One of the world’s largest enterprise software providers, Salesforce.com Inc., has hinted at its plans to introduce a “blockchain and cryptocurrency solution” later this year.

The comments came from Salesforce Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff (pictured) himself during an interview at the TrailheaDX conference last week alongside company co-founder Parker Harris. In the interview, Benioff said he was hopeful the company would release a product in time for its annual Dreamforce conference which takes place in September.

Benioff’s comments appear to be the first time that Salesforce, which generated almost $8.4 billion in revenue last year, has admitted any plans to implement blockchain technology. And although he didn’t offer any specifics of the proposed “solution,” Benioff appeared to suggest the plans were concrete as opposed to just a theory. “I kind of see what it looks like and what it could be,” he said.

Benioff related how he got the idea for implementing blockchain following a chance meeting in a bar with an unnamed executive during the 2018 World Economic Forum in Davos back in January. “I had been thinking a lot about what is Salesforce’s strategy around blockchain, and what is Salesforce’s strategies around cryptocurrencies and how will we relate to all of these things,” Benioff said.

He added that the more he thought about the idea, the more he believed that Salesforce could benefit from implementing blockchain. Suddenly, “something clicked,” he said, and he saw a way to make blockchain and cryptocurrencies work for Salesforce. “That’s kind of how it works and I hope by Dreamforce we will have a blockchain and cryptocurrency solution,” Benioff said.

The announcement of sorts is certainly a big surprise, since Salesforce is not known for building underlying technology platforms, said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc. He pointed out that Salesforce instead made its name for building products atop other technologies.

“The intriguing angle is that Salesforce powers so much of the worldwide CRM, which at its core has order management and fulfillment, a traditional area of weakness for CRM vendors,” Mueller said. He added that Benioff’s comments could be a “technology backdoor announcement” that Salesforce wants to become more than just the front office for sales operations.

Blockchain is a digital ledger technology that’s used to track bitcoin and other cryptocurrency transactions. Providing an irrefutable and immutable record of transactions, it has numerous business applications besides currencies, since it can track almost anything of value. It’s not difficult to imagine it being adapted for tracking and fulfilling sales orders. It’s less clear how Salesforce would implement cryptocurrencies into its platform, however.

Dreamforce is Salesforce’s annual customer conference, taking place in San Francisco Sept. 25-28.

Image: Salesforce/YouTube