There has been a lot of hype about blockchain technology – in particular, its potential to transform how humans transact, which could fundamentally redefine how business, governments and society operate.

Despite this hype, it is still a nascent technology with considerable challenges that need to be overcome. As the technology matures and is applied across a wider set of sectors and systems, there is both a challenge and an opportunity to realize blockchain’s potential – not just for finance or industry, but for people and the planet.

This report outlines how blockchain could disrupt the way the world manages environmental resources and help drive sustainable growth and value creation.

It identifies more than 65 use-cases where blockchain can be applied to the world’s most-pressing environmental systems challenges, along with eight ‘game changers’ where the technology could fundamentally disrupt current systems and approaches.

To date, these opportunities remain largely untapped by developers, investors, and governments, yet they represent an opportunity to unlock and monetize value that is currently embedded in environmental systems.

The report also highlights many of the current challenges that need to be addressed, outlines a set of principles for developing blockchain applications for the environment, and identifies the need for global platforms to incubate a responsible blockchain ecosystem.

Download the report here: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Building-Blockchains.pdf

Special Commission of the National Assembly in France approved a key framework today in pursuit of bespoke regulation for initial coin offerings (ICOs).

This is according to a report in Les Echos that stated “Article 26” was adopted earlier today – part of the broader the Pacte Act.The report indicates that ICO issuers may apply to the French regulator, the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF), for official authorization by complying with certain mandates. But this AMF approval is not a requirement as the French are crafting a “flexible regime.

” The optional authorization system may provide a degree of assurance for investors that the offering is more legitimate than non authorized ICOs – which may still issue a crypto in exchange for virtual or fiat currency.

Additionally, policymakers are making it easier for approved ICOs to open a bank account – something that has been a hurdle for some – due to reticence from French banks.

The French are also working on a framework for secondary trading.




Quoting Benjamin Grange, a spokesperson for the collective Crypto Asset France, Grange explained;

“We hope that this AMF visa will reassure potential investors, both institutional and private, about the strength of projects and their reliability. The non-mandatory nature of the visa will avoid the distortion of competition that it would create with other leading countries on the ICO, We also support the provision to facilitate access to banking services efficiently and unhindered. But we want to point out that all crypto-entrepreneurs should be able to benefit from this measure, because not all of them launch ICOs.” [translated]

France boldly announced earlier this year its intent to embrace the issuance of cryptocurrencies. The Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, said they wanted to create innovative regulation which favored the development of this new type of capital formation.

“Our goal is to provide legal certainty for those who seek it, without hindering those who want to follow their own path. We have a rather liberal approach. We work for a flexible, non-dissuasive framework. At the same time, we are not naive either, we know that these products can be risky.”

So will France, or perhaps Paris, become the new European capitol of ICOs? Good question. Both Switzerland and Luxembourg have positioned their jurisdictions as crypto friendly. Malta, an EU member state, has already crafted crypto friendly legislation as it transforms itself into the #BlockchainIsland. But then it would be hard to beat Paris when it comes to a central location and access to services.

In France, Final crypto friendly legislation is expected to be approved later this year or perhaps in Q1 of 2019.There is already specific crowdfunding legislation in place in France. It will be interesting to see how ICO regulation aligns with current rules enabling online capital formation.

Ali Montag | @Ali_Montag 
Source: UC Berkeley photo by Hulda Nelson

A meeting for the group Blockchain at Berkeley fills an auditorium. Last spring, Associate Professor of Computer Science Emin Gün Sirer was scheduled to teach a 600-level course on blockchain technology at Cornell University, an advanced class intended for PhD students.

"Usually when you have five to a dozen students in such a class, you're teaching a popular class," Sirer tells CNBC Make It with a laugh. But when Sirer arrived on the first day to teach, he was shocked: 88 students had shown up."It was pretty interesting to see that level of interest," Sirer says of the students, most of whom were undergraduates.

Those Cornell students aren't an anomaly: At other top universities across the country, students are anxious to enroll in courses focused on the proliferation of blockchain, a decentralized ledger technology that underpins cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.

Blockchain 101?

According to a new survey of 675 U.S. undergraduate students by cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and Qriously, 9 percent of students have already taken a class related to blockchain or cryptocurrency and 26 percent want to take one.

Among courses on blockchain, the University of Pennsylvania offers "Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, and Distributed Ledger Technology," taught by Kevin Werbach and engineering professor David Crosbie; University of California at Berkeley offers "Blockchain and CryptoEconomics," taught by computer science professor Dawn Song; and Cornell offers a course on Cryptography.

Last year, Song had around 100 students from her department competing to nab one of 25 available seats in a blockchain class she co-taught with faculty from the business and law schools on campus.

This year, she's still seeing high demand for her blockchain course."It's still very popular," Song tells CNBC Make It. "I think students are intrigued to learn about the technology which is very broad ranging and both has deep historic academic roots as well as exciting new frontiers.

"The course professor Werbach, who teaches legal studies and business ethics at The Wharton School, will be co-teaching this fall is the university's first full-credit class entirely focused on blockchain.A big reason for the increased interest in blockchain classes is job prospects, he says.

"There is rapidly growing student interest," says Werbach. "They're seeing opportunities with companies that want students to work in this area, which include both blockchain focused start-ups as well as major companies.

"Wharton sends people to all the Fortune 500 companies, and investment banks and technology firms. A very high percentage of those leading firms now have blockchain or distributed ledger projects, and they're looking for expertise in that area," Werbach explains.



Source: The Wharton School

University of Pennsylvania Professor Kevin Werbach speaking.Indeed, job postings related to bitcoin on LinkedIn increased nine-fold in the financial services industry and four-fold in the software technology industry (as a proportion of overall job postings on LinkedIn) over the last three years, according to data provided by the platform to CNBC Make It.

As of Monday, there were 2,770 open jobs related to "blockchain" posted on careers website Glassdoor. 

