28 Jun
0
BNP Paribas Blockchain: banks love the distributed ledger
A few days ago BNP Paribas revealed its new project related to the Blockchain: a lab that will study the distributed ledger technology with the goal of building new solutions for data and money management, as well as a tool to help users in case of liquitidity needs.
BNP Paribas Blockchain: a partnership with SmartAngels
Previously this year, BNP Paribas announced its interest in the blockchain technology when it started a partnership with SmartAngels, a crowdfunding platform that will help the bank to develop a project to be launched by the end of 2016.
According to the press release published in April, BNP Paribas would develop a ledger for shares in companies through the blockchain.
Also a few months ago BNP confirmed its interest in the blockchain for financial applications and announced that they were working on their own blockchain called Bizhackathon, that aims at finding use cases for the distributed ledger technology in the banking system.
Growing interest in Blockchain
All the central banks worldwide are expressing their own interest in the distributed ledger and digital currencies.
For example, recenlty we talked about the idea of the Central Bank of Canada to create its own digital currency called CadCoin.
Also, another revevant news on banks and cryptocurrency came yesterday when the Dutch Central Bank revealed its tests on the blockchain.
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27 Jun
0
Dutch Central Bank Tests Bitcoin Blockchain
Dutch Central bank presented the results of their digital currencies tests whose goal was to better understand the Bitcoin blockchain to adopt it within the main bank institutions.
After this test conducted in 2015 by De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), the bank presented the results earlier this month.
On 20th June Ron Berndsen, head of the bank’s market infrastructure policy department, explained to Coindesk:
“The general idea was that by adapting the Bitcoin software ourselves we could learn deeper how an actual implementation of the blockchain really works than if we would only perform desk research and go to conferences such as these, no matter how interesting.”
Dutch Central Bank test number one
To do the first test the DNB created a working group who acts as fictional participants in the digital currency world, as they want to replicate how the bitcoin environment seemed in the first two months of its existence.
Also, they sent each other several coins, testing the process.
DNB Second test
“The second DNBcoin prototype takes the other extreme of bitcoin by jumping to the year 2140, the year when the last fraction of the 21 million bitcoins will be issued,” said Berndsen.
For this second test, the team mined all of the DNBcoins in advance, beginning with a block reward of 1 billion of DNBcoins.
“In doing so we were able to generate 3 billion DNBcoins in 30 seconds. In addition, we observed that after all DNBcoins had been generated, blocks could still be mined and added to the blockchain. The reward was reduced to zero but transaction fees were still collected by the miner who finds the next block.”
Blockchain central bank adoption
Central banks are increasing their interest in the blockchain.
Recently, in fact, we talked about several central banks who studied, tested and adopted the blockchain.
For example, you may be interested in the news related to the Central Bank of Canada that revealed its new digital currency called Cadcoin.
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21 Jun
0
Central Bank of Canada revealed the digital Cad coin
Is Cad Coin the future for Canada?
Yesterday the Central Bank of Canada announced its new project: Cad coin, or the digital version of the Canadian dollar based on the blockchain.
Cad coin is just a part of a greater study about the blockchain, called “Project Jasper”, according to The Financial Times.
Bank of Canada is not the only bank involved: in fact, other important banks such as Bank of Montreal, CIBC, Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank and TD Bank are participating to this innovative project.
As you can read on a Forbes post, Bank of Canada is doing tests on a system that allows people to give their cash to the bank that will convert it into Cad coin.
Banks: in love with the Blockchain?
During the last months, we read about several bank projects related to the blockchain and digital currencies.
For example, in March, Bank of England announced the decision to create its cryptocurrency called RS Coin, as you can read here.
A similar news came in February, when Bank of Russia revealed to study the blockchain for their own business applications.
“The development of modern financial markets is inseparable from the development of financial technology”, said Bank of Russia’s deputy chairman Olga Skorobogatova.
Are these news the proof that banks love blockchain applications or is it just fear?
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20 Jun
0
Why the Ethereum DAO collapse is good for the cryptocurrency
” width=”400″ height=”232″ border=”0″ />The news of the Ethereum DAO hacker attack is riding high and of course it brings lots of damages for the ethereum investors who stored about $150m of the cryptocurrency.
However, it is always a good behavior to understand and see the other side of the coin, we would say.
In fact, any negative event can allow to have a better environment and more secure technologies.
A similar thing happened with the Mt Gox disaster, when we learned that an exchange must be built with more care and attention.
As Matthew Spoke, co-founder and CEO of blockchain startup Nuco, explained on Coindesk.
“the DAO attack will likely be reversed, as per Vitalik’s proposal; owners of TDT will be able to retrieve their ETH after the proposed hard fork; The DAO will be emptied of its investments; and future distributed autonomous organizations will learn from the lessons”.
