Viewing entries tagged with 'blockchain'

In terms of a zeitgeist shift, the change in sentiment towards cannabis and the distrust towards institutional financial powers is at a fascinating juncture. Individually, both fledgling industries are huge potential disruptors of many industries, but what could they do together?

In terms of a zeitgeist shift, the change in sentiment towards cannabis as an illegal drug and the distrust towards institutional financial powers is at a fascinating juncture. Individually, both fledgling industries are huge potential disruptors of many industries, but what could they do together?

The recent tidal wave of ICOs has seen billions raised but precious little so far in the way of products and services delivered. One reason for this may be that core devs are being sidetracked assembling all the components of a ‘real’ business — and losing focus on their grand vision.  One potential solution for these stalled projects, say some, is the ‘virtual merger'...

In Part II of three on "How do we design tokenized ecosystems?" Trent McConaghy takes us through an explanation of the practice of engineering the theory, practice and tools to analyze, design, and verify tokenized ecosystems

This Part I of a three part series looks at the possibilities of blockchain as a trust and incentive machines and the cross-section with artificial intelligence.

Blockchain provides an encrypted network of blocks where individuals and companies can share information securely, thereby enabling recruiters to verify employee data, including educational performances and career achievements.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin protocol was the first to successfully apply the concept of the distributed public ledger to peer-to-peer transactions. More recently, entrepreneurs in the space have begun to find applications for blockchain technology outside of the p2p money use case. This article will look at how these different applications fall into one of two categories, and what is the difference between them: Public Vs Private blockchain protocols.

If you are a potential investor in the blockchain space it can be difficult to differentiate between all the companies claiming to be the next ‘disruptor’ of an industry. The conflating of terms like blockchain technology, smart contracts and decentralised applications (DApps) can be confusing for many. Nonetheless, understanding what the project really entails, and whether it will actually be 'decentralized' remains a crucial part of any investor due diligence

Everyone got very excited a few years ago about blockchain technologies, the ledger system that was spawned by the arrival of bitcoin in 2009. It allows the recording of transactions to be automated and completely trusted, as the ledger system is tamperproof. The resulting excitement was that this could therefore replace many systems of contracts that are paper-based with smart, digital contracts.

There is undeniable potential for immense changes in the real estate sector, as a study published by Deloitte suggests. At the moment, however, there are few actual projects or applications of blockchain technology in the real estate industry. However, a serious approach can be seen in the area of evidence of ownership of land (the land register). In addition, there are also areas of application in the letting processes and other property management as well as real estate financing. The decisive driver for these innovations is above all the possible simplification and acceleration of management processes.

True to its word, the SEC has begun punishing listed companies that have previously had zero ties to the blockchain or digital currencies and have announced, with little to no supporting evidence, that they were moving into the cryptocurrency or blockchain space in some form or another.

The applications of blockchain technology will spread in 2018 far beyond bitcoin and, perhaps more surprisingly, way beyond financial services. Significant disruption and new business opportunities are on the menu. Four of the most-critical benefits from distributed-ledger technology can be encapsulated within trust, transparency, cost and speed. Where will the disruption occur?

Blockchain solutions for payments seem about a dime a dozen. But less is heard about bringing blockchain to the securities industry, even though current securities post-trade processing holds a large amount of inherent risk. Is blockchain technology a viable solution for the securities markets? Does the industry want to move forward with DLT and, if so, how will this progress from use case to business case? What are the challenges and opportunities? BNY Mellon’s Tom Casteleyn explains the latest blockchain and DLT trends impacting the securities industry.

2017 has been an important day for both Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. While hopefully not as tumultuous, 2018 is looking like it will bring us a lot of interesting innovation in the space. Here are some of the things I'm personally looking forward to seeing unfold in the new year.

In mid-December 2017, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published a really interesting 32-page paper on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). The timing wasn’t great as most of the City was out getting smashed at Christmas parties, so I thought it best to put it aside until the New Year hangovers were out of the way and share it with you now.

There has been much talk of how blockchain technology can improve mainstream financial markets. That cuts both ways. In particular, blockchain purports to fix post-trade, yet the crypto market itself fails miserably at it.

The banking industry, with all of the potential that blockchain technology offers for change, iteration, and development has been slow in its uptake of the new tech. That said, there’s no questioning whether blockchain technology will disrupt and revolutionize the banking industry. Leaders feel it coming. Some are ready. Most aren’t. But why and how is blockchain going to change banking over the next decade?

The momentum behind the autonomous vehicle movement has been growing rapidly as the major technology vendors, and new players, seek to define the future of road transport. Given the volume of potential data and the critical nature of automated transport it will be essential to get cybersecurity policies, tools and responses right. It should be no surprise that many in the automaker community believe the blockchain is the answer. 

If you’ve been involved with blockchain for a while, you may have picked up on a recurring theme in many recent news stories — something along the lines of ‘blockchain is the future,’ ‘it will only continue to grow in the coming years’, and ‘it will revolutionize corporate finance by de-centralizing lending and removing the need for middlemen.” Are they right? Currently, there are two dominant perspectives on that.

There have been many successful Blockchain proofs of concepts in financial services, and it’s exciting to see the beginnings of a shift from technology validation mode to commercialization. Here, Nasdaq provides insight into its Blockchain projects.

It’s exactly two years since we published “Avoiding the pointless blockchain project“, a checklist of questions to ask when assessing permissioned blockchain use cases. The post obviously struck a nerve and continues to attract thousands of monthly readers on our site and others. People are still hungry for content that goes beyond the blockchain hype to assess this technology objectively.

The Bank of Russia recently held a meeting with Russian President Vladamir Putin, where the legal status of cryptocurrencies was discussed. Citing the belief that cryptocurrency legalization represents “a loss of control over the money flows from abroad," the Chairwoman of Russia’s Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, clarified that her organization is against any type of legalization.

Earlier this month the Bank made a general announcement that revealed more of their stance on cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin. Recalling the usual risks from fluctuating exchange rates, technical difficulties, anonymity, and the lack of a responsible issuer, the Central Bank stated clearly that its position hasn’t changed on cryptocurrencies since they declared non-state-issued currency banned in January of 2014.

While potentially attractive to regulators due to increased transaction security and reduced risk of manipulation, blockchain technology gives rise to difficult legal and regulatory challenges that regulators are grappling to understand. With regulations for such a new technology always in flux, DLA Piper analyzes the current regulatory approach to blockchain.

I think it’s amazing that you can design algorithms that might have society-level impact. AI algorithms are in that category. And, AI is fun. Take Genetic Programming, where you write computer programs to evolve other computer programs. Moreover, AI poses exciting engineering challenges like scaling, and it asks the biggest questions, like the nature of the mind.

For these reasons, AI was my first love. I started my AI reading and hacking intently in the early 90s. By 1997, I was far enough along hacking AI that people started paying me to do it. I never looked back, doing two companies and a PhD on AI.

Bitcoin’s valuation eclipsed $4,950 earlier this month, up almost 400% from the start of the year. Then China cracked down on exchanges and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon labeled the cryptocurrency a ‘fraud.’ Bitcoin recently closed at $3,650. If you crave action and volatility, this is the asset for you. But traditional capital markets professionals know very little about cryptocurrencies; more education is warranted.

I’m making a presentation on cybersecurity this week at our Nordic Finance Innovation meetings. This meant preparing a few new slides from scratch as I don’t have a set deck for cybercrime, and sat and started ideas just as the news dropped about the Equifax breach. You’ll all know about this by now, but over 143 million Equifax accounts were hacked during June-July 2017, including customers’ social security numbers, name, address, date of birth, driving licence and other sensitive info. In other words, all the information you need to open new accounts and access existing accounts.