Tech companies like IBM, Facebook and Amazon have all started blockchain initiatives. And though the most widely known use for blockchain is cryptocurrencies, industry proponents say the potential applications are numerous and far-reaching, from tracking the supply chain of food as it travels from farms to your plate to helping you shop for electricity. A full 84 percent of companies are "actively involved" with blockchain technology, according to PwC's 2018 Global Blockchain Survey.

Plus, the bitcoin craze

Of course, 2017's bitcoin mania certainly helped peak students' interest when the price of the cryptocurrency (which relies on blockchain) rose from less than $1,000 at the start of the year to a high of over $19,000 in December, drawing the attention of everyone from young people to the likes of billionaire investor Warren Buffett. (Wednesday bitcoin traded near $6,270, according to CoinDesk.)The Penn Blockchain Club, for which Werbach is a faculty adviser, started in the fall of 2017 and had amassed 300 members by the end of that year.

Today, they're at nearly 600 members, Werbach says.Berkeley's Blockchain at Berkeley student club, which consults on building blockchain applications for companies and has worked on blockchain projects with companies ranging from wireless tech giant Qualcomm to the French aerospace company Airbus, also saw a swell of interest, Alan Lai, a sophomore electrical engineering and computer science student in the club, tells CNBC Make It.

"After December 2017 when the blockchain craze occurred, the following semester we had 2,000 people interested in our info session on Facebook," Lai says. "We had 400 applications that semester as well. This semester we had [approximately] 250 applications.

"At Cornell, the university's blockchain club has attracted over 100 members from fields of study ranging from hotel management to biology. When speakers have come to give lectures for the club, the attendance has often been "so large we had difficulty finding a room," Sirer adds.

Blockchain is just a piece of the puzzle

While Sirer is excited to see the students' passion, he has a word of caution for blockchain fanatics."What you want to avoid at all costs is overspecialization early on in your career," he explains. "If you end up going to a program dedicated to blockchain, I think I personally would say you're making a mistake.

"Studying with a niche focus — even a buzzy one like blockchain — is less useful than learning overarching principles, concepts and foundations underlying computer science and engineering Sirer argues, especially in an industry as fast-paced as high tech.

"The right thing to do is establish a broad, strong base," he says. "All of our courses are structured in a way that they convey principle. We are not teaching people how to use today's blockchains — tomorrow's blockchains will look nothing like today's. "Berkeley student Lai, for example, has interned at two blockchain companies not only as a developer, but also as a marketer, he says.

At Wharton, Werbach agrees. Focusing an entire academic education on one emerging technology would be a mistake, he says, given that there isn't yet enough material to teach a full degree on blockchain with sufficient rigor. He too encourages students to think about the topic in a holistic way.

"In order to understand blockchain well, you actually need to learn a bunch of subjects that we already teach in the university, things like economics and finance and law and distributed systems in engineering," Werbach explains. "I think someone who is taking a bunch of related courses because they're interested in blockchain is going to get a well-rounded education that is going to serve them well and be useful even if this industry falls apart.

"Still, Werbach says the subject is worth paying attention to and learning."I am confident that whatever happens to the price of cryptocurrencies or the success of some of these first generations of companies that have done token offerings, this technology of blockchain and cryptocurrency is here to stay," Werbach says.

"It is a fundamentally new approach that is valuable in a lot of contexts. "Don't miss: Yale economist: Here's how likely it is that bitcoin will become worthless

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Cryptocurrency ether plunges again, decoupling from bitcoin  

• Bitcoin is up 0.1 percent in the last 30 days, while ether has nosedived 45 percent.
• “In this case, bitcoin is acting like more of a safe haven for cryptocurrencies — it’s kind of consolidating,” said Mati Greenspan, analyst at cryptocurrency exchange eToro.
• Pressure could also be coming from short orders, which market intelligence platform CoinFi says are at all-time high.

Kate Rooney | @Kr00ney



Kin Cheung | AP

A man uses the Ethereum ATM in Hong Kong, Friday, May 11, 2018.Ether, one of the best-performing cryptocurrencies during the boom last year, is taking another nose dive on Wednesday.

The world's second largest cryptocurrency fell 8 percent to a low of $170.34, bringing its drop since the high in January to roughly 90 percent, according to CoinDesk.

Ether typically rises and falls alongside its larger, better-known predecessor bitcoin. But that trend is changing.

Despite volatility, bitcoin's value in 30 days has risen by 0.1 percent. Ether meanwhile has fallen 45 percent in the same time period."In this case, bitcoin is acting like more of a safe haven for cryptocurrencies — it's kind of consolidating," said Mati Greenspan, senior market analyst at cryptocurrency brokerage eToro.Ether's recent performance marks a sharp reverse from last year.

Retail investors were excited about its utility compared to bitcoin, which can't be used to build blockchain applications and is mostly seen as a speculative investment or a store of value. The cryptocurrency rose more than 9,000 percent after starting the year around $8.

Bearish comments from co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain Vitalik Buterin over the weekend may have also spooked ether investors."There isn't an opportunity for yet another 1,000-times growth in anything in the space anymore," Vitalik told Bloomberg News interview this Saturday in Hong Kong.

 "The blockchain space is getting to the point where there's a ceiling in sight."Ether is the name of the cryptocurrency, but it's closely associated with the popular Ethereum blockchain. Unlike bitcoin, which gives access to a global financial network, ether gives users access to a computer network. Its use has been compared to gasoline for a car.

Developers can use ether tokens as fuel for certain functions on that blockchain. "The fact that Vitalik is less bullish could be causing some to sell and it stands to reason that most of his most devout followers will be holding Ether," eToro's Greenspan said.Short-sellers are also putting pressure on markets.

