No app is an island
Smartphones have quickly become an integral part of everyday life, for communication to remotely managing our finances and consuming online media. Statista estimates that more than two billion people, a quarter of the world’s population, are smartphone users, and predicts that number will rise to 2.8b by 2020.
Look Out Fintech: Bumpy but fruitful road ahead
Are investors running out of patience to see tangible results from fintech? 2017 could be a year of reckoning for fintech companies if they do not begin turning over profits. The much-hyped cycle of fintech may get a dose of commercial reality, as financial services business leaders shift their immediate focus toward tangible business solutions while keeping innovation and automation on their long-term agenda.
The Lightning Network edges closer
Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja published the Lightning Network white paper in January 2016. “The Bitcoin blockchain holds great promise for distributed ledgers,” the document states. “But the blockchain as a payment platform, by itself, cannot cover the world’s commerce anytime in the near future.”
Blind Merged Mining
In pursuing my goal of Bitcoin prediction markets, I was drawn to sidechains as the only realistic implementation strategy. I even sketched out some way that they would have to work, in early 2014. My friends an I worked on my own project, while waiting for sidechains to be developed.
Privacy focused cryptocurrency Dash continues expansion
Dash is gearing up to launch Evolution. The new design will incorporate more decentralized services such as a cloud file-sharing system (DashDrive), a wallet (DashPay) and an API (DAPI).
Automobile eWallet uses a blockchain to enable new technology
German auto engineering firm ZF Friedrichshafen AG, along with Swiss banking giant UBS and the innogy Innovation Hub recently announced that they have built a blockchain-based automobile “eWallet,” and are planning to field-test a car with the eWallet in 2017.
Microsoft adds advanced support for bitcoin to Excel spreadsheets
Microsoft’s latest upgrade roadmap for MS Office, includes four entries for bitcoin support into the four different platform version of their popular Excel spreadsheet software. The changes allow for Bitcoin data to be used in their spreadsheets and calculations, making the task of doing budgeting with bitcoins far easier.
A Decentralized Content Registry for the Decentralized Web
Bitcoin inspired many of us in various ways. For me, it was an inspiration that you could have a global shared database for the planet, especially for creative works and for self-sovereign personal data.
Bitcoin scaling solution, Segwit, released
A new version of Bitcoin’s Core code was released on Thursday, Bitcoin version 0.13.1 Final. The contentious alternative contains a patch known as Segregated Witness (Segwit).
Code Valley starts the industrial revolution of coding today, with the help of bitcoin
Noel Lovisa has been thinking about the industrial revolution, and how programming might go through a similar transformation. The Founder of Code Valley has been working on the idea since 1994. Mass production is the key to industrialisation, Lovisa posits in the Code Valley whitepaper, and mass production is built upon the principles of standardisation, interchangeability and reductionism.
Contentious Bitcoin fork WILL create a split
The Bitcoin community has debated a potential hardfork to Bitcoin for over a year now. There have been various solutions proposed to change the hard cap on block size and increase the amount of transactions that can go into any single block.
RSK Federation finds support from 24 leading bitcoin industry companies
RSK Labs is developing the first smart contracts platform secured by Bitcoin, codenamed RootStock. Several of the most influential Bitcoin companies have expressed their support by participating in an innovative hybrid security model, which incorporates a private Federation.
Transactional currencies – Entry Credits and Gas
Working at Factom I came across an idea that seems seldom explored in the cryptocurrency space - a transactional currency called entry credits. They operate alongside the main currency of the network, factoids, but while factoids are a fully functional cryptocurrency that can freely circulate in the network, entry credits have a number of restrictions on them:
LenderBot by Deloitte and Stratumn to bring insurance to the sharing economy using bitcoin’s blockchain
LenderBot is a proof-of-concept micro-insurance platform that uses the bitcoin blockchain for insuring all sorts of things. Most notably, products and services in the sharing economy, such as AirBnB stays and Uber rides.
Coinbase improves services and sets up expansion into Asia while retreating from Canada
San Francisco-based bitcoin and digital asset exchange Coinbase recently [announced](https://blog.coinbase.com/2016/07/07/coinbase-partners-with-btmu/) a strategic partnership with Japan’s largest commercial bank, the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ (BTMU), to “support Coinbase's long-term international expansion efforts.”
Spells of Genesis Additions Arriving Soon
Spells of Genesis (SoG) is a blockchain-based trading card game (TCG) being developed by Switzerland-based EverdreamSoft. The company recently announced a September 2016 launch date for the game’s full release. However, players won’t have to wait until fall to test some of the latest developments surfacing out of the company’s Geneva headquarters.
