Blockchain Courses Will Be Top Trend in 2020 according to Deloitte

Blockchain Courses Will Be Top Trend in 2020 according to Deloitte

by | Feb 20, 2020 | News

According to Deloitte, 2020 could be the “blockchain decade”. 2019 was a great year for Blockchain. Huge companies have embraced blockchain and the trend continues in 2020.

This is the moment that the blockchain enthusiasts have been waiting for. Blockchain is starting to create a real impact cross-industries.

Deloitte published its 2019 Global Blockchain Survey, in which it recognizes blockchain as a priority for companies.

The blockchain trend goes beyond the private sector. World’s governments have seen blockchain’s potential and are trying to accelerate the adoption of blockchain.

The good news is that even former critics of the technology are now shifting. The US Federal Reserve is now exploring a digital dollar on blockchain.

Consider all these, Deloitte might be right in considering 2020 the “blockchain decade”. Each technology had a rough time at its beginnings but also took all the interest for a decade. The internet had its decade in the early 2000s. Social media took the world by surprise in the 2010s and the blockchain and IoT can dominate the 2020s.

But all this demand for blockchain drives demand for blockchain developers, the supply is nowhere near to compensate. Some reports state that the demand for blockchain engineers got up by 51% in 2019, at a global scale.

But blockchain development is still a new feature. Universities are slow in implementing courses to prepare future blockchain engineers. And this raises the obvious question. With all this demand and the lack of traditional education in aid, where do we get the engineers to build the future of blockchain?

The Ivan on Tech Academy: the World’s Largest Blockchain Academy

Someone already thought of a solution.

The Ivan on Tech Academy is an online blockchain academy, probably the largest at the moment. The academy prepares students with all they need to know about crypto and blockchain.

Also, the academy helps its students to get a real job in blockchain development.

The courses provided by the blockchain academy do not have any prerequisites. That means they are open for anyone who is willing to learn about the blockchain technology.

After LinkedIn announced the raise of blockchain jobs, many have decided to look for blockchain courses, regardless of having any programming experience.

Who is behind Ivan on Tech Academy?

The name and idea came from the Ivan on Tech YouTube channel. The channel has over 200k subscribers and it focuses on blockchain and crypto education.

Who rules the cryptocurrency world?

Who rules the cryptocurrency world?

by | Feb 18, 2020 | News

Forbes recently published its Forbes Fintech 50 top, a top of the Most Innovative Fintech Companies In 2020 and six blockchain companies are in it.

The Forbes top 50 has 19 companies listed as first-timers on the annual Forbes Fintech top. Forbes is definitely more inclined to include startups with good ideas, no matter how small.

The fintech market is growing as the values of the companies are exploding. The proof is indisputable. The 2020 top includes 13 companies valued at more than $2 billion. Last year’s top included only eight companies which were worth that much.

What do all these companies included in the Fintech 2020 top have in common? They are all enabling faster and cheaper financial services, and they all operate in the US as private companies.

Who rules the cryptocurrency world?

According to Forbes, these six companies are leading the crypto space worldwide.

Coinbase

Coinbase aims to “bring about more economic freedom, innovation, efficiency, and equality of opportunity in the world”.

To this day, Coinbase is probably one of the easiest to use crypto exchange platform and digital currency wallet. Coinbase is the perfect exchange to start learning about digital currency like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin.

We included Coinbase in the top of crypto exchanges for beginners. If you don’t have a crypto wallet in Coinbase, join now to get $10 in Bitcoin when they buy or sell $100 or more on Coinbase!

Funding: $525mn from Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global Management, Union Square Ventures and others

Latest valuation: US$8.1bn

Founded: June 2012

HQ: San Francisco, California

CEO: Brian Armstrong, 37

Fact: Coinbase Custody now holds $8bn in assets for 200 institutional clients.

Ripple

Ripple uses an open-source protocol to instantly transfer funds anywhere in the world.

Ripple aims to help improve the current complex global payment system, which is unreliable, pricey and sluggish, and to eventually replace it with its platform, which has its own cryptocurrency.

Funding: $293mn from Accenture, Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures and others

Latest valuation: US$10bn

Founded: 2012

HQ: San Francisco, California

CEO: Brad Garlinghouse, 49

Fact: Ripple works with initiatives and organisations to advance socially responsible uses of blockchain.

MakerDAO

MakerDAO is an Ethereum based financial platform that enables its customers to loan cryptocurrency. The platform’s token, the Dai, it’s an ERC 20 token, pegged to the US dollar. They refer to Dai as being the world’s first decentralized stable digital cash.