As virtual currency skyrockets in value and credibility, more and more people are beginning to take a serious look at blockchain technology to disrupt various industries. Banks are already adopting the technology at a breakneck pace: a 2016 report by IBM predicts that by 2020, 66% of banks worldwide expect to be using blockchain at scale in their commercial operations.

We are excited to announce that Thomson Reuters has added the Bitcoin Liquid Index (BLX) to its award-winning Eikon terminal. By adding a single, reliable USD price discovery tool and reference rate for Bitcoin, the Eikon terminal now extends its market data offerings beyond its traditional financial coverage and firmly enters the cryptocurrency space. The BLX gives Eikon’s growing network of professional and business subscribers a trusted live feed for gaining a competitive advantage.

Thomson Reuters has led the way as one of the most relied upon sources for financial and business intelligence. Its award-winning Eikon software package connects its users with critical timely feeds from over 400 exchanges and OTC-traded markets. Over 210,000 Eikon Messenger users have access to trusted news content, data, analytics and insights, filtered to their exact needs. Available on both desktop and mobile devices, the Eikon trading software provides access to deep pools of liquidity, professional networks, expert analysis and insights on emerging and complex markets.

I don’t usually tell people that I’m a qualified expert in insurance as it’s not relevant, but I’m mentioning it today as I just presented at a private insurance event. There are lots of interesting nuances in insurance. You and I probably think it’s just that once a year renewal of our auto policy, or maybe the regular premiums we pay for life and pensions. That’s an important part of it and is a challenge as people don’t buy insurance, it has to be sold. Think about it. You don’t wake up and think “oh, I might die today! Better get some life insurance”, but you learn through advisory sales that this is what you need to do.

Then there’s a whole other raft of insurance where the real money is made: commercial insurance. Insuring ships, aircraft, offices and employees is where the big-ticket policies arrive. These are more complicated, as the risks have to be calculated in more depth. Under assess the risk and the insurance company loses; over assess and a competitor might steal the business. Equally, the corporate relationship becomes important in this space, as that’s where the strength of understanding the client comes from.

Social media proofs of concept on the blockchain demonstrate important value propositions of decentralized apps.

In 2016, Steemit pioneered the world’s first blockchain-based decentralized social network and in my view remains one of the most important blockchain projects today.

Boiled down to its simplest form, Steemit is a kind of reddit with the property that creating interesting content, or curating it effectively, will earn users real money on the platform in the form of a cryptocurrency called Steem. There is no barrier to entry. Just create an account and start earning.

It takes 16 hours to drive from Lagos to Abuja, but one hour to fly. According to Google Maps, the trip should take under 12 hours. However, police will stop you every 30 minutes or so to ask for bribes. If you don’t pay up, you risk jail or your tires being slashed. My younger brother calls it “oil money” — ancillary payments such as these grease the wheels of Nigerian society.

The lack of accountability and corruption are entrenched in Nigerian society. Nigeria’s growing population of 185 million has encountered rising unemployment and violence. Youth under the age of 25 — more than 60% of the population — have been hit hardest. These are my cousins — talented and capable, with much to contribute. Society is leaving them behind.

The Estonian government is considering an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for a cryptoasset called estcoin. The resulting sale would enable “anyone to invest in a country for the first time,” explains Kaspar Korjus, the Managing Director at e-Residency.

Korjus explained that the funds could be managed through a Public Private Partnership (PPP. This would enable Estonia to invest in new technologies and innovations for the public sector, from smart contracts to Artificial Intelligence, as well as make it technically scalable to benefit more people around the world. Estonia would then serve a model for how societies of the future can be served in the digital era.

Blockstream has just announced that the Bitcoin blockchain is now being broadcast from space. The new service, Blockstream Satellite, streams data down to much of the planet’s surface for free, in order to boost the connectivity, decentralization, redundancy, affordability, security, privacy, and ultimately adoption of Bitcoin.

“Blockstream Satellite enables further participation in Bitcoin,” states the company, “including the billions of people in the world without internet access and people in places where bandwidth prices make participating cost-prohibitive.”

A lack of liquidity will haunt the Initial Coin Offering market. The problem is that there are too many currencies. Without enough liquidity, we will see great participation by buyers with no support from market makers and no buyers for the cryptocoins that the ICO company wants to convert into flat cash.

Some people talk about FinTech disruption and how payments and banking is being attacked and unbundled by start-ups, but we often look at banking too simplistically. Global banks and investment banks are far more complex creatures than their high street counterparts, which is why we’ve seen far less disruption in corporate, commercial and wholesale banking that we are seeing in retail, but don’t be complacent or closed here. There are things happening in the more complex areas too.

For example, there’s a new clearing bank that is just an API; there’s a global trading social network, that is far more effective and fun than day trading on your own; there’s a clearing and settlement engine being built, supporting billions of transactions through blockchain technologies; there’s a whole range of crowdfunding ventures that are allowing start-ups to get started far faster and easier than ever before; equally there are reams of new firms offering SME financing support, allowing small businesses to flourish and prosper; and there’s a lot more. In fact, the landscape of change in this more specialised market of markets is massive, but often overlooked.

Some of the biggest questions amongst conference goers at the second annual Blockchain D.C. conference were what is Blockchain, do I need it, and how can my company value from it?

Blockchain, otherwise known in capital markets as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), could potentially change the most fundamental foundation of capital markets: the transaction. DLT provides much needed functionality by embedding processing logic directly into contracts, decentralizing the trust needed for smooth risk transference, and bringing consensus-driven verification to transactions.

DLT will have a tremendous positive impact on operational efficiency and cost overheads. DLT also will enable workflows to be created that will transform virtually all economic activity. However, standards and protocols are still being defined.  Reference architectures are being contemplated and subjected to rigorous proofs of concept. And while there are now numerous production-level projects underway to bring the benefits of DLT to capital markets, significant challenges remain, given the complex technological ecosystem that is at the core of capital markets. For DLT to transform this ecosystem, it will need to operate within that ecosystem.

How are Ethereum, IPFS/Filecoin, and BigchainDB complementary? What about Golem, Polkadot, or Interledger? I often get questions like this. So, I decided to write about how I answer those questions, via a first-principles framing.

The quick answer: there’s no one magic system called “blockchain” that magically does everything. Rather, there are really good building blocks of computing that can be used together to create effective decentralized applications. Ethereum can play a role, BigchainDB can play a role, and many more as well. Let’s explore…

There are currently three proposals for activating Segwit on Bitcoin — Segwit2x, BIP 91 "Segsignal," and BIP 148 "UASF." The first two are intended only for use by miners and the third is primarily being run by users. We’ll take a look at each one in turn and show they all use a very similar approach to achieving their shared goal. We’ll also look at the differences between them and see what effects they can have on one another.

There is evidence to indicate that Bitcoin’s network has been suffering a far greater workload than needed recently, according to the developer behind the bitcoin analytics platform OXT. The French developer, Laurent, told BraveNewCoin that he is “95% confident” that the 2015 “Stress Test” and “Flood Attack” events affected the number of bitcoin transactions as recently as January 2017.

Here is my claim. Within 5 years the biggest cryptocurrency by market cap will not be Ethereum or any other platform currency. Instead, it will be an application token.

Part of being a human is wanting to leave a mark on the world. Within us lies the deep need to be remembered, in some form, after we die. We see it in the Cueva de las Manos - Cave of the Hands, where the inhabitants left the outlines of their hands painted on the walls as early as 13'000 years ago.

San Diego-based bitcoin wallet provider, Airbitz, and the San Diego Bitcoin meetup group recently hosted a number of speakers from blockchain startups. Among them was ShapeShift CFO, Justin, presenting the company's new smart contract-powered platform, Prism.