Ethereum DAO: what happened?
On June 17th, an unknown hacker (or a group of hackers) stole $60m in Ethereum coins from the DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization that used the Ethereum Blockchain to leverage smart contracts and to provide a platform where people can vote and fund projects.
Previously last week the DAO experienced another issue but it was fixed soon by the open-source community and the Etheruem DAO structure and problem-solving techniques.
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15 Jun
0
Allianz Test the Blockchain for swaps and bonds
Allianz test the Blockchain
The insurance company Allianz announced today its use of blockchain smart contracts to manage catastrophe swaps and bonds, which allow users to prevent losses in front of large -scale disasters.
Anyway it could also happen that insurers and investors money could drag on for a few months after the catastrophe.
But thanks to smart contracts the time could be reduced in a few hours, according to an Allianz spokeperson.
In fact, this test – done thanks to a partnership with Nephila company – showed that transactions can be “significantly accelerated and simplified”; it also demonstrated that it could help the increase of marketability for swaps and the growth of opportunities where it is possibile to use blockchain-based smart contracts.
Chief underwriting officer Richard Boyd explained to Coindesk:
“Blockchain technology will increase reliability, controllability and speed for both cat swaps and cat bonds because less manual processing, authentication and verification is needed through intermediaries to confirm the legitimacy of payments and transactions to and from the investors.”
He added:
“By replacing manual operations, which are currently embedded across the entire process, delays and the risks of human error are ruled out”.
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14 Jun
0
White House Fintech Summit
The Bitcoin Blockchain officially reached Capitol Hill, organizing a White House Fintech Summit.
After an event with the American President technological advisors organized last month, now there are more and more meetings and speeches about the blockchain.
Also, a few days ago the White House was theater for a Blockchain Summit, during which there were guests such as Secretary Penny Pritzker, president for economic policy Adrienne Harris, director for digital currencies initiatives at the MIT Media Lab Brian Forde and Matthew Roszak of the Chamber of Digital Commerce.
Held by the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the event was officially called the “White House Fintech Summit”.
In the audience there were also representatives from companies such as Deloitte, JP Morgan, PayPal and Microsoft.
President Obama’s special assistant Harris published a blog post with the conclusions of this event, you can read it here.
The article, titled The Future of Finance is Now was published on June 10th, the same day of the event, and it contains several ideas and thoughts about fintech and its implications such as people financial health and civil rights.
“Today at the White House, we convened stakeholders from across the financial technology (fintech) ecosystem, including traditional financial services institutions, fintech startups, investors, thought leaders, and policy makers, to discuss how fintech can help advance critical economic policy priorities”.
Recently CNBC said that Barack Obama needs to embrace Bitcoin and Blockchain soon, so maybe this is a good start for the US government to study and implement the distributed ledger.
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13 Jun
0
US Government awards Blockchain projects
Blockchain Award
The US government awards Blockchain projects: $600,000 in grants to six companies that work on blockchain applications.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) decided to destinate $3.1m to 29 businesses based in the American area and focused on data analytics, connected devices and blockchain.
Each awarded business will receive $100,000, according to the official press release.
This money came from the so-called program Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) that started back in December 2015.
These US Government Blockchain Awards were assigned to Digital Bazaar, Inc., Respect Network Corporation, Narf Industries LLC, Celerity Government Solutions LLC, BlockCypher and RAM Laboratories LLC.
Governments Interested in Bitcoin
In April the European Parliament defined the blockchain as the“perfect technology” and aimed at realizing new rules related to the distributed ledger.
Also, several European countries started to accept Bitcoin for public services. Among these there is Switzerland. In fact, Zug was probably chosen because it is the Swiss financial centre that has a good reputation for its low taxes.
In the meantime, the US Postal Service will start studying for the creation of a new digital currencies to be used for their own applications.
Another important news came in May, when Japan decided to officially recognize Bitcoin.
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10 Jun
0
IBM Watson uses the Blockchain in Singapore
IBM Watson project and the Bitcoin blockchain are two new technologies that might change the way we live and work in the near future.
Today tech giant IBM opened a new incubator with 5,000 computer technicians that aim at creating several prototypes by using the IBM Watson AI tools and the Bitcoin Blockchain.
This innovative environment is called the Watson Centre and it is situated in the Marina Bay in Singapore and in the IBM Garage, specialized in developing blockchain applications thanks to the IBM Open Standards tools within the Global Entrepreneur program that was launched back in 2010.
Randy Walker, CEO at IBM for the Asian zone, explained this project with these words:
“Watson and blockchain are two technologies that will rapidly change the way we live and work, and our clients in Asia Pacific are eager to lead the way in envisioning and creating that future.”
IBM Watson and blockchain
This new center comes thanks the study of the distributed ledger applications started back in 2015 when IBM joined the Hyperledger project.