Funding: $63mn from Andreessen Horowitz, Dragonfly Capital, Polychain Latest.

Latest valuation: US$500mn

Founded: 2014

HQ: New York  

CEO: Rune Christensen, 29

Fact: MakerDAO is a community project that has already attracted more than 400 outside developers; last year it generated $10mn in interest.

Axoni

Axoni is a company offering distributed ledger blockchain solutions for post-trade data management for credit and equity swaps. Axoni has implemented its solutions in partnerships with global banks and financial providers.

Axoni’s portfolio includes distributed-ledger technology deployments, bespoke smart contract development, and analytics tools.

Funding: US$59mn

Latest valuation: $171mn

Founded: 2015

HQ: New York

CEO: Greg Schvey, 33

Fact: Axoni has deployed its distributed ledger into the world’s most complex asset classes with proven results.

Chainalysis

Chainalysis is a blockchain analytic tool used by government agencies, exchanges and financial institutions in over 40 countries. Its aim is to “create transparency for a global economy built on blockchains” and to provide guidelines on how to use best this technology.

Funding: $45mn from Accel, Benchmark, and others.

Latest valuation: US$266mn

Founded: 2014

HQ: New York

CEO: Michael Gronager, 49

Fact: The company’s customers include bitpay, Barclays, Square and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Everledger

Everledger is a company that used the blockchain, AI and IoT to track goods, from production material to their selling point. This feature aims to build up the confidence of consumers in the marketplace and focuses on sustainability.

Funding: $20mn from Tencent, Graphene, Rakuten and others.

Latest valuation: US$100mn

Founded: 2015

HQ: London, UK

CEO: Leanne Kemp, 47

Fact: Everledger pursues the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, particularly around gender equality, economic growth and responsible consumption and production.

The convergence of the VR and Blockchain technologies

The convergence of the VR and Blockchain technologies

by | Feb 17, 2020 | Blockchain

Convergence is becoming a very common term in the technology sphere. It means merging technologies into a new form that combines their media and applications. Embedding your devices with technology improves their functionality.

Even though the article only covers the two, VR and Blockchain are not the only technologies that have been combined to improve our lives the list is endless and the applications are numerous.

Understanding VR and Blockchain

VR stands for Virtual Reality, and it is a technology that simulates an experience that is similar or different from the real world. some of the common applications of VR include entertainment, communication, and education.  

While Blockchain is a digital ledger technology that enables the permanent storage of transactions online within a decentralized atmosphere. Blockchain also has several applications which include smart contracts, securities, record keeping, cryptocurrency, and gaming.

VR and Blockchain in online retailing

As we have it, VR and AR are already enabling in-store virtual tours, with a little innovation we will be able to conduct virtual shopping.

Just imagine, sitting on your sofa and wearing your VR goggles and then the next thing you know you are walking into a store and browsing through the virtual representations of the merchandise.

Imagine being able to even try out the outfits in the fashion section because you have already uploaded a full body scan of yourself, and the avatar is your virtual replica.

 Blockchain, on the other hand, enables cryptocurrency payments which are borderless thus making it very compatible with the global VR retail environment. Cryptocurrencies will enable small ventures to take products directly to their customers thus reducing the costs involved.

Developers are currently working on an application that merges these two technologies. their convergence will make it possible for small businesses to trade globally. Not to mention the participants will be able to enjoy some interesting benefits which include lower costs, disintermediating of banks. Traders will no longer need to use credit cards which charge transaction fees and create waiting periods for merchants to receive their money.

VR applications are unlimited and once converged with Blockchain they could spider out across the globe.

IBM’s vice president of blockchain technologies talks about money

IBM’s vice president of blockchain technologies talks about money

by | Feb 12, 2020 | News

According to Jerry Cuomo, the VicePresident of IBM blockchain technologies, the enterprise feature is an enabler of spending big money.

“It is driving additional spend,”
“When you look at the direct attribution of the actual dollars spent on blockchain, we are seeing that for every dollar spent, $15 is spent on other cloud services.”

This is perhaps a hint on IBM’s current business strategy, as it tries to bring enterprise blockchain closer to the company’s cloud offering. IBM might try to pivot their business plans as distributed ledgers are losing some of the initial hype all around the world.

IBM’s VP believes that blockchain is only 20% of a blockchain application and the rest of the solutions lays in other technologies.

“Blockchain is a new class of enterprise application,”
“It plays into trends like app modernization and new cloud-native applications, data and analytics. It crosses all those things.”