Data from market intelligence platform CoinFi shows bets against ether at an all-time high, according to CoinFi CEO Timothy Tam.Not insignificant bets, either. Tam said they're watching "multi-million dollar bets" in real time."Retail investors were completely euphoric a few months ago. Now, that emotion has flipped and they're panicking," said Tam, who is also a former Goldman Sachs analyst. "Shorts are going to ride that wave.Ethereum shorts at an all-time high




Source: CoinFiAnalysts also say investor enthusiasm is eroding because of scrutiny in initial coin offerings that built on Ethereum's platform. The Securities and Exchange Commission said earlier this year that ethereum itself is not a security. But the agency's chairman has said initial coin offerings, many of which were built on the Ethereum blockchain platform, are indeed securities subject to SEC law.

Tons of those projects have failed since launching during the crypto boom, and have had to sell a significant portion of ethereum holdings to manage cash flow and expenses.

On Tuesday, a federal judge in New York refused to dismiss a case that argued two cryptocurrencies were not securities for the purpose of criminal law. The Brooklyn, New York district judge said a reasonable jury should be able to apply what's known as the Howey Test, which is applied to securities.While CoinFi's Tam sees regulation as a positive for the long haul, and the only way to usher in a "healthier market," investors seem to disagree.

"Others see this as cause for panic — an end to the lax rules and low hanging fruit to which they've become accustomed," Tam said. "You also now have a ruling on the table that effectively means ICOs are now subject to securities law.

"Bitcoin was mostly flat Wednesday, trading near $6,269 while the rest of the cryptocurrency landscape was mixed. XRP was up .5 percent, and Stellar rose 4.8 percent. Bitcoin Cash meanwhile fell 7 percent, EOS was down 1 percent, according to CoinMarketCap.com.

The entire cryptocurrency market has suffered alongside ether in 2018. The total crypto market capitalization has fallen by about 68 percent since January 1, according to CoinMarketCap.com.



Kate Rooney

Markets Reporter

It is not terribly common for a mainstream economist to say something good about bitcoin in the period of its downtrend, but Mohamad El-Erian once again made an exception.

Cryptocurrency’s Not Going Away

The Allianz chief economic advisor said in an interview that cryptocurrencies are not dead, though they may be overvalued. He specifically mentioned bitcoin as an asset whose buy value should be circa $5,000, a sentiment he had already shared in June. In his latest statements, El-Erian added that unnecessary speculations had led to the previous bullish action, causing an unwarranted buying frenzy.He told Yahoo Finance:

“What we’re getting is the realization that adoption is not going to be as big and as quick as the proponents of crypto would like. I think it’s going to be there, it’s going to last for a long time, it’s going to play a role in the ecosystem, but it’s not going to be the currency that a lot of proponents would like it to be.”

The statement arrived at the time when the cryptocurrency market as a whole is undergoing a robust bearish correction. The industry’s capitalization has dropped by as much as 80 percent since its all-time high this year. All the top coins, including bitcoin (BTC), ripple (XRP), ethereum (ETH), and stellar (XLM), have contributed to the overall loss. All eyes are now on the bitcoin price’s yearly low around $5,800 — just $800 above El-Erian’s expectations.

Who Said What during Bitcoin’s Downtrend

Source: ShutterstockOther notable financial experts have feared bitcoin’s downtrend is far from over and its value could even go lower than what El-Rian expects.

Luis Carranza, the founder of London Fintech Week, in June, had said that bitcoin could likely establish its bottom near $2,500 in 2018.“$4,500 could be the bottom, but nothing is preventing $2,500 from being the bottom,” he had told Express UK.

Nouriel Roubini, the American economist and vociferous cryptocurrency skeptic who predicted the 2008’s stock market crash, has said that bitcoin’s value could eventually drop “all the way down to zero.” He even criticized ethereum smart contracts for being the tools that can only govern “kangaroo courts.

”Neil Welson, an analyst at ETX Capital, had said during the previous bottom formation that bitcoin will be derailed soon as soon as regulatory crunch appears closer.“Selling pressure at the moment is intense as there has been nothing but bad news for bitcoin bulls of late. Trying to catch the falling knife is a risky game,” he told the Guardian.

At the same time, there are plenty of finance professionals that have come out in support of bitcoin’s short-term prospects.Jürgen von Hagen of the Universität Bonn believes the success of any decentralized asset is proportional to the limitations of conventional currencies.

”Cryptocurrencies would become attractive if central bank issued currencies became very unstable. Their widespread use in the financial system would be a result, not a cause, of instability.”

Barry Silbert, founder, and CEO of Digital Currency Group, a venture capital firm, said after bitcoin established its bottom in June that the cryptocurrency could not go any lower.

“As an asset class, it is here to stay… I’m 100% confident a decentralized, non-fiat form of money is here to stay,” he said.

Featured Image from World Economic Forum/Flickr

Blockchain and real estate: A global revolution in the making?

White & Case LLP








In 2008, bitcoin announced itself as the first blockchain application, introducing the world to distributed ledger technology —a secure and transparent peer-to-peer payment protocol. Fast-forward a decade and blockchain is transforming the way global business is done—across industries.

In the financial services sector, fintech companies are deploying blockchain to enable retailers and consumers to deal with each other directly, disintermediating lenders.

In the mining industry, blockchain is used to track the entire diamond supply chain to ensure that the stones are ethically sourced. In the global fishing business, blockchain is helping to improve tuna traceability and stop illegal and unsustainable practices.

Blockchain has also found applications in energy trading and car manufacturing—and it also has the potential to revolutionise the global real estate industry. What is blockchain?In a traditional database, data is stored and managed from a single source.

In a blockchain environment, data storage and management is decentralised. Here, one public record or database (often referred to as a 'ledger') is distributed across a network of computers (a 'decentralised peer-to-peer network').

The database is secured by sophisticated cryptography safeguarded by so-called 'miners'— computers that process transactions and ultimately verify that they can be uploaded to the database.

The network can either be completely public and available for any user who is interested in participating, or private meaning that only designated users have the ability to participate. Every new transaction or information 'block' added to a blockchain is immediately available for every network participant.