Also, at the beginning of 2016, Chris Ferris, CTO at IBM, became the project leader of the aforesaid open-source blockchain project.
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6 Jun
0
Can the halving event cause a blockchain collapse?
The reward halving will arrive soon and some people believe that this event could boost the Bitcoin price.
But a miner of BitBank is concerned because he fears the halving might lead to a collapse of the entire blockchain validation system.
In fact, founder of the Chinese Bitbank Chandler Guo fears that if the price of bitcoin does not appreciate significantly before or immediately after halving, too much of the hashrate will drop off the network due to unprofitable mining, making transaction verification virtually impossible.
Bitcoin Halving
This event happens every four year: in January 2009 every new block generated a reward of 50 BTC. In 2012 the reward will drop down to 25 BTC.
The reason of the halving existence is that there is a limit of 21 million of Bitcoin to be ever generated by the system, so it exists to keep its price consistent and to protect the cryptocurrency from inflation.
But this drop will cause a lowering in profit margins for miners, that’s why Guo believes that miners who use less efficient hardware will shut down as the reward is cut.
He explained:
“When halving comes the cost of the electricity is the same, so it must shut down. For example, the S3 is working 24 hours, they cost $1, for example, and they can mine $1. So if mining equipment can only mine the electricity payment, they don’t need to work.”
Miners calculate their income as the difference between their reward and their electricity and machines cost; in order to maximize their profit, they need more hashing power at a given electricity cost.
To calculate the hashing power needed, Satoshi Nakamoto created an equation in the code so it can analyze how much hashing power is on the network and increase – or decrease – the difficulty.
This is the reason why Guo is concerned: if more hashing power is added, blocks can be found sooner, increasing profits for miners and speeding up the time at which difficulty must be raised. But now the risk he foresees is exactly the opposite:
“When the difficulty doesn’t change, but the hashing power shuts down immediately, there will be no next block. If, after the halving, the price does not go up, but the prices goes down, there will be heartache. It means no next block, no blockchain, all of the blockchain will be shut down immediately.”
So, if a significant share of the hashing power were to drop off the network, that would slow down the validation of blocks.
That would determine slower transactions, impacting on the confidence of the network. A crisis of confidence would generate a sell-off, causing a fall of the bitcoin price that would push more miners to the shut down, thus further reducing the hashing power and eventually leading to a total collapse.
A Different Perspective
Some other players in the mining business don’t agree with Guo.
That’s the case of Bobby Lee, CEO of BTCC, the third-largest bitcoin mining pool that controls roughly 16% of the hashrate. Lee believes that even though a drop in hashrate is likely to happen, it won’t be as significant as Guo thinks.
“After mining, for sure the hashrate will come down a bit, it will probably come down by 5-10%. It won’t come down by more than 30%. We’ve seen it in other cryptocurrencies that at a block halving, the hashrate does come down. That’s expected,” he explained to Coindesk.
Another of the main mining companies, BitFury, doesn’t seem concerned about the halving.
“The important point is that the hashrate decline will not compromise the security of the network and will not make it susceptible to attack. We also firmly believe the upcoming halving event is good for the industry because it will motivate Bitcoin companies to innovate,” said Valery Vavilov, CEO of BitFury.
One thing is sure: if the price will to rise when the halving occurs, there won’t be a problem, because miners will continue to be rewarded enough to cover their cost and maintain profitability.
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2 Jun
0
The newest Richard Branson’s Blockchain Event
The well-known founder of Virgin Group, Richard Branson has organized a new blockchain-related event on his private island in the Carribbean.
Among his about 40 guests there are: Beth Moses, engineer for the Virgin Galactic; Laurent Lamothe, former prime minister of Haiti; Jim Newsome, former chairman at the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission; and Elizabeth Rossiello, CEO at BitPesa.
This is the second year for the Branson’s Blockchain Event on his Necker Island, also thanks to the support of the mining company BitFury.
BitFury CEO Valery Vavilov explained:
“Our emphasis for this year’s gathering is to bring some of the world’s top thinkers from diverse backgrounds – civil society, [non-governmental organizations], business, technology, government – to this extremely special place known for free thinking and cutting edge innovation.”
Branson’s Blockchain Event
From 3rd to 7th June, guests will partecipate to this summit focused on three main topics: financial technology, security and global change.
Also, they will have a lot of networking time, a great opportunity to build connections.
Last year’s event generated some controversy about the lack of women, so this year the list includes several female experts who work in the blockchain field, as you can read on the guest list above.
Branson in Bitcoin
Of course this is not the first time Branson talks about Bitcoin.
A few months ago, during an interview on Bloomberg TV, he explained that this cryptocurrency is working well.
In a conversation with journalist Trish Regan about space tourism, Branson also commented positively on the future of the Bitcoin industry.
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