Sidechains promise to help Bitcoin adapt to new demands and accommodate new innovation, according to the company behind the seminal sidechain whitepaper, Blockstream. Several different companies have been developing the idea since Blockstream introduced the concept in an October 2014.

What used to be euphoria has fizzled into despair as the price of Ethereum (ETH) has taken a dive from a June high of US$400 down to US$240. Media outlets covering the crash allegated that it was due to “technical difficulties” that clogged the Ethereum network, causing significant delays in processing transactions.

As of Q1 2016, in excess of $1.1 billion in private capital has been invested in blockchain and Bitcoin startups by traditional venture capital firms and seed investors. But as decentralized applications and marketplaces continue on the road to maturity, there is a problem. VCs might be asking themselves — are we investing in the correct asset class?

Bitcoin proved the viability of a decentralized, peer-to-peer digital currency. Ethereum demonstrated the demand for a world computer that can support decentralized applications, that is, applications that don’t rely on a central authority. However, widespread adoption of these platforms isn’t currently possible because they don’t yet scale.

Dubbed the “silver to Bitcoin’s gold,” Litecoin (LTC) has been riding the crytocurrency uptrend as wave after wave of bullish news has driven its spot price over US$45, or 0.017 BTC. But beyond price, the Litecoin development playground is also seeing expansion as far as its codebase is concerned.

Since I see a lot of downsides to having one large uber-blockchain connecting all others, I will focus on a token-LESS solution. This would have several advantages.

Tokens are the new “new” thing in the blockchain space. Just when everyone thought that blockchains were hot enough, everyone realized that tokens *are* the business model for Web 3.0.

I’m boarding a flight yesterday and murfing (mobile surfing). Flicking between Facebook apps, twitter, bank account, BBC news and more. Suddenly I spot a new ICO – Initial Coin Offering – for a new bank.

Nevada Senate Bill 398 was recently signed by the State Governor, and officially passed into law on Monday. The bill establishes various provisions relating to the use of blockchain technology, and makes the Silver State the third in the Union to recognize the nascent industry.

While Wall Street is cautious on Bitcoin, it has gone all in on blockchain. But real-world implementation of distributed ledgers in the financial system, mostly in experimental fashion, has been underwhelming.

At the recent NYC’s #consensus and #tokensummit, almost every other person I met start or end with a variation of the question: Do you have a token for sale? What token should I buy?

I saw a really interesting presentation in Kigali at the Dot Finance Africa FinTech Summit from Yasaman Hadjibashi, Chief Creation Officer with Barclays Africa (soon to be something else).

In the blockchain space this summer, three white hot letters are buzzing on everybody’s lips: ICO, or Initial Coin Offering. Droves of blockchain developers are scrambling to put together white papers to architect the next big solution since Bitcoin.

While last week I dissected Ripple's XRPs. There are many fundamental features of the Ripple system that other cryptos can learn from. A lot of them are small and obscure to anyone who hasn't had a hands-on experience developing systems on top of cryptos. Luckily enough, that's my speciality.

Earlier this month, hackers executed a global cyberattack, reportedly attacking over 150 countries, including public and health care systems and individual computers. The attackers demanded payment in bitcoin to unlock computers and return the data.

On May 10 Segregated Witness (Segwit) was activated on Litecoin, allowing Lightning Network (Lightning) transactions from various software clients to settle on the cryptocurrency network.

A new blockchain-based platform is being developed by technology giant Intel and healthcare API service provider PokitDok. The platform promises to advance blockchain technology by processing transaction requests securely using Intel SGX.

Dutch point of sale (POS) software provider Countr recently announced a strategic partnership with European Bitcoin payment provider Conify. The partnership allows Countr to offer a wider variety of alternative payments, including Bitcoin and 13 other cryptocurrencies, for more than 3,000 retailers.

No technology has captured the public’s imagination over the past couple of years more than blockchain. The technology entered full hype-cycle in but has begun to climb the ‘slope of engagement’ with real progress in 2017. What is the current state of blockchain adoption and what does this promise for the future?

Nearly 80 percent of financial institution executives believe that distributed ledger technology will significantly transform capital markets within the next three years. But infrastructure technology will be the lynchpin for how well DLT applications and solutions are adopted and perform in the fintech, institutional trading and security arenas.

If you ask someone well-informed about the characteristics of blockchains, the word “immutable” will invariably appear in the response. In plain English, this word is used to denote something which can never be modified or changed.

If you are interested in Blockchain, you should maybe look to north-western Europe, in particular Ireland, The Netherlands, and naturally The UK with London still being the fintech capital of the world.

Three major energy companies in Europe, including the leading central European electricity Transmission System Operator (TSO), TenneT, have announced that they are working with IBM on blockchain solutions for managing electricity.

No discussion of blockchain or crytpo-currencies should begin without mention of David Chaum’s Untraceable Electronic Cash and Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments. These are some of the most interesting blockchain and crypto-currency documents and reports that I have come across. Note: These are in chronological order (oldest to newest).

At an accelerating pace, blockchain projects have been raising money to impressive levels by offering their digital assets to a global market of token sale investors. Earlier this year, DFINITY sold $3.9M worth of pre-seed assets in just 24 hours. A few days later, Melonport’s “contribution period” sold out over $2.9M worth of MLN tokens in just under 3 minutes. In 2017, many more companies and projects are gearing up to raise capital through this new methodology of decentralized crowdfunding.

We all know what a database is: an organized collection of data. By analogy, then, we can think of a blockchain as an organized collection of resources, latter being defined as something that exists only in limited quantities. So, blockchain is really a resourcebase.

Blockchain technology was announced through the paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. Interestingly, this paper does not specifically use the word “blockchain.”

The State Agency for eGovernment in Ukraine and Bitcoin mining manufacturer BitFury recently announced a memorandum of interaction and cooperation to create “the first full-scale Blockchain eGovernance program for Ukraine."

The UK’s Royal Mint (TRM) and CME Group recently announced that AlphaPoint and BitGo are helping develop a trading platform for a new blockchain based product, Royal Mint Gold.

I try to generally avoid making political commentary on the blog as it’s not appropriate. This is a blog about technology and finance, not the economy and politics. Every now and again the two come together such as with Brexit and Donald Trump.

Ubitquity LLC recently launched to a pilot project in Brazil, recording real estate ownership on the Bitcoin blockchain. The Delaware-based startup runs a platform that secures the records using Colu colored coins.

There are two ways to look at the future: The first assumes a linear progression from past achievements and is relevant to forecasting short periods of time, where the future is a derivative of the past. The other method assumes that in the period of a decade, the law of accelerated returns applies exponentially and compounds acceleration assuming a high level of change in the period forecasted.

A ticket is a type of contract. Ticket companies often have surcharges in the range of 5 percent just for issuing and managing their tickets. Can blockchain technology provide better, more secure tickets at a fraction of that cost? I think it can.

The last six months have ushered in a sea-change in the blockchain community. In short, the days of experimentation are over. Blockchain is being implemented to work at scale in our global financial institutions and no one will be left untouched by its tidal force.

At least eight US States have worked on bills accepting or promoting the use of Bitcoin and Blockchain technology this year, and a couple of them have already passed them into law. The bills cover a wide range of purposes, from increasing transparency in State operations to protecting consumers from added taxation. Some have been very specific, defining blockchains and smart contracts, while describing the tecnology as “immutable” and providing “uncensored truth.”

We’re delighted to announce the first beta release of MultiChain 1.0 for Linux and Windows, after more than two years of intensive development. As we’ve said before, our definition is very specific: "beta" means that there are no known bugs or major shortcomings. So the purpose of the beta period is to ensure than any unknown issues are discovered through our own testing, as well as that of our growing user base.

