Category: Blockchain

The South Korean city of Seoul will implement blockchain technology in its citizen cards, Korean publication Queen.co.kr reports on May 20. Park Won-soon, the mayor of Seoul, has participated in the ongoing event “Korea Future Forum (KFF) 2019 & Blockchain Tech Show,” reporting on the city’s achievements in embracing major technologies including blockchain and artificial intelligence. The mayor highlighted the role of blockchain in storing data, noting that the value of data “has become even more important than before.” According to Park, the city of Seoul will implement blockchain in…

Microsoft is leveraging blockchain technology to create a trustless digital identity scheme, but its not launching a token or building a private blockchain to do so. Its building on Bitcoin instead. Announced on May 13, 2019 , Project ION is an open-source, Layer 2 network built out of the public key infrastructure protocol Sidetree. In practice, “it is akin to Lightning, in that there is no secondary consensus among ION nodes,” a source close to the network’s development told Bitcoin Magazine . “This is just like Bitcoin, but for IDs,”…

Swiss food and drink multinational Nestlé and French hypermarket chain Carrefour are trialing blockchain to provide consumers with greater transparency in the food sector. From April 15, 2019, the technology will be applied to the famous Mousline instant mashed potato brand, available on shelves in Carrefour stores around France, to enable consumers to access reliable and unfalsifiable information on the supply chain and production of the products. Nestlé and Carrefour will test the blockchain platform with Mousline purée over the next few months. The pilot will help the firms understand…

Major developer community website StackOverflow has surveyed nearly 90,000 developers, and the results published on April 9 show that 80% of organizations are currently not using blockchain. As well, 12.7% of the developers responded that organizations use blockchain for non-currency applications, 4% for cryptocurrency-related applications, 2.1% accept crypto as payments and 1.3% are implementing their own cryptocurrency. StackOverflow also claims that developers in India are the most likely to say that their organizations are using blockchain technology. The most significant portion of developers, 29.2%, believes that blockchain is useful across…

The Russian prime minister has welcomed an initiative to use blockchain in agreements over gas supplies by the country’s state-owned gas giant Gazprom, local finance news outlet Vestifinance reports on April 4. The news agency operates under Russian Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (RTR), a major TV channel. The head of Russia’s state-owned gas giant Gazprom, Alexey Miller, has met with Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev to report on the development of applications powered by distributed ledger technology (DLT). According to Miller, Gazprom has carried out substantive work with Russia’s…

Multinational computing giant IBM is adding to its stack of blockchain patents with two new applications, the United States Patent and Trademark Office confirmed, publishing documents on March 5. According to one patent document, IBM now seeks to target network security using blockchain technology. A second patent focuses on database management using the tech. “Securing a data log using monitor security protocols may be accomplished with different levels of security, ranging from low security to high security, and have various combinations of hardware and software configurations,” the description of the…