The need to transfer information from one party to another or separately record and store that information falls completely away.The blockchain database grows exponentially in this way, forming a comprehensive record of all transactions that have occurred since the database's inception.

Once recorded, it is impossible for data to be removed, edited or revised—the data is immutable and resistant to fraudulent modification.But the data in this environment is only as reliable as the entity or person who is recording it, and so will need verification. For real estate, this will require collaboration between traditional data providers: appraisers, due diligence providers, notaries, and brokers.

46% of Deloitte's blockchain survey respondents say they would be comfortable using a smart contract instead of a paper-based contract

Blockchain in land registration

Real estate is full of registries: Governments or courts often maintain multiple registries of who owns what land and the various interests affecting it; brokers must keep a registry of investors and what shares they own; and landlords have registries of their tenants.

There are many issues with these registries, which are often slow, disparate and uncoordinated. In the US, for example, records are kept by individual counties, each with different standards and protocols, making interoperability a problem.

In Dubai, there is one central entity that all real estate transactions must go through, creating a slow, expensive and paper-heavy process. Blockchain—at its core, a new type of registry—appears tailor-made to address these challenges by digitising a traditional land registry and moving the industry away from its historic and now technologically outdated models.

A blockchain-based land registry will have all the same functionality— tracking property titles, ensuring single-ownership, keeping a seamless and near-instantaneous record of all transactions and third parties' rights—but with the added advantage of streamlining and enhancing the way real estate transactions are logged and executed.

"Using a blockchain as a shared registry has the potential to make investing, transacting and renting real estate cheaper, more efficient and more transparent," said Joseph Lubin, Founder of ConsenSys, a US-based blockchain software technology company.




Smart contractsThe benefits to the real estate industry go beyond the creation of an 'alternative' land registry. A combination of blockchain and so-called 'smart contracts' in property sales, purchases or leases could likewise transform the industry. Smart contracts administer and execute without the need for human interaction.

In commoditised real estate transactions such as residential conveyancing, smart contracts could reduce or even eliminate the need for lawyers and other intermediaries.

Many legal agreements are complex and contain provisions that are never actually used by the parties in practice. But by using blockchain, property service agreements with clear delivery targets and penalty regimes can be administered automatically in ways that have not been previously possible.

For example, datacenter 'smart contract' service agreements that require an operator to provide a customer with specific power, temperature and humidity requirements would automatically award the customer service credits if sensors in the facility detect a breach. These contracts can be built into a blockchain database and could be self-executing without human intervention.




Real estate asset and property managementAsset management could also be streamlined by blockchain technology by making property more accessible and liquid as an asset class with all relevant data available on a single online platform.

This has obvious attractions for owners, prospective purchasers and tenants. "Not only does distributed ledger technology offer opportunities to streamline the existing process, it also opens up new market opportunities", explains Alex Edds, Director of Innovation at JLL. "The concept of buying shares in a real estate asset anywhere in the world is made more viable through the use of blockchain.

"Another possible application is in relation to property management and maintenance. For example, if all maintenance and services for the technical building equipment is recorded in a blockchain, the condition of a property can be easily reviewed and assessed by the owner, tenants and potential buyers, and reduce the need for technical due diligence.

Certain estimates suggest that nearly US$1 billion is spent annually on title fraud resolutions

Building a new technological world orderBlockchain databases can be a tool for increasing efficiency, transparency and security for real estate transactions—providing a secure, permanent record that will speed up transactions, reduce costs and create a unified single registry accessible to all parties.

But the adoption of the new technology is going to vary greatly between industries and jurisdictions. Creating blockchain-based land registries may be appealing in countries that seek to encourage overseas investors and have less mature central land registries, as in certain parts of the Middle East, for instance.

But more developed European jurisdictions, such as Germany and France, which took a long time to introduce digital signatures and electronic contracts, are likely to take a more cautious approach to the adoption of blockchain, particularly in an industry such as real estate which has historically been regarded as conservative.

"In developed markets, a top-down approach is the ideal solution," says Mohammad Shaikh, Co-founder of Meridio, ConSensys's real estate branch. Existing land registries must be converted to a consistent format, and the gatekeepers of those registries must agree to transfer their data to the new system and eventually relinquish some control.

In emerging markets where registries are in their infancy, a bottom-up approach could work better. Individuals must agree to certain standards for recording data, and the registry is built up by individuals and small organizations who want to claim ownership of real estate and make transactions.

"In both cases, for widespread adoption there will likely need to be government acceptance of these registries as the source of truth," says Shaikh.

In Germany, for instance, moving to a blockchain database controlled by the courts would enhance efficiency. Signing and closing of transactions, including registration of title or mortgages, could be completed in a single day rather than months.

Due diligence of complex easements currently requires a physical visit to a local court and would clearly be much easier if accessible online through public notaries.

Further publicly recorded information such as public easements, ground contamination and warfare records, monument protection, etc. could all be recorded in one database which is only accessible to the authorities to make registrations and to public notaries to review and apply for new registrations.

Where gatekeepers are in fact market participants themselves, there will be a particular need for acceptance of the technology underpinning blockchain and distributed ledger technology. But as Edds points out: "Blockchain technology doesn't need to be scary. For the end-user, the experience is exactly the same.

Much of the hype of this technology is actually in the back end that doesn't require the end-user to understand the intricacies of how it works. Do you know how your iPhone works?"

40% of Deloitte's blockchain survey respondents believe there is value in recording existing contracts on the blockchain.

Bumps in the road to adoptionIf blockchain technology is to succeed, it is crucial that the gap between the technical and legal worlds is successfully bridged, and in many cases there will need to be a fundamental change in the legal approach to address the many challenges that new technology brings.

For example, smart contracts are an appealing proposition, but can the technology accommodate the many facets of a typical commercial contract? After all, smart contracts are neither 'smart' nor 'contracts'. They are self-executing computer programmes, included in a larger economic activity which has its own legal regime concerning non-binary concepts that require a degree of judgment.

