Crypto World December 2019: China wants more blockchain, Buy crypto with Visa, blockchain school in Rwanda

Crypto World December 2019: China wants more blockchain, Buy crypto with Visa, blockchain school in Rwanda

by | Jan 3, 2020 | News

Chine is open for private and public blockchains

In November 2016, the very first blockchain industrial park has been opened at Shanghai’s Baoshan District together with the objective of not just developing blockchain technologies for government-related work, but also for linking the tech together with finance, insurance, property, intellectual property and other sectors.

Soon after the launch at Shanghai, blockchain industrial parks emerged in different cities around China, for example Hangzhou, Chongqing, Suzhou and Changsha, with a whole investment of over 170 billion RMB ($24 billion) and a great deal of this funding coming from the authorities. With this quantity of investment and spread “playgrounds” to learn more about the nation’s potential with blockchain technologies, it’s normal that China is planning to be a pioneer in the blockchain area.

Binance offers card payment for 4 of its cryptos

Binance, the worldwide cryptocurrency exchange offers the option to purchase cryptocurrency using Visa debit and credit cards.

On the 26th of December, Binance explained in an announcement that its customers have the ability to buy four cryptocurrencies after binding their account into Visa cards issued inside the European Economic Area.

After the user links the Visa cardto his/her account, the user may purchase any of these four cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), XRP and Binance’s native token Binance Coin (BNB) using Euros or British pounds.

According to the statement, Binance intends to include support for Mastercard and extra currencies in the future. Binance also intends to expand the support to other authorities past the European Economic Area.

Rwanda will have a school for blockchain professionals

The Africa Blockchain Institute (ABI) will start Rwanda’s apparently first blockchain faculty in 2020, offering five new classes for local programmers, professionals and policymakers.

The ABI Executive Director, Kayode Babarinde, disclosed the new college has five important classes from the pipeline: a blockchain essentials certificate training course, a blockchain programmers’ class, a venture blockchain program, blockchain for attorneys and blockchain for effect.

Babarinde said that the ABI laid the basis for the work in Rwanda by conducting a pilot stage for the faculty from Ghana, where it established the inaugural class to get a blockchain essentials certificate program.

While the five class areas had been extensively sketched out before this pilot in Ghana, the college’s program has been rehauled and upgraded on the basis of their answers and experiences of class participants.

The Bahamas will experiment with crypto

The Central Bank of the Bahamas (CBOB) will present an electronic form of the Bahamian dollar at the Exuma district.

According to the press release, the CBOB will establish its electronic money (CBDC) pilot Dec. 27, which will expand at the first half of 2020 into Abaco, a set of islands and barrier cays from the northern Bahamas.

The electronic money has been developed under the initiative named Project Sand Dollar and are the Bahamas’ first electronic money. The initiative intends to make access to financial services more effective and non-discriminatory.

Is Bitcoin going to fix the banking crisis?

Is Bitcoin going to fix the banking crisis?

by | Dec 20, 2019 | News

Bitcoin Beats Banks

As another week goes by, countless billions were created into the US financial system by its own central bank. According to the WSJ the FED added another $57.5 billion in temporary liquidity into financial markets.

The central bank started interfering in markets since September and intends to boost repurchase operations within the vacation period. More than double the recent Bitcoin market capitalization is going to be pumped back into the market by the FED.

The additional $425 billion is a part of continuing quantitative easing programs and the bank stated that it is ‘perfectly normal’. Printing countless dollars to prop up lending markets isn’t normal by any criteria and illustrates the flaws of the fiscal system.

According to usdebtclock.org, the federal debts are of over $23 trillion, but even so, banks have been encouraging taking credits in the market.

Crypto business analyst ‘PlanB’ compared this to the Bitcoin stock to flow model, which is much smaller compared to the trillions of dollars which were printed over the past ten years.

“You think bitcoin stock-to-flow model predictions are unrealistic, flawed, absurd? I think negative interest rates & quantitative easing are absurd, printing $21 trillion out of thin air since 2008,”

A recent report by RT stated that the US government could have misspent an identical sum as the ineptitude escalates. Two divisions may have spent up to $21 trillion on matters they can not account for between 1998 and 2015.

Is Bitcoin going to fix to the banking crisis?

Bitcoin has a fixed total supply and its fixed inflationary rates are a mathematically way to solve the monetary madness that’s presently being orchestrated by global banks.

These banks brought on the 2008 financial catastrophe and they’ll cause the subsequent one that could be imminent if present trends persist.