I’ve just returned from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) where there were a number of events. Just a few weeks ago, I was in Bahrain, talking at a conference about FinTech as usual. What struck me is the interest and excitement about FinTech in both countries. There’s also a lot of competition between different cities in the region to be a recognised Financial Centre. Bearing in mind that none of these cities were on the map fifteen years ago, it’s quite incredible that today Dubai is the 18th largest Global Financial Centre, one place higher than Frankfurt; Abu Dhabi is 32nd on the list, squeezed in between Dublin and Amsterdam; Doha is number 40, above Stockholm and Jersey; and Bahrain is 58th, above Johannesburg and Copenhagen. Ten years ago, when the first Global Financial Centres Index was produced, Dubai was at number 25 in the charts, and Abu Dhabi, Doha and Bahrain didn’t even make the list.

The cryptocurrency and blockchain security pioneer Ledger has secured a $7M Series A funding led by MAIF Avenir, with the participation of Xange, Wicklow Capital, GDTRE, Libertus Capital, Digital Currency Group, The Whittemore Collection, Kima Ventures, BHB Network and Nicolas Pinto.

IBM, commodities trading house Trafigura, and the French investment bank Natixis are pioneering a blockchain solution for US crude oil transactions. Using a distributed ledger to host this market “allows major steps in a crude oil transaction to be digitized on the blockchain, ensuring improved transparency, enhanced security, and optimized efficiency,” according to IBM.

“Blockchain technology could change the world!” But how? If an industry gets a single shared source of truth, what happens? If you’re in the blockchain space, you may be working hard to paint a possible picture to answer that. You may be using logic and extrapolation, but wishing that you had something more tangible.

Australia Post recently joined an initiative to combat the rise of counterfeit food being sold across China. The company joins Chinese e-commerce juggernaut Alibaba and nutritional supplement maker Blackmores. The project aims to track food from, “paddock to plate.”

Alongside the Statue of Liberty the iconic yellow cabs of New York City are recognized worldwide as an emblem of the great metropolis. Today these hallmark fixtures of the city are facing an existential crisis and for the city’s residents and visitors alike, it’s a big win.

According to customer identification manager LoginRadius, four out of five people dislike the tedious process of providing personal information for website registration. The Baynard Institute, a web research company based in the UK, reports that 35 percent of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts due account creation requirements, while ITProPortal estimates that we will have over 200 digital accounts to manage by 2020.

I recently discovered that there is around $1.6 trillion of money laundering globally and less than 2% is caught by the financial system. That’s a stunning amount and makes you wonder why our system is so awful. Much of it is down to the fact that account openings depend upon physical documentation and human checks. If we could digitalise the whole process, it could be tightened up immensely.

Bitcoin’s block size debate is seeping into the mainstream press, the Wall Street Journal states that the “bitter split in the developer community behind the virtual currency threatened to literally break it in two.” The article echoes statements made by investors such as Vinny Lingham, the Civic CEO and Gyft co-founder, who states “I’ve been very surprised with the amount of vocal support for a Bitcoin Hard Fork.”

Just two days after Gyft founder and Civic CEO Vinny Lingham’s warning about a Bitcoin hard fork devastating bitcoin’s value, 21 different Bitcoin exchanges have clarified their position on Bitcoin Unlimited trading. The exchange coalition stated in a hard fork contingency plan that they will trade any Bitcoin Unlimited cryptocurrency alongside bitcoin.

Since the rise of the internet, big data is becoming the bedrock of the economy. Billions of decisions are being made everyday based on data. Not only is it evident that appropriate security measures are not in place, those that do attempt to secure their data pose little deterrence to cyber attackers.

On February 10th the World Jurist Association hosted a side event at the United Nations, entitled Blockchain: Highway to a Deliberative Democracy. Experts in financial, legal, technical, and philosophical industries came together and presented the different ways that blockchain technology can be leveraged in order to improve Democratic Governance. The audience comprised government officials, academics, and technological leaders. Joseph Lubin, the founder of ConsenSys and a major player in the blockchain space, presented the concept of a decentralized web 3.0 as enabled by blockchain technology, and the ways in which this development is uniquely positioned to aid people in both the developing and developed world through the creation of self sovereign identities.

The current implementations of distributed ledger technology clearly are not the Blockchain that underpins the virtual currency Bitcoin. The tools and platforms such as the offerings from Digital Asset Holdings and R3 Corda are offered as a pragmatic answer to a set of current business, technological and regulatory challenges. By implementing the appropriate use cases, firms can avoid the current challenges exhibited by the Bitcoin example – including scalability, latency and privacy – that make the current public Blockchain model a non-starter for banks.

The Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) announced on Wednesday that Canadian businesses using blockchain technology in their financial products or service offerings may be subject to Ontario securities law requirements.

The announcement states the many uses of distributed ledger technologies (DLT), such as blockchain, have the potential to increase transparency and efficiencies in our capital markets. “We are keen to support this type of innovation," said Pat Chaukos, Chief of the OSC LaunchPad.

I’ve just been alerted by friend Gijs Boudewijn to the release of a fascinating white paper by BIS, the Bank for International Settlements (the guys who do Basel stuff and are big cohonez in banking circles). Their Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures released Distributed ledger technology in payment, clearing and settlement: an analytical framework last week, and I just read it.

3months.com, BraveNewCoin, and the Blockchain Association of New Zealand (BANZ) are putting together another blockchain conference, BlockchainLabs.NZ. The conference is focused on empowering organisations to collaborate, undertaking research and development, and commercialising new disruptive blockchain business models.

Several businesses in “Crypto Valley,” centered in and around the Swiss canton of Zug, recently launched the Crypto Valley Association. The independent, government-supported association aims to take advantage of Switzerland’s strengths to build the world’s leading blockchain and cryptographic ecosystem, while working with government to foster the development of pioneering digital technologies. Alongside many blockchain startups in Zug, association launch members include Thomson Reuters, PWC, UBS, Luxoft, Lykke Corp and Lucerne University.

It made me laugh today.  I was chairing a panel where Romana Kumar, Head of Global Transaction Banking for the National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD), was discussing their trial of Ripple. The background to this was announced in a press release on 1st February 2017.

The Government of Guernsey recently announced that their island has become the home of "the first ever commercial deployment of blockchain technology for the private equity market."

Post-trade derivatives processing is a complex and integral part of everyday global financial markets. As blockchain-inspired technology for financial services continues to mature, post-trade infrastructure providers are collaborating with the industry to explore how it can be used to increase the efficiency of systems and processes underpinning the global derivatives markets.

The unsurpassed reach of the Internet and the emergence of a range of new digital technologies have transformed virtually every corner of the music industry for fans and creators alike. While consumers enjoy vastly more options, these market disruptions are presenting a range of important challenges for creators, producers, and distributors of music.

The Vice-President of the European Commission, Andrus Ansip, recently provided details on initiatives, projects and partnerships to foster decentralised innovation ecosystems in Europe. “The Commission is actively monitoring Blockchain and DLT developments,” he said.

Blockchain technology has captured the imagination of the financial services industry. Unfortunately, the adoption of the technology is impaired by a lack of clarity from regulators, including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), on how the technology will be regulated. Many firms in the financial services industry believe blockchain technology can be adapted for use in traditional financial services transactions in a way that can reshape the model of executing trades. But the success of blockchain technology will be impacted in large part by how the SEC elects to regulate platforms that use the technology. The devil will be in the details.