What is a 'reasonable' period of time?

When is a party acting 'unreasonably' or 'improperly'? Outside events or circumstances may influence how a contract is to be performed. What if the property that is being conveyed is damaged or even destroyed between exchange and completion of the smart contract?

The market may need to provide insurance solutions to accommodate such scenarios. These questions require an application of the facts to legal concepts and obviously cannot be addressed through smart contracts.

There is also another challenge that has come to the fore with the recent implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). GDPR includes the 'right to be forgotten' if the data is no longer needed for its original purpose. But by default, data entered into blockchain cannot be erased or removed.

So on the face it, blockchain databases in EU Member States appear to be in breach of this requirement. This, too, will need to be addressed.Many questions still remain, and building trust in the new technology will take time.

But one thing is certain: Real estate professionals, law makers, technology developers and regulators must work together to confront the difficulties—and embrace the transformative powers—that blockchain technology can bring to real estate.


White & Case LLP - James Johnson and Dr. Holger Wolf

In late July, Google announced a partnership that would allow the multinational technology company to offer a cloud-based platform where they can develop and run blockchain-based applications.

Blockchain is a relatively new distributed ledger technology that allows for secure transactions. It’s the technology behind popular cryptocurrency bitcoin, but blockchain has a number of applications.

Blockchain-based smart contracts can help businesses automate a number of transactions and processes. For example, in supply-chain management, a smart contract could be used to track delivery transactions from start to finish. In the real estate market, smart contracts can handle the transfer of titles and the exchange of funds.

With Google’s recent announcement, the company joins a growing list of major technology players that are now offering Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS). They include Amazon, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. Microsoft was one of the first software vendors to offer BaaS when it launched its Azure Blockchain Service in 2015.

These tech leaders are working to provide businesses with all the benefits of blockchain technology without the associated costs of having to build a blockchain platform from scratch.

BaaS is helping businesses adapt to this new technology and utilize it as a business solution. Businesses that prefer to outsource the development of blockchain solutions can take advantage of BaaS services. And these new resources can help businesses increase efficiencies and take advantage of growth opportunities.

BaaS could be the next big thing for business-to-business companies especially. Until recently, many B2B companies have been unable to take advantage of the benefits of blockchain, but BaaS presents a promising opportunity. Here are three benefits of BaaS for B2B companies.

BaaS Allows Companies To Test Out The Technology

One of the greatest draws of BaaS is that it allows B2B companies to try out blockchain technology before making a larger investment. Enterprises are still trying to work out how to implement blockchain on a large scale, but the industry’s largest software providers are putting the technology to the test. With BaaS, these companies are allowing B2B companies to test the technology without having to expend capital costs related to on-sight development and hardware.

BaaS eliminates the risk of deploying a blockchain platform in-house."Everybody works with cutting-edge technology, but it does not happen often that your software makes history for being the first of its kind, says Antons Sapriko, CEO of Scandiweb, a blockchain development service provider helping businesses accelerate new ideas.

The cost of hiring a coder to build a platform from the ground up can also be substantially prohibitive. As for 2017, the average annual income of a competent blockchain developer was $150,000-$200,000. And hourly rates can fall between $40 to $200 or more.

For B2B companies whose core functions have little to do with technology, a blockchain platform may never be important enough to implement in-house. But with BaaS, these companies can see the same benefits as those companies building their own platforms from the ground up.

BaaS Addresses The Limited Talent Pool Issue

Despite the clear benefits of blockchain for B2B companies, the technology is still in its infancy. A small percentage of the international population have even heard of blockchain technology and an even smaller percentage are qualified to implement it.

There currently exists a shortage of blockchain coders, making it downright impossible for many B2B companies to utilize the technology. Of the 20 million software developers in the world, only approximately 0.1 percent know what a blockchain code looks like. And experts indicate there are no more than 60,000 coders qualified to adequately do this work.

In the meantime, while international education institutions work feverishly to produce more blockchain capable coders, BaaS companies are ensuring B2B companies can still benefit from those professionals currently holding expertise in this field.

BaaS Can Change The Way B2B Companies Handle Transactions

In 2016, global financial services institution Visa announced  a new partnership with blockchain enterprise company Chain to develop a simple and fast way to process B2B payments across the globe. Often times payments at this level can be difficult for B2B companies to complete efficiently and securely, but with blockchain, Visa can offer companies a consistent process for managing settlements.

Making cross-border payments can often be an onerous and lengthy process even for corporations. But blockchain technology simplifies the process. Even though companies offering BaaS essentially serve as middlemen between B2B companies and blockchain technology, the hallmark of this technology is that it cuts out the middlemen in financial transactions by automating them.

For this reason, transactions made on blockchain have the potential for faster than usual speeds. Companies like Visa are developing blockchain-based systems to execute near real-time transactions. And the amounts and destinations of these transactions aren’t a barrier. With BaaS B2B companies can exchange high-value international payments.

By speeding up the process, BaaS can lead to real savings for B2B companies. A study by Accenture found that blockchain technology could help eight banks save at least $8 billion per year, or approximately 27 percent. Annual cost savings were predicted to reach as high as 38 percent, or around $12 billion.

If blockchain can help large institutions processing hundreds of thousands of transaction per day, save money, it’s likely to help B2B companies as well.

Founder and CEO of By Monday, Inc., a consulting firm that accelerates B2B sales revenue through strategic alignment and innovation. I previously worked as president of VitalSmarts for 9 years. I wrote the book Indispensable By Monday, which teaches employees at all levels t... 

MORELarry Myler: CEO By Monday, Inc., adjunct professor in the Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology at BYU, author of Indispensable By Monday.

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Start a Cryptocurrency Exchange

Starting a cryptocurrency exchange has become a popular option as is evident from the rise and success of exchanges in recent years. One of the best and most effective ways to go about it is to implement a cryptocurrency exchange turnkey solution.

