Category: Blockchain

Deloitte, the international professional services firm have recently piped up with regards to how blockchain technology might impact the retail sector. Not just online and through e-commerce, but within physical, brick and mortar retail establishments. It is well known that Deloitte, alongside rivals PwC et al. are currently working on blockchain research projects that in turn, aim to carry out extensive research into how the professional services industry can improve the experiences of their clients, by utilising blockchain technology. The report by Deloitte, titled New Tech on the Block can…

Read More

Environmental fintech company Veridium Labs is partnering with IBM to use blockchain to help companies offset their environmental footprints and reduce global warming. The idea is to help transform carbon credits into fungible (exchangeable or interchangeable) digital assets that can be redeemed or traded on Stellar, the decentralised financial network for digital banking tools. In this relationship, Stellar acts as the underlying ledger, IBM as the token manager or broker, and Veridium provides the environmental expertise and structure. The resulting “digital environmental assets” are designed to help companies and institutional…

Read More

Banking giants HSBC and ING have successfully completed a trade finance transaction by using blockchain technology. The platform is ready for commercial deployment, according to HSBC. HSBC Holdings announced on Monday it had successfully carried out the world’s first trade finance transaction via distributed ledger technology (DLT), or what is more popularly known as blockchain. The London-based banking giant and Dutch peer ING acted on behalf of US agribusiness conglomerate Cargill. The banks hope that DLT will minimize fraud risks in letters of credit and reduce the number of steps…

Read More

Kodak is working to help photographers fight image theft using a blockchain and cryptocurrency. After announcing KodakOne during the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show, owner of the image rights management platform Wenn Digital has now achieved funding for KodakCoin. KodakCoin will launch on May 21, followed by the KodakOne platform sometime during late 2018. KodakOne uses the idea of a blockchain — protecting data through a large network of computers — and applies the concept to managing photo rights. The company calls it an “encrypted digital ledger of rights ownership for…

Read More

Alibaba and four Australian and New Zealand companies introduced a food-tracing system based on blockchain technology on Friday. The consortium, which includes two New Zealand-based companies dairy-exporter Fonterra and New Zealand Post, as well as Australia’s natural health company Blackmores and Australia Post, is called the Food Trust Framework. It will use an immutable central ledger to provide end-to-end supply-chain traceability and transparency designed to enhance consumer confidence and build a trusted platform for cross-border trade. Alibaba’s cross-border marketplace Tmall Global now incorporates controls to manage the supply-chain process including…

Read More

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has awarded a new grant that supports the development of an autonomous spacecraft that could make decisions using Blockchain technology without human intervention, news outlet Space.com reported April 18. Jin Wei Kocsis, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Akron, Ohio, received a $330,000 NASA grant to support her research. Kocsis said that the research program will examine the application of Ethereum-based Blockchain technology in developing a secure computing system to be used in deep space: “In this…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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,…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More