Global professional services firm Accenture PLC and Thales e-security recently announced the launch of a patent-pending security system for enterprise use that, “creates a simple path to large-scale commercial use of blockchain technology,” according to Accenture.

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.

I recently traveled to Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum, and was surprised to find blockchain on the minds of many of the leaders convened there. Even those who were not particularly knowledgeable about blockchain were aware that they should know about it. I participated in three events, including a panel at the Swedish Lunch, where I spoke about reimagining our global identity infrastructure, in front of a well-informed audience.

Enterprise use of blockchain technology has evolved at an almost unfathomable rate over the past 24 months. From early bitcoin experiments, senior bankers joining start-ups, the launch of the public Ethereum decentralized application platform and the many private, permissioned systems currently under development using the Ethereum technology, to the creation of industry consortia, blockchain has emerged as one of the top enterprise IT trends entering 2017.

Blockchain Global Limited (BGL) recently announced that DigitalX will onboard all of its existing platform customers to BGL’s Bitcoin exchange platform, ACX.io. Customers will be introduced to Blockchain Global Limited as the DigitalX Direct platform winds down its operations. ACX is already the largest Bitcoin exchange in Australia by volume.

The Estonian based security software company Guardtime has been awarded a contract by the Estonian Ministry of Defence and NATO, to design a next generation system, including a blockchain, to modernize the NATO Cyber Range defensive platform.

Recently I became involved with SCC's committee on "Blockchain and electronic distributed ledger technologies". During one of the discussions, I've learned about a new term that seems to have become very popular in the banking industry - "Distributed Ledger Technology" (DLT). Apparently companies like Deloitte or even the UK government have picked up on this new thing and seem to be abuzz with it.

The Irish Funds Industry Association (Irish Funds) recently announced a new regulatory reporting blockchain project, in collaboration with Deloitte, and industry participants including Northern Trust and State Street.

A bank has to make a regulatory change every 12 minutes. That’s some task. A bigger question must also be: how can a regulatory check that a bank is compliant with their regulatory changes, if their regulations change every 12 minutes are run to 1,000’s of pages?

The Governor of the Bank of England (BoE) and Chair of the Financial Stability Board and Monetary Policy Committee, Mark Carney, recently gave a speech about FinTech, financial inclusion, and BoE research into Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC).

Swiss blockchain startup Procivis recently announced their existence and a proof of concept software program. Describing it as an “e-government as a service platform,” the Procivis platform is designed to “enable the digitization of societies and the provision of online public services across the globe.”

I was surprised the other day when I met Pawel Kuskowski, CEO and Co-founder of Coinfirm, a start-up firm offering Compliance-as-a-Service. Pawel has been trained in compliance and AML, having worked with some of the world’s biggest financial institutions including AIG (Compliance Officer), UBS (Director of Compliance, Compliance and Operational Risk Officer) and RBS (Head of Global Anti-Money Laundering, AML). Why was I surprised?  I was surprised by his opening line: “there is around $1.6 trillion of money laundering globally and less than 2% is caught by the financial system”

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).

Interpol, Europol, and the Basel Institute of Governance recently held a conference in Doha, Qatar. The Global conference on countering money laundering and digital currencies attracted over 400 financial investigators from financial intelligence units around the world.

In the days before computerised trading and centralised electronic stock systems Wall Street depended heavily upon messengers delivering paper certificates by hand. In 1968, the New York Stock Exchange facilitated 12 million trades in one day. Wall Street back offices attempting to settle and clear these trades were overwhelmed, and the messengers could not keep up with the demand.

Deutsche Bank, HSBC, KBC, Natixis, Rabobank, Société Générale and UniCredit recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding in Brussels, agreeing to collaborate on the development and commercialization of a new product called Digital Trade Chain (DTC).

“Smart contracts” is a phrase which is often difficult to define. Let me help: a “smart contract” is a contract which enforces itself! Nick Szabo gave the example of a vending machine. You insert the money, and the machine lets you take back either [1] your money, or [2] some merchandise.

McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm for governments and NGOs, recently submitted a blockchain Technology report to the US Federal Advisory Committee on Insurance. The firm analyzed how the technology may disrupt a range of industries, emphasizing banking and insurance, and predicts commercial deployment of blockchain technology at scale by the year 2021.

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers have finally cracked problems that they’ve worked on for decades, from Go to human-level speech recognition. A key piece was the ability to gather and learn on mountains of data, which pulled error rates past the success line. In short, big data has transformed AI, to an almost unreasonable level.

Commodities markets rarely feature in blockchain conversations, but if Memphis-based commodities brokerage The Seam and their technology partners at IBM and Hyperledger are successful, cotton will be the first commodity where an industry-wide consortium takes advantage of a blockchain to improve the trade process.

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.

2016 was a year of growth for Bitcoin compared to last year, both in price and infrastructure. Bitcoin has retained its title of best performing currency for the second year in a row, and perhaps more importantly, has found its first taste of legitimacy in commercial use by banks.

Two Russian companies, S7 Airlines, and Alfa-Bank, have successfully closed a deal using a smart contract to settle and record a Letter of Credit (LoC) on a blockchain. A Deloitte in Russia provided legal support to the project.

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. The platform offers a growing collection of integrated cloud services, including analytics, computing, database, mobile, networking, and storage.

It’s hard to deny the promise of blockchain. It seems like everyday I wake up and read about a novel use case or decentralized application seeking to blaze a new path forward or innovate off a legacy system.

Big Four accounting firm KPMG recently published its third quarterly report on China’s banking sector. Among a variety of topics is the implications and countermeasures for commercial banks, “under the rise of blockchain technology.”

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Commission (NDIC) have set up a committee to investigate the growing trend of bitcoin use, according to the government-owned broadcasting station, the Voice of Nigeria. The news was revealed on Friday by NDIC Managing Director Alhaji Umaru Ibrahim at the 2016 Workshop for Financial Correspondents in Kaduna.

The Netherlands' third largest bank, ABN Amro, and its technology partner, IBM, recently launched a pilot to explore how blockchain technology can improve Commercial Real Estate (CRE) processes.

About 18 months have passed since the finance sector woke up, en masse, to the possibilities of permissioned blockchains, or to use the more general term, “distributed ledgers”. The period since has seen a tsunami of activity, including research reports, strategic investments, pilot projects, and the formation of many consortia. No one can accuse the banking world of not taking the potential of this technology seriously.

Deloitte Netherlands recently announced that the city of Rotterdam will use a blockchain to record lease agreements for the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC), enabling the city and companies housed in CIC office space to conclude contracts faster and easier.

The legal marijuana market is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. According to the 2016 report released by New Frontier and ArcView Market Research, “2015 was a watershed year.” Legal sales of the coveted plant were US$5 billion in 2015, and they will grow 25% this year to reach $6.7b. The report projects that the legal market will be worth a whopping US $22b by the year 2020.

The latest industrial supply chain to embrace blockchain technology is targeting the additive manufacturing industry, otherwise known as large-scale 3D printing. Cubichain Technologies and CalRAM LLC. recently made a joint announcement that they have successfully demonstrated the deployment of a blockchain network to track aircraft parts from design, through printing, all the way to certification and sales.

A prestigious Berlin-based business school, ESMT, recently announced that they are accepting bitcoin for tuition payments, making it the first German institute of higher education to do so. Students attending undergraduate programs and executive business school programs can now pay for tuition using the cryptographically secured currency.

I’ve noticed a great deal of schadenfreude related to the R3 bump. Lots of people saying that blockchain is past its sell-by date, R3 are bust and distributed ledgers are dead. I think it’s related to the journalists who, having delighted in bigging up blockchain big time for the past two years are now relishing the idea of trashing it but come on guys, blockchain is far from dead. It’s just entered the trough of disillusionment.