This is an increasingly popular line of business, partly due to the large number of ICO projects that need to list tokens on cryptocurrency exchanges.A cryptocurrency exchange turnkey is an ideal solution for companies or individuals with insufficient upfront capital or when one of the key factors involved in building a cryptocurrency exchange, like crypto liquidity and the trading engine are not feasible options.

Many companies have implemented B2Broker’s cryptocurrency exchange turnkey solution to provide a fast and cost-effective setup with a choice of personalised features all geared up towards creating a profitable business.

With B2Broker’s cryptocurrency exchange turnkey, you can start earning immediately from the day you launch by means of qualitative aggregated liquidity through B2BX aggregator and have the ability to list tokens and coins within 5 minutes.

Hence, you have a great business opportunity to occupy a profitable niche in one of the fastest growing industries in the world with your own branded cryptocurrency exchange turnkey solution.

Start a Crypto Turnkey Brokerage Business

Setting up as a cryptocurrency broker is another excellent way to capitalise on the growing crypto trend and choosing a professional, ready-made solution  allows you to avoid the pitfalls of doing it yourself.

Another good reason to follow this route is because the field of brokerage services in the cryptocurrency market has until now been poorly represented. As a result, there are many sub-standard crypto exchange and brokerage firms in existence even though the demand for these services is on track to grow even further.

As one of the industry leaders, B2Broker has provided many of its clients with a turnkey cryptocurrency brokerage solution using its trading platform, Trader’s Room technology and liquidity, enabling them to offer their own clients a full spectrum of services for exchange, trade and investments in cryptocurrencies with advanced trading platforms.

B2Broker’s solution allows crypto brokers to launch in a short timespan of one month and offer clients better security, trading costs and leverage than most crypto exchanges, as well as a wide range of crypto CFDs.

When implementing B2Broker’s cryptocurrency broker, clients can choose from a range of cutting-edge technologies in order to design a tailor-made solution including Trader’s Room and liquidity provision from B2BX, the biggest aggregator of cryptocurrencies in the industry.

These, along with a variety of other great features allow B2Broker to offer a complete solution.

Launch Your ICO Project

With the growth in the number of ICO projects in recent times, the need to list tokens on crypto exchanges has grown substantially. However, launching an ICO can be a major challenge with one of the main issues facing companies that decide to raise finance in this way being the best way to handle the whole process.

Pursuing an ICO on your own is a complicated process when you consider the time needed for development of the technical, legal, financial, and marketing aspects. These kind of projects from scratch can take a minimum of six months. Experienced specialists are also hard to come by as they are scarce and can also be very expensive.

An option that is proving popular in the industry is implementing a ready-made solution from a team who has already realized their project and is therefore in an ideal position to share their technology and know-how with the industry.

B2Broker offers a technical solution that completely automates the whole ICO and fundraising process. In fact, the company held its own B2BX ICO on this platform which was subsequently selected by 10 other companies to start their own ICOs.

B2Broker’s ICO platform can operate with any blockchain including Ethereum, EOS and NEM and offers many advantages including: fully customizable interface, the ability to see how many investors have supported your ICO and how much money has been raised in different cryptocurrencies at any given time, API for data transmission to the website or other external sources, a widget with exchange rates that enables an investor to see how many tokens he can buy in real time, configured crypto-processing, a secure, tested and customizable smart contract, three-level security system with tokens fully controlled by the issuer, integration with many PSPs for acquiring and processing of bank cards.

Getting Started

In summary, choosing ready-made, tried and tested technical solutions will not only save you time and money, but will help you gain a competitive advantage over your counterparts in order to achieve your financial goals.

B2Broker has a solid reputation for successfully building cryptocurrency businesses from the ground up. If you’re looking at setting up your own cryptocurrency business and would like to consider B2Broker’s Cryptocurrency Exchange or Broker turnkey solutions, or our ICO Platform, talk to us today. We’ll have you up and running in just one month!

Ethereum co-founder says blockchain growth is near a ‘ceiling’

The cryptocurrency bear market plumbed a fresh 10-month low on Monday as Bitcoin’s biggest rival tumbled and U.S. regulators suspended trading in two securities linked to digital assets.

Ether, the second-largest virtual currency, slumped 11 percent from its level at 5 p.m. New York time on Friday, according to Bloomberg composite pricing. Bitcoin declined 2.4 percent, while the market capitalization of digital assets tracked by CoinMarketCap.com shrank to about $197 billion -- down almost $640 billion from its January peak.


Cryptocurrencies have declined for five of the past six weeks amid concern that a broader adoption of digital assets will take longer than some had anticipated.

That worry was underscored over the weekend after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission temporarily suspended trading in two exchange-traded notes linked to cryptocurrencies and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin told Bloomberg that the days of explosive growth in the blockchain industry have likely come and gone.

“The temporary suspension of these products led to an initial knee-jerk reaction,” said Ryan Rabaglia, head of trading at cryptocurrency dealing firm OSL in Hong Kong. “But ultimately, it’s just another obstacle for the market to overcome.”

Read more: Crypto Growth Nears ‘Ceiling,’ Ethereum Co-Founder Buterin Says

Cryptocurrencies remained under pressure on Monday despite reports that Citigroup Inc. has developed a new mechanism trading them. The U.S. bank plans to act as an agent issuing so-called digital asset receipts, or DARs, to enable trading by proxy without direct ownership of the underlying coins, a person with knowledge of the plans said.

In a separate report, two financial-technology companies won New York state approval to issue cryptocurrencies pegged to the U.S. dollar, creating more regulated and transparent competitors to so-called stable coins such as Tether, currently the eighth-largest of all digital assets by market value.

The MVIS CryptoCompare Digital Assets 10 Index of major virtual currencies dropped 2.2 percent as of 4:30 p.m. London time, paring a decline earlier on Monday that extended to its lowest level since late October.

