software business is showing tangible progress: annual recurring revenue (ARR) has risen to €24.6 billion, up 8%, and management says generative AI now accounts for half of all contract signings, with the AI consulting backlog growing steadily.
The Core Question
The blockchain patent sale to Circle gives IBM a positive headline disconnected from the mainframe and software worries that have dominated since mid-July. Whether it translates into more than a single good trading day depends on whether the “delayed deals” Krishna cited actually materialize in the second half of the year. The company is caught in a transition: the reliability of its legacy infrastructure business is in question, while the big bets on quantum and AI have yet to fully pay off. For now, the burden of proof rests squarely with management.
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