Nasdaq Blockchain: new investments in more startups
Nasdaq Blockchain – related venture initiatives include new investment in distributed ledger based startups.
Today Nasdaq Ventures announced it has decided to invest in startups and companies that work with blockchains and/or artificial intelligence, next-generation data analysis and machine learning.
Nasdaq Blockchain budget is $10m to be awarded to deserving startups that are focused on both seed-stage and late-stage placements.
This Nasdaq Blockchain effort is a natural extension of the firm’s work in the blockchain field.
Back in 2015, Nasdaq started a partnership with Chain, an enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure that enables organizations to build better financial services from the ground up.
This effort saw the two companies develop a distributed ledger market focused on pre-IPO offerings.
President and CEO of Nasdaq, Adena Friedman, explained in a statement:
“With the launch of our new venture investment program, we are reinforcing our focus on driving growth and innovation by evaluating, distributing, licensing and integrating disruptive technologies for the long-term benefit of our global clients.”
Nasdaq has been testing the blockchain even in other areas.
In fact, back in February 2016, Nasdaq announced its blockchain tests on e-voting prototypes with Estonia’s sole securities exchange.
Also, in January, Nasdaq published a report arguing that the distributed ledger is also useful beyond transaction settlement.
Read more about Nasdaq Blockchain – related projects by clicking here.
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Bitcoin users growth: read the University of Cambridge’s research about cryptocurrencies
According to a recent research conducted by the University of Cambridge, bitcoin users number has increased by four times in five years.
The research explains that bitcoin active wallets surged from 8.2 mln in 2013 to nearly 35 mln in 2016, suggesting that the number of active wallets ranges from 7.5% to 30.9% of the total number.
The Global Cryptocurrency Benchmarking Study by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance at the University of Cambridge suggested an estimated number of unique active bitcoin users wallets to be grown from between 0.6 mln and 2.6 mln in 2013 to currently between 5.8 mln and 11.5 mln in 2017.
This study – led by Dr. Garrick Hileman & Michel Rauchs – is the first of its kind to examine the growing global cryptocurrency industry and its exchanges, wallets, payments and mining platforms.
The research, in fact, is not only focused on bitcoin users, but also on cryptocurrencies in general.
“81% of wallet providers are based in North America and Europe, but only 61% of wallet users are based in these two regions,” the study which collected non-public data from nearly 150 companies and individuals states. “Almost half of all wallet providers are located in the United States and the United Kingdom. If we break down origin by world region, Europe is leading with 42% of wallet providers, followed by North America with 39% and Asia Pacific with 19%.”
North American wallet providers think that the current regulation is good and 57% of European and 2% of Asian-Pacific wallet services seem to be satisfied with the existent regulation.
Exchanges have to gain more popularity yet as only two of the 51 exchanges included in the research can provide a decentralized platform: 40% of North American wallet platforms said that the existing regulation is excessive and too strict – a point of view shared by 14% of European companies.
Another focus of this study is the innovative and rapidly changing of the cryptocurrency economy that is becoming more fluid in a few countries.
It says the line between exchanges and wallets is more and more “blurred” and several other digital currencies after Bitcoin are now supported by a growing environment as they are able to be used in a wide range of use cases.
Also, it argues that security-related problems and the lack of clarity about digital currencies regulation will continue to be prevalent in the next future.
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Bitcoin in Japan: a new way to evaluate blockchain projects
While there is lack of clarity related to the regulation of Bitcoin in Japan, one of the Japanese government ministries has worked to develop a new way in order to evaluate projects related to the distributed ledger tech.
The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), in fact, announced a few details about this new methodology, that was created by the Information Economy Division of the ministry’s Commerce and Information Policy Bureau.
According to a presentation published a few days ago, METI will exploit this process to consider projects for a variety of use cases, by evaluating more than 30 different characteristics including project scalability, privacy and overall reliability.
People involved with the creation of this new methodology explained it was developed to impartially weigh blockchain-related projects.
The official presentation explains:
“No evaluation indices or criteria had been established to adequately assess the features of the technologies and to compare them with existing systems. This causes the public anxiety, misunderstanding, and unreasonable hopes to blockchain technologies, and leading to a potential unwillingness to introduce the technology.”
It is not a big surprise that the Japanese ministry is involved in this project, as it has already supported the blockchain technology in the past.
METI, in fact, is conducting some researches about the technology since 2015, commenting that the government should play a supporting role. Also, the Japanese ministry has sponsored a trip abroad for local bitcoin and blockchain-based startups.
Click here to read more about Bitcoin in Japan news.
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ZCash Bug: team releases software fix
A ZCash bug has been discovered a few days ago and now the development team has released a new software update to fix this denial of service (DoS) vulnerability.
