Category: Blockchain

The EC is inviting other countries across Europe to join the partnership. As representatives of the European countries gather in Brussels for Digital Day 2018, 22 Member States of the European Commision (EC) have signed a declaration to establish a European Blockchain Partnership. According to the press release, this is a landmark partnership as it will be a “vehicle for cooperation amongst member states to exchange experience and expertise in technical and regulatory fields and prepare for the launch of EU-wide [Blockchain] applications across the Digital Single Market for the…

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Blockchain is the technology that powers cryptocurrencies, but on a technical level, it’s just a growing list of records that are linked and secured. While you can mine Bitcoin on just about every PC and phone on the market, there is no shortage of dedicated hardware options, like physical wallets. According to Bloomberg, Huawei is currently in talks with Sirin Labs to develop a ‘blockchain-ready’ phone. Sirin Labs is a tech startup in Switzerland, focused on building products utilizing blockchain tech. The company announced its own phone last year, called…

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Bank of America, Mastercard, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, JPMorgan, and IBM are just some of the big names among the filers. The number of patents relating to blockchain is on the rise. According to data collected by the Korean Intellectual Property Office, more than 1240 applications for blockchain-related patents were filed across South Korea, the United States, Japan, China, and Europe by the end of January 2018. South Korean news source the CS Times reported that the vast majority (78 percent) of the applications filed came from the US and China,…

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The Comisión Nacional de Energía de Chile, which manages the national grid throughout the South American country, is to implement blockchain technology to help authenticate information. The Comisión Nacional de Energía de Chile will use blockchain to authenticate data such as peripheral costs, normal market costs, fuel costs, and consistency with the country’s sustainable power source law. According to spokesperson Andrés Romero, another important factor is with data security. Romero told BittrMint: “The National Energy Commission has decided to join this inventive innovation and we have decided to utilize blockchain…

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A group of bankers and traders have completed what they believe to be the first agricultural commodity sale conducted entirely on a blockchain platform. The parties – seller Louis Dreyfus Company, buyer Shandong Bohi and bankers ING, Societe Generale and ABN Amro – handled the sale of a soybean cargo on ING’s Easy Trade Connect platform, which uses blockchain to validate all steps of the transaction. No paper contracts or certificates changed hands, and there were no manual paperwork checks. In addition to its novelty, the digital platform is much…

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Four Bitcoin developers have released a paper outlining how Schnorr multi-signatures (‘multisig’) can help scale the Bitcoin Blockchain. In the paper, published Jan. 15, Greg Maxwell, Andrew Poelstra, Yannick Seurin and Pieter Wuille discuss and illustrate how the technology, which ‘bunches’ multisig data together to reduce its size in a transaction, “could improve both performance and user privacy in Bitcoin.” Multisig has seen wide use in various applications for Bitcoin over the past several years. Its trademark security benefits are a principal feature of some consumer wallet applications, and this…

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Following recent reports that Chinese e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba launched its own cryptocurrency mining platform, the company has issued an official statement Tuesday, Jan. 16, denying that its platform is related to either virtual currencies or their mining. According to the official statement, published on the microblogging platform Weibo, Alibaba’s recently launched platform ‘P2P Nodes’ has been mistakenly reported as cryptocurrency-related. The statement further clarifies that the platform is actually a peer-to-peer (P2P) Content Delivery Network (CDN) service provided by Alibaba Cloud designed to allow users to improve their network speed…

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IBM and Danish transport conglomerate Maersk announced today they are launching a joint venture to redefine the global shipping industry for the blockchain age. The new company, which hasn’t yet been named, will focus on simplifying the complex process of moving goods across different trade zones. The company initially plans to market two capabilities built on IBM Blockchain: a shipping information pipeline that provides a real-time, transparent view of merchandise movement, and smart contracts to replace what is today a slow and paperwork-heavy process. “More than $4 trillion in goods…

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Smart Dubai close to rolling out 20 blockchain-based services. Smart City, the Dubai Government agency entrusted with making Dubai the world’s happiest and smartest city, said it was close to rolling out 20 blockchain applications in a number of civic agencies including the Roads and Transport Authority in order to bring greater efficiency. “Blockchain will improve people’s experience,” Aisha Bint Buti bin Bisher, the director general of Smart Dubai, told The National on the sidelines of Unlock Blockchain Forum on Sunday. “The applications are in various fields, some of them…

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