Big data arose in the early and mid 2000s to meet internet-scale computation needs: ZooKeeper at Yahoo, BigTable and MapReduce at Google, Cassandra at Facebook; and so on. Then came open source projects like Hadoop File System (HDFS), Hadoop MapReduce, Cassandra, and more.

The German Central Bank, Deutsche Bundesbank, and the operator of the country’s stock exchange, Deutsche Börse, recently announced a research blockchain. “The Deutsche Bundesbank hopes that this prototype will contribute to a better practical understanding of blockchain technology in order to assess its potential," said Carl-Ludwig Thiele, Member of the Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank.

The issuer of the UK’s coinage, and the world's leading export mint, The Royal Mint, has partnered with American futures company, and one of the largest options and futures exchanges, CME Group. The two companies are building and launching Royal Mint Gold (RMG), a blockchain-based digital asset backed by gold. Set to launch in 2017, “RMG will change the way traders and investors trade, execute and settle gold,” The Royal Mint announced on Tuesday. The mint is now inviting other market players to participate in this project by building connecting platforms to trade their assets.

Formerly known as Ernst & Young, EY is one of the “Big Four,” a collection of mammoth organizations that advise on tax, and offer a wide range of management and assurance services, while auditing more than 80 percent of all US public companies. The group includes KPMG, Deloitte, PwC and EY. 

R3 CEV launched with nine founding members in September 2015. Helmed by David Rutter, a former executive at interdealer broker Icap, the firm set out to develop blockchain technology for the financial services industry.

Rutter put together an unmatched group of large financial institutions. At its recent peak, the consortium claimed 73 member, including many of the world’s largest banks and insurance companies.

According to big-four professional services firm KPMG, China’s dominance in the blockchain space has now spread to startups and startup funding, displacing Silicon Valley.

Bitmark is a digital asset startup from Taiwan that is hoping to change the digital content rights landscape. The company recently announced the latest blockchain industry seed round investment. The US$1.7 million round was led by Cherubic Ventures, the Digital Currency Group and WI Harper Group also participated.

The only securities exchange in Korea, Korea Exchange (KRX), recently launched a blockchain-based marketplace where equity in startup companies can be traded, called the Korean Startup Market (KSM).

Philip Sedgwick and Juan Martin Grisales have two things in common; they’re both business owners and they both see digital currency as the future. Sedgwick is the owner and operator at the Wirtshaus am Bavariapark beer garden in Munich while Grisales is CEO at Living Group, an organization of three companies engaged in international tourism.

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.

One of Thailand’s leading retail banks and the fourth largest by assets, Kasikornbank Pcl., has entered into an agreement with IBM to develop blockchain services using the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger. The announcement marks the first time any bank in the tumultuous country has embraced blockchain technology.

Last Friday saw the launch of Zcash, a new public blockchain and associated cryptocurrency that attracted a lot of attention. By now, there are hundreds of cryptocurrencies, so any budding young entrant needs a serious differentiator to rise above the fray. In the case of Zcash, this is easy – Zcash users can send money to each other in absolute privacy.

Myanmar’s nascent Yangon Stock Exchange (YSX) will be using blockchain technology in its settlement platform, and putting it into practical use within two years. Having only opened for trading this spring, two stocks are currently trading on the exchange with four more on the way.

Tullett Prebon Information (TPI) has announced an agreement to distribute Brave New Coin (BNC) digital currency data. “This is the first time such a comprehensive view of the entire digital currency landscape has been made available to financial markets,” states the announcement.

At Monday’s 12th annual FinTech Demo Day in Seoul, the chairman of South Korea’s Financial Services Commission (FSC), Yim Jong-yong, announced that his department will, “Lay the systemic groundwork for the spread of digital currency.”

Global payments technology giant Visa Inc. recently previewed a new payment platform for financial institutions. Visa B2B Connect is described as a simple, fast and secure way to process business-to-business (B2B) payments.

Retail giant Walmart, IBM and Tsinghua University are collaborating to improve the way food is tracked, transported and sold across China, using blockchain technology. The project creates, “A new model for food traceability, supply chain transparency and auditability using IBM Blockchain based on the open source Linux Foundation Hyperledger Project fabric,” and coincides with the opening of a new Walmart Food Safety Collaboration Center in Beijing.

Five of the world's largest insurance companies recently announced the Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative (B3i). Aegon, Allianz, Munich Re, Swiss Re and Zurich aim to explore whether Blockchain technology can be used to develop standards and processes for industry-wide usage, and to catalyze efficiency gains in the insurance industry.

At BigchainDB, people often approach us with their “next great blockchain idea.” At least 8 times out of 10, that idea could be best implemented by a traditional database. But sometimes, the ideas are genuinely applicable.

Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX) recently debuted a number of digital services, at the 36th GITEX Technology Week. GITEX is the largest technology exchange and marketplace for the Middle East and Africa. This years event takes place in Abu Dhabi from October 16 to 20, and over 140,000 visitors and 4,000+ exhibitors are expected to attend.

The bi-annual Shanghai Fashion Week is packed with almost 50 shows. As part of both the Shanghai International Fashion Culture Festival and supported by the Ministry of Commerce, the event is a growing business and a cultural event hosted by the Shanghai Municipal Government.

The latest development out of Moscow is that Russia's largest bank, Sberbank, and the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) have launched a pilot program to increase the speed, reliability, and quality of exchanging documents, using blockchain technology.

India’s largest private bank, ICICI, and one of the middle east’s largest banks, Emirates NBD, recently announced successful international blockchain transactions for both Trade Finance and Remittance purposes.

We see six key verticals where blockchains are being applied. Each of these has many business opportunities. We’re still in the early days of blockchain and the broader decentralization movement, which means there is still plenty of opportunity in each vertical.

At the end of the second quarter this year, there was $13.97 trillion mortgage debt outstanding in the U.S., according to the latest statistics from the Boards of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Residential properties account for over 90 percent or approximately $12.6 trillion. 35 percent of outstanding mortgages were held by major financial institutions and over 36 percent by Federal and related agencies, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Dubai’s Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan recently launched the Dubai Blockchain Strategy, a plan to use the technology in several different areas. The Blockchain Strategy has three main objectives, making the government more efficient, creating specialized sectors for business, and achieving global leadership.

If you’re thinking about business opportunities for blockchain technology, it’s useful to avoid getting over-excited about an idea that a traditional centralized database could do just as well. How do you parse which is which?

Scorechain Luxembourg-based bitcoin and blockchain solutions startup that entered the market with the release of the mobile bitcoin wallet, Yallet, last year. The company has since pivoted towards blockchain analytics, raising US$570,000 along the way.

PricewaterhouseCoppers (PwC) recently recently hosted a discussion for the Asset and Wealth Management (AWM) sector to specifically look at the application and potential of distributed ledger technology on their business. “From our work across the financial services sector, it is clear to us that Blockchain applications have the potential to transform the industry,” said Steve Webb, Partner at PwC & UK lead for Blockchain. “Blockchain is not just hype – there is real interest in this topic.”

Recently, I was contacted by a fellow Bitcoiner and informed about some possible shady goings-on on the DECENT platform. Reportedly, the platform has raised 5352BTC (3.2M USD equivalent) in its token presale, but the product appears to be on some shaky grounds. Lets have a look at what we can find out about the platform, the presale and have a look at whether there is something shady going on...

The 2016 European Social Innovation Competition focuses on social innovation for refugees and migrants, as the world is facing an unprecedented displacement crisis. More than 65 million people are now forcibly displaced as a result of violent conflicts and natural disasters.

Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Holdings Inc. recently announced a trial of blockchain technology for derivative products, in collaboration with Soramitsu Co Ltd. The Tokyo-based company is one of largest insurers in Japan.

IBM China Research Lab and China UnionPay’s E-payment Research Institute recently demonstrated a collaborative blockchain project at the Shanghai International Blockchain Week. The project enables banks to integrate and share bonus point systems, while consumers will be able to exchange points from any of the banks they do business with.

Bitscan has been providing merchants and consumers with tools that promote cryptocurrency since 2013. Co-Founder & CEO Rob Wilson holds a firm belief that commerce will be the primary driver of adoption, and the company is built on one core idea; The blockchain is a wholly commercial tool that allows us to record and transfer ownership of anything, instantly, on a global, open ledger.

Global technology research and advisory firm, Ovum, recently published the results of a Corporate Treasurer survey, developed in partnership with Swiss financial services software specialist, Temenos.

Seven financial institutions, including Credit Suisse, Citi, and HSBC, have collaborated “to explore how blockchain technology could simplify reference data processes.” The companies are working with blockchain technology company R3 CEV and capital markets blockchain infrastructure provider, Axoni.

BNP Paribas Securities Services recently announced that it’s “expanding its blockchain platform for private stocks.” The aim is to enable private companies to legally issue minibonds via crowdfunding platforms, in accordance with the new French crowdfunding regulations. “Issuers and investors will benefit from a standardised process, which will ensure financial transactions are performed quickly, efficiently and securely,” the company said.

Standards Australia recently announced that the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is supporting its proposal to develop a set of international standards for blockchain technology.

According to the Global Slavery Index,  “Two thirds of the estimated 45.8 million people in modern slavery were identified in the Asia-Pacific,” including a large number forced to work on fishing vessels throughout the region.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) recently challenged the reinsurance industry “to take brave steps in their cost reduction strategies,” at the international rendez-vous of insurance and reinsurance, in Monte Carlo. The event attracts major players in the world Reinsurance markets, including reinsurers, insurers and brokers, as well as a large number of lawyers, bankers, accounting and rating companies.

Blockchain applications live in their own digital realm, totally orthogonal to the “meat space” also known as the Real World™. Be it decentralized application or smart contracts, their reach is limited to the space they can control. Any use case projection in our reality eventually confronts the following hard fact: how can an app efficiently and securely interact with the physical world?

A steady week in bitcoin ended preceded a drop of almost 5% overnight. The Bitcoin price was bullish the entire week, starting at $609, but ends the week at $602. 80% of Bitcoin trading volume is in CNY, followed by 11% in JPY. USD is 3rd with 5.6%. More detailed information can be found in the Bitcoin technical analysis.

SpaIn’s largest bank, Banco Santander, recently published a report, “Brazil : Banks & Financial Services: To Bitcoin Or Not To Bitcoin?.” The Equity Research paper discusses a meeting on August 23 between local investors and the CEO of Mercado Bitcoin, Rodrigo Batista.

A new 4G wireless data network with over 80% coverage, Reliance Jio, recently went live in India. Residents of approximately 18,000 cities and 200,000 rural villages can enjoy free cell and data plans until the end of the year. The data service then costs 149 rupees, about US$2.25, per month while cell remains free.

One of the bigger trends in the blockchain world, particularly when it comes to financial services and specifically capital markets operations, has been a need for privacy and confidentiality in the course of daily business. This has meant that blockchain solutions are being designed with this primary need in mind. This has led to all the private blockchain solutions being developed today.

Deloitte's Toronto office has a new bitcoin automatic teller machine (ATM), also known as a BTM. The company's first machine is located in city’s Financial District at the intersection of Yonge and Adelaide. “Enter the Deloitte entrance off Yonge St. and go up the escalator,” tweeted the firm's blockchain team, Rubix by Deloitte (Rubix).

The Internet of Things is evolving into a world of interconnected smart devices that communicate all manner of information. Smart homes can be filled with appliances that can be controlled remotely, while the smart grid promises to dynamically react to power requirements.

The Japan Exchange Group (JPX) recently released a working paper to further technological advancements and the ongoing global efforts for applying blockchain to capital market infrastructure.

There are three big areas are emerging in FinTech, from an investors viewpoint; FinTech for the unbanked, the rise of blockchain technologies and InsTech. In this short piece, we look at these three areas, and why they are of such interest.

A challenge held by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)  to encourage Blockchain use in the Health Information Technology field resulted in 15 winning whitepapers. The Department’s Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) first announced the “Use of Blockchain in Health IT and Health-Related Research” challenge in July.

Antshares promises “Digital Assets for everyone.” The organization's platform and cryptosecurity is designed to be a useful asset digitization platform for the mainstream user. Existing in the space between Ethereum and Counterparty, “Antshares is about building a financial system bridging the real-world assets.”

The World Federation of Exchanges (WFE) recently published a 14-page report outlining the results of an in-depth survey on how exchanges and financial market infrastructure providers use blockchain technology, and what their perspectives are.

Given Singapore’s financial strength and stability, coupled with its strategic location, the country has grown to become a leading global financial centre, with a major role in regional and international payments.

Payment flows between individuals and businesses in Singapore are substantial. As a major trading hub, trade finance centre, and gateway for investments in Asia, there is an even larger volume of international payment flows.

It’s no secret that crypto-ransomware has become a huge problem for cybersecurity over the last few years. The powerful tools typically encrypt files on an infected computer, and extort a bitcoin ransom from victims.

Australia’s largest Stock Exchange, the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), recently published its Annual Report, revealing the company's progress and near-future plans for its blockchain, or Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), projects.

ASX is one of the world’s leading financial markets, with a total market capitalization of around $1.5 trillion. Employing a team of 530 people, their customers include 6.7 million share owners, 180 participants and, according to the annual report, 2,204 listed companies and issuers.

In Trade Finance there’s a lot of activity. HSBC and Bank of America are working with HyperLedger; R3 is trialling with 15 banks based upon Corda; Ripple is working with Standard Chartered and DBS; and JPMorgan have been developing a trade finance trial with Digital Asset Holdings.

These are platforms and industry developments, but there are a number of standout companies developing specific solutions as start-ups focused upon blockchain distributed ledgers for trade finance. In this case, I’m going to pick out five that have grabbed my attention, although there are seven other contenders for the crown.

Research powerhouse Gartner Inc. recently announced their “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2016,” which shows that “Blockchain” is in the Peak of Inflated Expectations phase.

According to the Hype Cycle, it will be another 5 to 10 years before blockchain reaches mainstream adoption. The industry specific “Blockchain Technologies and the Programmable Economy,” shows Bitcoin is further ahead.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Directorate, recently unveiled a list of 13 small businesses working towards “the development of new cyber security technology.” The companies are part of the 2016 Small Business Innovation Research program.  Each was awarded approximately $100,000 in funding, for a total of $1.3 million, and four are using blockchains in their product.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BofAML), HSBC, and the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (iDA) recently announced that they have jointly developed “a prototype solution built on Blockchain technology that could change the way businesses around the world trade with each other.”

A pair of Washington DC attorneys recently penned an open letter suggesting that the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Shared National Credit (SNC) review program should use a blockchain.

Founded in 1856, Credit Suisse is a leading global private bank and wealth manager. The company reported $1.25 trillion under management in 2016, has operations in about 50 countries, and 47,180 employees from over 150 different nations.

My article yesterday was about the flagship lead taken by the Bank of England, supporting innovation and creating refreshed central bank digital structures. They are experimenting with everything from a Britcoin to a FinTech Accelerator program, and these operations have filtered through the system into RegTech programs from Project Innovate to the Regulatory Sandbox.