In fact, in a new blog post, Zooko Wilcox and Paige Peterson – both developers at ZCash – explained how the bug could allow an hacker to crash a zcash node remotely by sending a specific kind of transaction.
ZCash bug found on Wednesday
The bug was found in an update included in the ZCash’s 1.0.4 release, related to how transactions are given priority in a node’s mempool.
This vulnerability was discovered back on Wednesday (April 12nd, 2017).
The blog explains:
“ZcashCo, and several exchanges, wallet vendors, and miners have already deployed a mitigation as well as detectors for this attack vector. No attacks have been detected.”
Zcash published a software update to address this bug, asking users to upgrade their platforms in order to delete the denial of service risk.
The Zcash team also commented that, should signs emerge that an attack attempt is being made, it would issue alerts and coordinate with related services on a response.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Zcash is a digital currency with the special feature of total anonymity thanks to its zero knowledge proof of work called zk-snarks.
ZCash Wallet – Open yours at HolyTransaction
Recently, we at HolyTransaction implemented the ZCash Wallet on our multicurrency wallet platform.
Together with Bitcoin, Ethereum and more than 10 other digital currency, from now on you can use HolyTransaction to store also ZCash coins.
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Intesa Sanpaolo Blockchain: a new trial for recordkeeping
The newest Italian Banca Intesa Sanpaolo blockchain – related project has been tested with the main goal of validating trading data.
Thanks also to a partnership with Deloitte and the Italian startup Eternity Wall, Intesa San Paolo started to test a new proof-of-concept at the end of 2016.
Heart of the project is the open-source OpenTimestamps protocol, developed by Peter Todd, a Bitcoin Core contributor, that Eternity Wall moved to implement.
The Intesa Sanpaolo blockchain project uses the bitcoin distributed ledger to notarize transactions and create a publicly available database trail for future referral.
Information security officer for the bank, Carlo Brezigia explained:
“Relevant data has been hashed to produce a short unique identifier – a digest – equivalent to its digital fingerprint. This fingerprint has been associated to a blockchain transaction and hence registered on the blockchain: the blockchain immutability provides robust non-refutable timestamping that will always prove without any doubt the existence of that data in that specific status at that precise moment in time.”
According to a Deloitte statement, Intesa Sanpaolo tested this tool between October and February with tht idea of including support for other blockchains, potentially including also private ledgers.
This Italian blockchain trial shows the will of regulated financial institutions to test public blockchains.
In an official announcement, the bank’s retail innovation accelerator officer, Gianni Cavallina, explained the interest in experimenting these protocols beyond the main use case of digital currenciese:
“In particular, considering public blockchains, we are exploring the applicability of different use cases, abstracting from the value of its native digital currency. Notarization is one of the most interesting applications.”
Intesa Sanpaolo Blockchain projects– also member of the R3 distributed ledger consortium – also include tests on several blockchain use cases made during the previous years, including trade finance and digital identity.
Read more about previous Italian projects related to the Blockchain here.
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Bitcoin in Russia: transactions will be monitored
Bitcoin in Russia will be officially “recognized” by 2018, but each transaction will be subjected to monitoring.
In a recent statement by the Russian central bank, Deputy Finance Minister Alexey Moiseev explains – in an interview quoted by Bloomberg – that a legal position about Bitcoin in Russia will be taken in the next future.
Recently, bitcoin and altcoins had been put aside regarding regulation, with users and companies operating in Russia threatened with takedowns and jail.
In October, Russian communications watchdog Roskomnadzor blocked access to a peer-to-peer marketplace called LocalBitcoins, but developers responded by setting up a new mirror site, LocalBitcoins.net.
“The state needs to know who at every moment of time stands on both sides of the financial chain. If there’s a transaction, the people who facilitate it should understand from whom they bought and to whom they were selling, just like with bank operations,” said Moiseev about the Russian government position.
While digital currencies are still yet to receive an official status, Bloomberg reports that they will be treated as assets, cash or security by mid-2017.
Back in January, Deputy Olga Skorobogatova (Bank of Russia) commented that authorities “would not like to concretely block anything” instead of “understanding how to approach cryptocurrency and from this generating a basis for regulation.”
Read more about Bitcoin in Russia by clicking on the blog post titles below.
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Porsche to explore the Blockchain technology
German automobile manufacturer Porsche wants to explore the blockchain technology.
According to a press release, Porsche announced a new startup competition last week with the main goal of attracting companies that work in the blockchain industry as part of a bid to test potential applications.
This is the first time Porsche has talked about its interest in the distributed ledger tech.