Ether has tumbled faster than Bitcoin in recent months on concern that blockchain-related firms are cashing out of the No. 2 cryptocurrency. Many startups that raised Ether from investors in their initial coin offerings will eventually need to sell their holdings to cover expenses like salaries and development costs.

“The rhetoric around ICOs continuing to unload their raise proceeds on the market remains valid,” Rabaglia said. “It’s hard to see how that story line will go away any time soon.”Have a confidential tip for our reporters?
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Crypto traders reeling from a week of losses are getting a soothing message from the European Union.

Finance ministers gathering in Vienna agreed that they won’t rush with steps to further regulate the market, and that they’ll wait for the outcome of a thorough analysis by European authorities before deciding on any steps, according to officials involved in the talks.

“The EU will be acting carefully in this area,” Irish Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe told reporters in the Austrian capital. Officials also sided with the view of the Financial Stability Board, which said earlier this year that crypto assets currently don’t threaten the financial system.

Regulators around the globe are taking steps to rein in one of the biggest investment manias in recent memory, ranging from a massive crackdown in China to an exchange-licensing regime in Japan.

EU policy makers have moved to increase transparency in the market, yet have stopped short of introducing rules to protect investors or shield traditional financial firms from the risks posed by the crypto market.




Bruegel, a Brussels-based think tank, wrote in a report prepared for the ministers’ meeting that “limiting the exposure of financial institutions” to crypto-currencies would be “sensible.” It also said that it could be useful to try different national solutions in the EU before moving to a more harmonized approach with a single supervisor in charge.

The discussion in Vienna was meant to make sure that everyone understands the challenge and to ensure that policy makers are “put in a position in which they’re able to act,” said German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz. “It’s obvious that we shouldn’t wait too long with that.

”A Bloomberg gauge of the biggest cryptocurrencies fell almost 15 percent this week, amid concern that broader adoption of digital assets will take longer than anticipated.

Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency, is down 65 percent from its peak in late 2017.

— With assistance by Todd White, Piotr Skolimowski, William Horobin, Nikos Chrysoloras, Viktoria Dendrinou, Boris Groendahl, Lorenzo Totaro, and Richard Bravo

Here’s a prediction. ETH — the asset, not the Ethereum Network itself — will go to zero. Those who already think that ETH will not see real adoption — thanks to a failure to scale, to adopt more secure contract authoring practices, or to out-compete its competitors — don’t need to be convinced that a price collapse would follow as a consequence.

But, if one believes that Ethereum will succeed beyond anyone’s wildest dreams as a platform then the proposition that ETH (as a currency) will go to zero will take a bit more convincing running a substantial share of the world’s commerce securely.

So here’s how Ethereum ends up succeeding wildly but ETH becomes worthless. Ethereum’s value proposition, as given by ethereum.org, is as follows:

Build unstoppable applicationsEthereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference.

çThese apps run on a custom built blockchain, an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of property.

This enables developers to create markets, store registries of debts or promises, move funds in accordance with instructions given long in the past (like a will or a futures contract) and many other things that have not been invented yet, all without a middleman or counterparty risk.

If Ethereum succeeds on its value proposition it will therefore mitigate external risk factors for decentralized applications.



İstanbul, Turkey – January 28, 2018: Close up shot of Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum memorial coins and shovels on soil. Bitcoin Litecoin and Ethereum are crypto currencies and a worldwide payment system.

No Future for ‘Gas’

There’s no value proposition for ETH in the official description. Perhaps this omission is because ETH’s value seems so obvious to the Ethereum Foundation that it is hardly worth mentioning: $ETH fees (dubbed ‘Gas’) is how you pay for all this.If the concept of gas isn’t immediately obvious, let’s expand the metaphor:

The Ethereum network is like a shared car. When a contract wants to be driven by the shared car, the car uses up fuel, which you have to pay the driver for. How much gas money you owe depends on how far you had to be driven, and how much trash you left in the car.

Gas is a nice metaphor, but the metaphor is insufficient as an argument to support non-zero $ETH prices. Gasoline actually burns inside an internal combustion engine; an internal combustion engine will not work without a combustible fuel. $ETH as Gas is a metaphor for how gasoline is consumed; there is no hard requirement for Gas in an Ethereum contract.


(Photo by Manuel Romano/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Buying the “BuzzwordCoin”

Suppose we’re building a new decentralized application, BuzzwordCoin. By default, following a standard ERC-20 Token template, every transaction on BuzzwordCoin will pay gas in $ETH.

Requiring every BuzzwordCoin transaction to also depend on ETH for fees creates substantial risk, third party dependency, and artificial downwards pressure on the price of the underlying token (if one must sell BuzzwordCoin for ETH ahead of time to run a BuzzwordCoin transaction, then the sell-pressure will happen before the transaction requires it, and must be a larger sale than necessary to ensure sufficient funds to cover the transaction).

Instead of paying for Gas in ETH, we could make every BuzzwordCoin transaction deposit a small amount of BuzzwordCoin directly to the block’s miner’s address to pay for the contract’s execution. Paying for Gas in a non-ETH asset is sometimes referred  to as economic abstraction in the Ethereum community.

The revised BuzzwordCoin contract has no functional dependence on ETH. We’re able to incentivize miners to mine transactions without paying any fees in ETH whatsoever.

If the BuzzwordCoin contract has non-transactional contractual clauses — that is, a functionality that should be regularly called by any party for tasking like computing and updating cached statistics in the contract — we can specify that the miner performing those clauses receives coins from an inflation or shared gas pool. In the shared pool, all fees for user’s transactions in a specific contract are paid to the contract’s wallet.

A fee dispensing contract call performing the non-transactional clauses releases the fee to the miner (this bears some semblance to Child Pays for Parent in the Bitcoin Ecosystem).

Battling the economic abstraction

There are four main counterarguments to economically abstracting Ethereum: the lack of software support for economic abstraction; difficulty in pricing many tokens; the existence of contracts not tied to tokens; and the need for ETH for Proof-of-Stake. While nuanced, all four arguments fall flat.