PlanB also stated on Twitter:

“Companies are buying back their own shares with that money. CEO’s of those companies are getting richer and richer and have few other options than to put their money in real estate.”

The main point is that you can not print Bitcoin! More individuals are starting to realize this. BTC is the greatest hedge for anyone desiring a parachute once the monetary walls come crumbling down.

Amazon and Alibaba to reshaped e-commerce?

Amazon and Alibaba to reshaped e-commerce?

by | Dec 19, 2019 | Blockchain, News

The online era fundamentally changed the way people shop. Companies as Amazon and Alibaba laid out the basis of e-commerce.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in the early 1990s, and clients reacted well to Amazon’s services. In May 1997, Amazon developed the initial public offering. The issue price was $18 per share at the moment. After 21 years, the stock touched the historical $2,000 mark in August 2018. This is the way Bezos became the wealthiest man on the planet and Amazon turned into a $1 trillion firm. Amazon’s stock has increased more than 1000 times since its beginning. On December 12, AMZN stock returned 14% year-to-date.

Alibaba, often referred to as the Chinese version of Amazon, has not such a different story. Alibaba was first funded by the CEO of SoftBank, Masayoshi Son, and it issued 2 different series of stocks. In 2014, Alibaba received a record-setting $21 billion of initial funding after listing ADRs (American depository receipts) on NYSE. In 2019, throughout the trade war between the US and China, Alibaba was confronted with a possible threat of becoming delisted. After some deliberation, Alibaba went forward using a second listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange at the end of November 2019 under the ticker 9988. Alibaba inventory rose by 6.5% on the first day of listing in Hong Kong. By November 2019, the Alibaba IPO was the biggest IPO recorded.

In December 2019, Saudi Aramco’s IPO surpassed Alibaba’s IPO record. The state-owned oil firm from Saudi Arabia draw over $25 billion in its IPO.

E-commerce business transformation

Each time a new technological invention springs upward, the companies that set the new technology up the fastest, are the most successful.

Amazon and Alibaba are great examples of businesses embracing the online world. The world wide web has made it feasible to search for products and services while still sitting in your home. Nowadays, emerging technologies such as fintech are catapulting e-commerce to another level.  Everyday consumers are able to instantly purchase their desired goods thanks to fintech. These are only a couple of examples of how e-commerce has adapted to newer variants of this technology. Lots of new start-ups have emerged and are interested in finding methods to add value to the e-commerce industry using modern technology.

With blockchain, enterprises can streamline daily operational tasks. The technology is highly transparent and secure. It could drastically reduce costs.

Energy industry: What can Blockchain improve besides security?

Energy industry: What can Blockchain improve besides security?

by | Dec 17, 2019 | Blockchain

How Blockchain Can Improve Security and Other Operations

Since blockchain is a public, noneditable record-keeper, it is a fantastic tool for any company that wants to operate on large-scale information projects without regulation. Ever since 2015, it was suggested that world governments should start to test blockchain as a tool to ease bureaucracy.

A recent study in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews discovered that blockchain‘s “hash” functionality makes it an uncompromising tool for safety.

“Cryptographic hash functions are mathematical algorithms or one-way functions,” the researchers explain.

How does the hash work? The Hash functions “take an input and transform it into an output of specific length”, which is known as the hash output.

“Their operation relies on the fact that it is extremely difficult to recreate the original input data from the hash output alone (collision resistance).”

The encryption procedure is automated by the blockchain, and this also makes it exceedingly hard for hackers to exploit this information.

Taking Advantage of Blockchain Benefits

Energy and utility companies can leverage blockchain technologies to aid lines of business which will need to share findings with others. Because most electricity businesses contain many departments across different energy resources, blockchain will level the playing area and make each group’s data available to other people. Even more, an energy firm will not need to be concerned about exposing its inner information since blockchain-based cross-functional sharing will remain secure as the app scales.

What are the possible use cases for blockchain for the energy and utility companies?

  1. Allowing an easier exchange of electricity between providers and clients by tokenizing energy units.
  2. Employing DLTs (distributed ledger technology) of a blockchain to set up microgrids that may track the use of power and execute trades, resulting in more efficient energy usage.
  3. Tracking the location where electricity was created and stored to ease peer-to-peer energy trading.
  4. Tracking energy costs to assist operators of charging stations for electric automobiles better-set costs.
  5. Creating tokens for energy credits to simplify the process of issuing and tracking the carbon offset credits. This can lead to a reduction in carbon emissions.