I like to point at the fact that the Bank of England is taking a leadership role in FinTech, but it goes wider and deeper than this. Bear in mind, the regulator –  the Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA) –  lies under the Bank’s control. Before the Global Financial Crisis, it was independent and part of the Financial Services Authority (FSA). This does not mean it' under government control – like the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England is a private company – but they do co-ordinate closely with Her Majesty’s Treasury (HMT) department  within UK Government, especially as HMT control the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is one of the world’s largest professional services firms in the world. With headquarters in London, the company operates in 157 countries, boasts 756 locations and employs 200,000 people. The company ended 2015 with global revenues reaching US $35.4b.

After the DAO hack in June, Ethereum's development team decided to resolve the situation with a hard fork, creating two separate networks and cryptocurrencies. This controversial move was widely embraced by those who lost their investments, but strongly opposed by those who want to save Ethereum's original blockchain.

The multinational professional services firm, Ernst & Young (EY), recently announced a Startup Challenge in London, to “explore how blockchain technology can tackle challenges in digital rights management and energy trading.”

Moody's Investors Service (MIS) recently released a detailed report that names 120 blockchain projects being explored by various companies. The bond credit rating business then offers 25 top use cases for blockchain technology.

JPMorgan Chase & Co, and an international management consulting firm, Oliver Wyman, recently released a guide encouraging blockchain technology adoption amongst asset managers: “The report is designed to serve as a guide to how the technology may evolve, the impact it may have on asset managers and the action they can take.”

Bain & Company recently published a 12-page brief about blockchain technology, “Distributed Ledgers in Payments: Beyond the Bitcoin Hype,” authored by four employees based in London.

Most justice systems today require identification as a precondition to participation. In 10 years of legal practice, I’ve never had a client ask why ID is required. We simply accept, without question, that in order to get justice we must disclose identity. But what if that’s not true? Can we uncouple identity and justice?

The UK Government recently unveiled that it is undergoing a blockchain technology pilot to implement “social welfare payments distribution trial for UK’s Department for Work and Pensions.” If the trial is successful, the underlying technology could be useful for everything from tax collection to sharing health records, according to a government report released in January.

After the launch of the blockchain angels startup tracker and the explosive growth of the tracker from 760 at launch, we now have 967 startups listed in the ecosystem tracker. In 6 weeks, over 200 new startups have been added. We hope to reach the milestone of 1000 blockchain startups by the end of July.

The potential uses for blockchains in all of their various forms are piling up, and everywhere you turn another multinational corporation, industry organization, central bank, or government has come out with a research paper extolling the benefits of blockchains, distributed ledger technology, and even Bitcoin itself.

I’ve written about Bitcoin and blockchain for half a decade, and now banks are all talking about it too. There is a belief that the blockchain technology that came from the Bitcoin structure could revolutionise banking. 

Just to mop up the final discussions at the White House FinTech summit, there was a fourth panel on financial inclusion. 

Sean Ryan and Perry Woodin are ideas men, and founders of Node40, an incentivized node service and Dash masternode hosting provider launched in 2015. “In the world of distributed Peer-to-Peer (P2P) decentralized blockchain applications, stability is of paramount importance. Without stable nodes, the network can experience issues,” states the company site.

The founders say that the most challenging aspect of running the business has been holding their focus and not branching out.

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.

We live in an age where online content often has no attribution attached, from songs to cat gifs and HD movies. Sharing content has become so ubiquitous and easy that ownership information can be quickly lost and hard to track. It then becomes effortless to replace that information, compounding the problem further.

Data and Information Executive Rory Manchee has joined Melbourne-based blockchain technology vendor BNC. The new Head of Business Development is responsible for planning and executing its Digital Assets Market-Data, business and product development efforts.

Bermuda is a picturesque British overseas territory with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of about 5.2 billion dollars and a population of less than 65,000 people. Nonetheless, it's an important offshore financial hub, with a zero-percent corporate income tax rate.

The island territory has the fourth highest per capita income in the world, according to the CIA factbook, which is about 70% higher than that of the US.

Living in the Bitcoin land, you never know what you might come across next. It could be as benign as someone issuing a currency backed by pre-1965 silver US dimes, as geeky as someone creating a blockchain to mine for prime numbers, or it could be as convoluted as BitShares with the many iterations it had over the years (as someone put it - "BitSharesX - An Alt Coin That Is Impossible To Understand"). Over the last few months, I've been seeing a lot of spam about Tau-Chain, along with its many extravagant claims, and figured it might be interesting to try to understand it.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) released a report on Monday, outlining four different ways it could use a public blockchain to improve efficiency and save money.

Issued by the internal Office of the Inspector General (OIG), the report comprehensively suggests that the government agency responsible for mail services should consider using blockchain technology for identity purposes, supply chains, device networks, and possibly even a cryptocurrency to be issued in place of postage stamps.

We had an all-day meeting on Friday about Digital Identity, at the United Nations. There are almost two billion people born with no identity.  There is no record of their birth. There is no proof of their existence. As a result, these people can disappear without a trace. There is no evidence of their disappearance because there is no evidence of their existence. Many of those who disappear are girls, sold into sexual slavery. Many others are victims. Victims of war. Victims of politics. Victims of human traffickers. Victims of the inhumanity of humans to humans.

During the inaugural ID2020 summit, held at the UN headquarters in New York on Friday, representatives from over 50 technology businesses discussed the world's Identity problems, including representatives from at least half dozen blockchain-centered companies.

The purpose of the annual event is to make sure that every human being has access to identity services, even if they have no state-issued identification. “One fifth of the world's population is without legal identity” the ID2020 website states. "Without legal identification people are invisible to society and vulnerable to trafficking, prostitution, and child abuse."

I believe it is vital to understand and think about basic concepts like rights and obligations in order to successfully understand Bitcoin, Ethereum and eventually replace the traditional financial instruments and systems that are all based on these models.

There is a lot of talk about blockchain. A lot. Loads. But when you get past all the talk, what is actually happening with blockchain?  Answer: not enough.

I say this because there are some stand out firms out there – like R3, Digital Asset Holdings, Ripple – who have gained traction with the banks, but the banks are still unsure of their commitment to blockchain developments. Talking with several, they see their commitment was funding these firms to do the work for them.  Now that they have funded, they feel that’s it.

Indian Bitcoin heavyweight Unocoin, sometimes referred to as ‘the Coinbase of India’ due to offering similar services, announced an integration with leading mobile wallet in India, MobiKwik, on Thursday.

The announcement followed news of their partnership with MobiKwik earlier this month to “let Unocoin users topup their MobiKwik wallets through bitcoin,” and is now live on the website.

ValueWeb makes the contention that you cannot have an internet of things without a real-time and cheap internet of value.  A core part of this is focused upon building a cheap shared ledger structure for digital identity and digital currencies and guess what?  That cheap shared ledger is most likely going to be built in Africa.  In fact, Devie Mohan of Thomson Reuters, one of the many fine speakers at Dot Finance, predicted that Africa would invent the global standard for digital identity and she may well be right.

Capgemini today announced an alliance with ascribe GmbH to develop a blockchain database solution built on BigchainDB. The Paris based consulting, technology, and outsourcing services provider is present in over 40 countries, employing over 180,000 people worldwide.

The Ethereum conference, “The Blockchain - Disrupting Global Commerce: Understanding the Blockchain, Smart Contracts and Ethereum,” is taking place on May 17 in Auckland and continuing on May 19 in Wellington, New Zealand.

It’s got an exciting lineup of speakers to talk about Ethereum, and It’s hosted by an offshoot of New Zealand-based web, mobile, and Internet of Things development company, 3months.  The company offers a range of smart contract services including consulting, training, prototyping, and deployment.