IBM’s business strategy is shifting massively after last year’s acquisition of the open-source software, Red Hat. In their last quarter of 2019, IBM posted about their unexpected revenue growth: Red Hat had 24% revenue growth and the cloud and cognitive software revenue grew with 9%.

As Cuomo stated regarding the shift in priorities:

IBM has “put its chips down on the table in a very aggressive way around the hybrid space.”

What is a hybrid cloud?

According to McKinsey & Company, the hybrid cloud is a combo of on-premise, public and private cloud, which allows for different workloads to be handled across the different platforms. The hybrid cloud market is worth $1.2 trillion.

Can blockchain and the cloud work together?

The IBM VP talked about a symbiosis between blockchain and cloud, which will unite Hyperledger Fabric, a Linux incubator for blockchain enterprise projects, and Kubernetes, a hybrid cloud platform which automates clusters of services. The latter is a field of expertise for Red Hat.

“Hyperledger Fabric works well with Kubernetes,”
“Many of the things we’ve done around Chaincode, which is the way we plug smart contracts into Fabric, is to make sure it runs really well on that type of containerized environment with buttoned-down security. Red Hat gave us that motivation.”

Jerry Cuomo, the VicePresident of IBM blockchain technologies, described 2018 as “more of a Wild West,” he added:

“We had a lot of projects. Some would hit, others missed. The ideas weren’t always completely baked. Going into 2020, clients continue to get smarter.”

The fact remains, the enterprise blockchain world has seen some development lately. Might there yet be some bloodletting on the blockchain side at IBM? 

Cuomo says no: “We are very healthy here in blockchain land.”

Australia Published Blockchain Roadmap

Australia Published Blockchain Roadmap

by | Feb 11, 2020 | Blockchain, News

Australia is serious about implementing blockchain into its daily operations. The Blockchain Roadmap has been published to guide Australia’s productivity in all industries.

Australia is keen to use blockchain in its future developments

Australia’s government announced the development of a National Blockchain Roadmap over one year ago, and spent over 100,000 AUD on it. Today, the roadmap is ready and will be utilized to help develop the usage of blockchain in all its industries.

According to Karen Andrews, the Miniter of Industry, Science and Technology, the government worked with various researchers to complete the blockchain roadmap.

The minister is a strong believer of the beneficial results of incorporating blockchain in bost public and private sectors, which will lead to a significant increase in jobs:

“Blockchain technology offers great potential to save money, initiate new business and export opportunities, boost economic growth, and create new jobs. Governments and private industries all stand to benefit from embracing this technology.

Employment opportunities in blockchain are growing substantially, with rapid growth in job advertisements since 2016.”

The blockchain roadmap includes all the essential sectors, not just the financial industry. The roadmap mentions education, transportation and the agricultural sectors.

The minister believes that Australia can become a leader in the new digital era after it will combine the blockchain’s roadmap with the already published one for Artificial Intelligence.

The potential risks of adopting the blockchain technology for mass usage

The government is also paying attention to the potential threats of implementing blockchain on a mass scale. For the blockchain roadmap to successfully work, it needs to be mentioned in a regulatory framework.

A major challenge of such massive use of blockchain is to maintain trust, the data integrity and security. Balancing privacy and transparency is a challenge.

The Australian government decided to spend 350,000 AUD more and work with Standards Australia, which will develop a regulatory framework which will guarantee the blockchain’s integrity, using the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Australia is recognizing the efforts other countries are making to develop the blockchain technology and is willing to cooperate with the UK, China and Singapore to remain a leading country in this blockchain era.

The Bitcoin network overpasses 500 million transactions

The Bitcoin network overpasses 500 million transactions

by | Feb 6, 2020 | Bitcoin, News

Bitcoin transactions are over 500 million as of the beginning of February 2020. The number of transactions doubled in 3 years, from 250 million in 2017 to 500 million in 2020.

The Bitcoin network went live on January 3, 2009. Eleven years later, in 2020, the network processes over 500 million transactions.

Since 2017, Satoshi.info, named after the pseudonym of the presumable creator of Bitcoin, started tracking and recording the number of transactions on the Bitcoin network.

The data on Satoshi shows a constant increase in the Bitcoin transactions, year after year. In only 3 years, the volume of Bitcoin transactions has doubled and considering the same growth rate, Bitcoin transactions can exceed 1 billion transactions.

How did the community react to the 500 million milestone?

Now, on to the next 500 million.