Blockchain’s uses extend far beyond the boundaries of resource mining, product development and client relations. In addition, it can be used to enlarge an organization’s global community, and its own inherent factual coverage structure adds itself to creating reports for compliance purposes.

Smarter money with blockchain: Project Ubin in Singapore

Smarter money with blockchain: Project Ubin in Singapore

by | Dec 16, 2019 | News

Singaporean monetary institutions are known for their efficacy. The state’s public policy is seen as a blueprint to other fundamental systems round the world. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has also taken the lead of the investigation regarding the potentials of distributed ledger technology in relation to banking and finance software.

MAS partnered with a range of financial institutions and venture blockchain technology organizations to make Project Ubin. It implemented real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems with complete transaction privacy and settlement finality while avoiding single points of failure. Project Ubin efficiently reimagined institutional infrastructure in Singapore by implementing blockchain platforms.

By experimenting with technology that aims to improve transparency and enhance efficiencies, MAS indicates that it is prepared to future-proof its recognized procedures. MAS has established a multi-phase practice in partnership with a consortium of international banks, dispersed ledger technology, and blockchain providers.

“DLT has shown potential in making financial transactions and processes more transparent, resilient, and at a lower cost. The project aims to help MAS and the industry better understand the technology and the potential benefits it may bring through practical experimentation. This is with the eventual goal of developing simpler to use and more efficient alternatives to today’s systems based on digital central bank issued tokens.” – The Monetary Authority of Singapore

Together, they demonstrated how the tokenised Singaporean dollar may be a method for everyday inter-bank settlement. The goal was to enhance how trades are settled compared to the present system, where they’re queued and occasionally netted. The project determined the programs tested could function as foundations for distributed ledger-based RTGS systems.

At the conclusion of Stage 2, MAS supplied open-source access to this code and supporting information from the practice.

Having demonstrated that blockchain technology functions for interbank settlement, Project Ubin proceeded on to interconnecting blockchain networks.

Stage 3 (Delivery-versus-Payment) was a project with SGX on growing capacities for simultaneous transactions and final settlement of tokenised electronic currencies and securities resources on various blockchain platforms. The capability to carry out these tasks concurrently improves operational efficiency and reduces settlement dangers.

Stage 4 (Payment-versus-Payment) appears at linking up blockchain payment systems for cross-border payments. Stage 4 began as a cooperation with Bank of Canada and Bank of England on a tech-agnostic overview of present obligations versions and new alternative versions that could improve cross-border settlements and payments. It then continued as a technical experiment to join the experimental national payment systems of Ubin and Jasper by Bank of Canada, for cross-border payments. The project demonstrated the capability to join both networks and permit Payment-versus-Payment (PvP) settlement with no necessity for a reliable third party to serve as an intermediary.

The project is now into its fifth stage – Stage V. This stage concentrates on creating the version of the multi-currency payment, among those other models described in Stage 4, with the intention of business testing with commercial uses. This stage requires a step past technical experimentation, researching and understanding the wider ecosystem advantages of empowering business opportunities which were previously impossible or not cost-effective. The Phase V network will offer connectivity ports for additional DLT networks to join and integrate easily, providing added features to encourage use-cases like DvP together with trades, programmatic escrow, and conditional obligations for Trade and Trade Finance.

Europeans countries which use the blockchain technology

Europeans countries which use the blockchain technology

by | Dec 11, 2019 | Blockchain, News

The blockchain technology reaches far beyond the financial institution and some believe it has more potential to help other fields more than ever. Bitcoin brought the world into a new age of transparency and no matter what will happen to cryptocurrencies, the blockchain technology is here to stay. What European countries are using the blockchain technology? From research institutions to personal data-keeping, the potential is huge.

The European Union is actively engaging in programmes striving to further research blockchain and pursuing innovation. The aim of the EU is to accelerate the development of blockchain within its borders. That’s why the European Union Blockchain Observatory & Forum was founded, to foster all the discussions and blockchain innovations for the European countries. Funding for blockchain projects can be acquired through the Horizon 2020 program, which supports projects in the European Union. Horizon 2020 is investing €300 million in blockchain projects. 

Austria

The Austrian government announced its support for blockchain forming a new research institute for crypto-economy and securing an €8 million fund.

Denmark

In Denmark, the Liberal Alliance used the blockchain technology to have an election. A local branch in Hvidovre was the first one in the world to use the blockchain technology to perform e-elections.