Porsche is offering €25,000 in prize money and a three-month stint at SpinLab, an accelerator based in Leipzig that the automobile company supports.
Applications for this contest are due by May 15th.
Below you can read a statement published by the German company:
“Porsche aims to obtain external input on the disruptive potential of the blockchain transaction system by collaborating with the start-up scene. The central question is to what extent the application of this technology in the value creation chain of the company makes sense. Moreover, other forms of potential long-term collaboration will be investigated.”
Porsche is not the first automobile company to reveal its interest in exploring the blockchain for possible use cases.
In February, in fact, Daimler AG announced that it was joining the Hyperledger project, explaining how the blockchain is “a promising technology, not fully mature yet, but continuously growing”.
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Bitcoin Japan Regulation: official recognized as method of payment
On April 1st, 2017, Bitcoin Japan regulation was officially announced as the digital currency is finally recognized as a method of payment.
This Bitcoin legal classification will set a boom in its adoption as retailers will be able to accept the most popular digital currency.
In 2016, Japanese officials ended the 8% consumption tax rate imposed on bitcoin purchasing on the digital currency exchanges.
This tax relief and the Bitcoin Japan regulation might help to foster confidence in the digital currency industry, where there are 4,200 merchants that accept bitcoin. This growth – merchants are quadrupled from 2015 – occurred in two years when Japan’s cabinet decided to recognize bitcoin and digital currencies as the equivalent of money, in March 2016.
Payment processor Coincheck estimated that 20,000 merchants will be started to accept bitcoin this year.
260,000 Bitcoin-accepting Retail Stores
According to the Asian magazine Nikkei, two Japanese retailing giants have started a few partnerships with bitcoin companies in order to accept bitcoin as a method of payment.
One of these is Recruit Lifestyle, the retail arm of conglomerate Recruit Holdings, that is partnering with Coincheck in order to introduce bitcoin payments.
Also, bitcoin will be soon included in AirRegi, a recruit-developed point-of-sale application that is used at 260,000 retail locations across the whole Japan.
Customers will be able to use tablets and smartphones for paying bills with their bitcoin wallet and Coincheck will convert the digital currency into yen in order to transfer the fiat funds to the shop.
Also, AirRegi is compatible with Alibaba’s Alipay app for payments. Bitcoin’s inclusion will be attractive for tourists who will be able to make payments in other countries without the burdens of foreign exchange.
Click here to more about Bitcoin in Japan.
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Litecoin Segwit: how it is driving the prices
Maybe because of the recent Litecoin Segwit support, this digital currency price set a new high yesterday, reaching a value of $11.42, its highest price since May 2014.
We cannot define it a cryptocurrency pump, but the market seems to answer to the technical changes in the network.
This price growth, in fact, could be explained thanks to the almost reached the 75% support level needed in order to activatate the Litecoin Segwit (Segregated Witness), or a scaling solution that will improve blocks capacity.
Right now, in fact, just over 70% of miners were giving their support for the Litecoin Segwit.
Even if at press time, Litecoin price declined of about 67%, litecoin traded as high as $11.32 today up nearly 40% in one day, according to CoinMarketCap.
On March 30th, litecoin price increased of about 70% and, always according to Coinmarketcap data, its 24-hour volume passed $250m today.
Litecoin SegWit support
These important new Litecoin highs have coincided with the almost reached support level needed for activating the Litecoin SegWit.
First designed to be used on the Bitcoin blockchain, SegWit would increase the block capacity by modifying how transaction data is stored by the blockchain itself.
Once reached, the support level will have to remain at or above the 75% threshold level for 8,064 blocks (almost two weeks) before SegWit can officially be activated.
The litecoin price reached $50 in late 2013, but it has traded below $20 since early 2014.
Click here to read more about SegWit and a new Bitcoin potential fork.
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Kim DotCom Bitcoin: video streaming with crypto payments
Kim Dotcom bitcoin -related project is a new platform where users can sell files and video streaming by using the most famous digital currency.
Dubbed “Bitcontent”, Kim Dotcom presented his new venture in a video posted on Twitter this week.
While he is fighting extradition to the United States for criminal copyright charges because of its now-defunct streaming site Megaupload, the German entrepreneur continues his bitcoin-related platform, explaining:
“You can create a payment for any content that you put on the internet. You can share that with your customers, with the interest community and, boom, you are basically in business and can sell your content.”
He added that Bitcontent would allow both private users and companies to earn money from their websites.
Unfortunately the Kim Dotcom bitcoin platform has not a launch date yet.
Also, Dotcom hasn’t provide any details on how Bitcontent would be different from existing Bitcoin platforms or how it would help magazines and companies to earn money through its subscription payment options.
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