Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank, estimates that cash transactions made up only 15 percent of all retail transactions last year, down from 40 percent in 2010, thanks in large part to massively popular mobile payment services. Riksbank and the central banks of other countries are taking a serious look at blockchain, the technology that makes Bitcoin …
PitchBook has an update for Q3 2017 of ICOs and venture capital investment in the blockchain. * regulatory statements in China and the US have yet to temper market enthusiasm for the red-hot cryptocurrency and ICO market. Regulatory action against secondary exchanges in China may put short-term downward pressure on an overheated market, but will …
Vitalik Buterin created Ethereum. He projects that Ethereum will have Visa scale transaction per second in a couple of years. Currently Bitcoin is processing a bit less than 3 transactions per second and Ethereum is doing five a second. Uber gives 12 rides a second. VISA handles on average around 2,000 transactions per second (tps), …
The USA, Singapore and Canada regulators have all issued some warning and guidelines for cryptocurrency and fintech. They are in general regulating tokens similar to securities. On August 24, the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA), an organization composed of Canada’s provincial and territorial securities regulators, released Staff Notice 46-307 Cryptocurrency Offerings, which addresses how Canadian securities …
In 2011 Nextbigfuture projected a Mundane Singularity, where certain emerging technologies would start to have development and impact by Dec 2016. There were various updates and the last update was in January of 2017. I need to update and alter the January 2017 forecast andI will shift from calling it Mundane Singularity to Next Big …
Bitcoin has had a big selloff with the closing of Bitcoin exchanges in China. It did take Bitcoin over 4 years to recover from a 2013 selloff from a peak of just over $1000. Bitcoin did not push to new highs until February of this year. Chinese bitcoin exchange BTCChina said on Thursday that it …
Tencent also signed a cooperation framework agreement with Intel to develop blockchain technology for Tencent’s TUSI IoT (Internet of Things) laboratory and promote the establishment of security capabilities in Internet of Things applications. Blockchain is a new application mode in distributed data storage, point-to-point transmission and encryption algorithms for computer technology, which can be widely …
The Metropolis (Ethereum 3.0) hardfork upgrade is scheduled for late September. It will be the first upgrade since Homestead (Ethereum 2.0) from early 2016. Innovations are known for Metropolis: Anonymity – “Zero Knowledge Proofs” (zk-snarks) will allow the Ethereum Blockchain to perform anonymous transactions on a higher level in the future. This is like Zcash. …
Blockchain is coming to healthcare and medical fields. There are over a thousand blockchain startups, various open source implementations. There are dozens of blockchain companies targeting healthcare applications. There different use blockchain healthcare use cases. Blockchain for electronic medical records. Blockchain for Medicaid applicants. Blockchain for payments. Blockchain to enhance secure mobile and remote distribution …
Blockchain data storage network Filecoin has officially completed its initial coin offering (ICO), raising more than $257 million over a month of activity. The internet is in the middle of a revolution: centralized proprietary services are being replaced with decentralized open ones; trusted parties replaced with verifiable computation; brittle location addresses replaced with resilient content …
Finland has recently seen a large influx of asylum seekers, is using a cryptographic ledger called blockchain to help them get on their feet faster. For two years the Finnish Immigration Service has been giving asylum seekers who don’t have bank accounts prepaid Mastercards instead of the traditional cash disbursements, and today the program has …