Estonia

When speaking about blockchain at a national level, Estonia is already an example in most conferences. Estonia started testing the technology more than 10 years ago and it was the first country to use blockchain on a national level.

The Estonian government uses the blockchain technology to operate the national health, judicial and commercial registries and plans to expand it even further, to cybersecurity and personal medicine. The ‘most advanced digital society’ created a program called e-Estonia, which helps all online services. For instance, 98% of Tax files are done online, 98% of the population has a digital ID and 44% of Estonians vote online. To top it all up, 99% of the health data is stored on the blockchain.

Estonia is also proud of its juridical process, having the second fasted court proceedings in Europe. And the Ministery of Justice used the blockchain technology to inform the public about every law draft using the online database called e-Law, since 2003.

Georgia

Georgia is trying to win back the trust of its population and has launched the first-ever blockchain land-registry system. With an average of 3 minute registration time, there are now more than 1.5  million land titles.

Germany

Germany is looking actively into the blockchain technology. That’s why the German government has released a strategy on how to use blockchain opportunities for digital transformation.

A ‘Blockchain Lab’ was established to understand the potential of the distributed ledger technology and to reach the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Ireland

Ireland is also preoccupied with the impact of blockchain and published a discussion paper on digital currencies and the subsequent blockchain technology. The Ministery of Finance also created a working group to understand and be proactive in the regulatory approaches.

The government of Ireland partially funded Blockchain Ireland, which was created to help promote and distribute information all across Ireland. The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, together with the Department of Finance organises Blockathon, a hackathon that aims to identify and analyse real-life uses cases for blockchain in the public sector.

Italy

After joining the European Blockchain Association, Italy amended regulations to define the blockchain technology and smart contracts.

Latvia

The Latvian Ministry of Finance published a memorandum, together with the ministries of Lithuania and Estonia, which includes the support of innovations and new technologies regarding regional fintech solution such as DLT.

Lithuania

Lithuania takes the blockchain serious as the Central Bank of Lithuania has launched LBChain, a sandbox for blockchain products. The bank also published an updated position on virtual assets such as cryptocurrencies, explaining how these can be used.

Luxembourg

The Luxembourg government created Infrachain, a non-profit organization, which aims to put in place community-driven governance for blockchain use.

Malta

Malta strives for modernization and efficiency of business processes as well and that why it will adopt Malta Business Registry. The government also launched Blockcerts, a system for verifying credential for education.

The Netherlands

The city of Groningen, in the Netherlands, has a proof of concept to help its citizens with their financial debts. The services included consist of debt assistance, debt prevention and income management. They store all financial records in a private blockchain.

The Netherlands also thought of Pension Infrastructure, a project to administrate pensions. Another city, Zuidhorn, won the Sampp Business Innovation Research competition with their project that supports financially children living in poverty.

Slovenia

Slovenia plans to become Digital Slovenia in 2020, as the Blockchain Slovenia launched a digitization plan which includes an initiative to explore the DLT technology. The Slovenian government also launched Bitcoin City, a commercial complex where paying with cryptocurrency is possible.

Spain

In Spain, the government of Catalonia launched IdentiCAT, a self-sovereign identity project, which can be privately managed by citizens.

In the city of Valls, launched Municipal Data Portal, a project which publishes data sets and resources in the local municipal web portal and on the blockchain.

The port of Valencia, blockchain is used to offer transparency and security to the supply chain.

Sweden

In Sweden, the government is testing transfers of real estate in the land registry (Lantmäteriet) and other multi-party transactions on the blockchain.

The municipality of Zug, Switzerland, tested Zug Digital ID, a government-issued self-sovereign identity on the Ethereum blockchain.

Ukraine

The government of Ukraine announced its plans to move government information to a blockchain platform. The Ukrainian Ministry of Finance piloted trial auctions using blockchain and announced plans to define cryptocurrencies in Ukraine.

United Kingdom

In the UK, a digital asset platform was set up to explore the blockchain potential in the UK real estate industry. The Food Standards Agency completed a trial to track distribution of meat with the use of blockchain. This pilot was the first time blockchain was used as a regulatory tool in the food industry.

The Isla of Man wants to attract more blockchain companies on the island and has launched a sandbox designed to help companies overcome regulatory hurdles.

The Associated British Ports(ABP) is the leading port operator in the United Kingdom and is currently testing the use of blockchain to facilitate trace through its marine terminals.