Software Support: Currently, miners select transactions based on the amount of Gas provided in ETH.

As ETH is not a contract (like an ERC-20 token), the code is special-cased for transactions dealing in ETH. However, there are efforts to make Ethereum treat ETH less special-cased and more like other ERC-20 Tokens and vice-versa. Weth, for instance, wraps ETH in a 1:1 pegged ERC-20 compliant token for trading in Decentralized Exchanges.

Detractors of economic abstraction (notably, Vitalik Buterin) argue that the added complexity is not worth the ecosystem gains. This argument is absurd. If the software doesn’t support the needs of rational users, then the software should be amended. Furthermore, the actual wallet software required for any given token is made much more complex, as the wallet must manage balances in both ETH and the application’s token.

Market Pricing: To mine on Ethereum with economic abstraction, miners simply need software which allows them to account for discrepancies in their perceived value of active tokens and include transactions rationally on that basis.  Such software requires dynamically re-ordering pending transactions based on pricing information, gleaned either through the miner’s own outlook or monitoring cryptocurrency exchanges prices.

Vlad Zamfir argues that the potential need to monitor market information on prices makes economic abstraction difficult.However, miners requiring pricing information is already the status quo — rational actors need a model of future ETH prices before mining (or staking) to maximize profit against electricity costs, hardware costs, and opportunity costs.

Non-Token Contracts: Not all contracts have coins, or if they do, they may not be widely recognized, valuable, and traded on exchanges. Can such contracts pay fees without ETH?

Users of a tokenless contract can pay fees in whichever tokens they want. For example, a user of Tokenless Contract can pay their fees in a 50/50 mix of LemonadeCoin and TeaBucks. To ensure liquidity between users and miners with different assets they would pay or accept fees with, a user can simply issue multiple mutually-exclusive transactions paying with fees in different assets.

Specialized wallet contracts could also negotiate fees with miners directly .  A miner could also process transactions paying fee with an asset they do not want if there is an open Decentralized Exchange (DEX) offer to exchange the fee asset for something they prefer —  it is possible to create DEX orders for paying fees which allowing only a block’s miner to fill a user’s offers in proportion to the fees that a user has paid in that block preventing the case where a user’s fee diversifying offers are taken by non-miners.

Proof-of-Stake: Without ETH, a modified version of Proof-of-Stake with a multitude of assets could still decide consensus if each node selects a weight vector for the voting power of all assets (let’s call it HD-PoS, or Heterogeneous Deposit Proof Of Stake). While it is an open research question to show under which conditions HD-PoS would maintain consensus, consensus may be possible if the weight vectors are similar enough.

Proofs of HD-PoS may be possible by assuming a bound on the pairwise euclidean distance of the weight vectors or the maximum difference between any two prices. If such a consensus algorithm proves impossible, the failure to find such an algorithm points to a more general vulnerability in Ethereum PoS.

Assuming a future where ETH’s main utility is governance voting, why wouldn’t all the other valuable applications on Ethereum have a say in the consensus process? Rolling back actions in a valuable token contract by burning ETH stake could be a lucrative business; if HD-PoS is used such attacks are impossible.



Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum Foundation) at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017

ETH’s ethereal value

If all the applications and their transactions can run without ETH, there’s no reason for ETH to be valuable unless the miners enforce some sort of racket to require users to pay in ETH. But if miners are uncoordinated, mutually disinterested, and rational, they would prefer to be paid in assets of their own choosing rather than in something like ETH.

Furthermore, risk-averse users would want to minimize their exposure to volatile assets they don’t have to use. Lastly, token developers benefit because pricing in their native asset should serve to reduce sell-pressure. Thus, in a stateless ecosystem, replacing ETH is a Pareto Improvement (i.e., all parties are better off). The only party disadvantaged is existing ETH holders.

• The author holds Stellar and Bitcoin,  but has relatively little holdings in other cryptocurrencies. He has previously done a Virtual Lapel Pin Sale (like an ICO) for his cause, “Fuck Nazis”, on top of Ethereum which faced both government censorship and censorship from the Ethereum community. 

• Goldman Sachs is dropping its plan to open a trading desk for cryptocurrencies, Business Insider says, citing people familiar with the matter.
• Bitcoin fell roughly 5 percent to below $7,000 following the report, and the rest of the top five cryptocurrencies by market cap were all down by more than 12 percent.
• "To the extent that they represent the institutional herd, this is a negative," Brian Kelly of BKCM says.
• 
  

Michael Sheetz | Kate Rooney


Goldman Sachs reportedly ditches plans to trade cryptocurrencies  14 Hours Ago | 00:35

Bitcoin slipped below $7,000 Wednesday after a report that Goldman Sachs is abandoning plans to open a trading desk for cryptocurrencies.The world's largest digital currency fell roughly 6 percent to a low of $6,866.06, according to data from CoinDesk.

Goldman still sees the regulatory environment as ambiguous, according to Business Insider, which cited people familiar with the matter.

The Wall Street giant has been considering the launch of a new trading operation focused on bitcoin and other digital currencies for the past year. The bank's CEO Lloyd Blankfein tweeted in October that Goldman was "still thinking about bitcoin."

"No conclusion - not endorsing/rejecting. Know that folks also were skeptical when paper money displaced gold," Blankfein said at the time.Executives now say more steps need to be taken, most of them outside the bank's control, before a regulated institution would be allowed to trade cryptocurrencies, according to Business Insider.

Goldman would not confirm the report to CNBC, and repeated its only public comment on the matter.

"In response to client interest in various digital products, we are exploring how best to serve them in the space. At this point, we have not reached a conclusion on the scope of our digital asset offering," Goldman Sachs said in a statement.

Brian Kelly, founder and CEO of crypto hedge fund BKCM, said while this doesn't have an impact on actual bitcoin trading volume short-term, the report pours cold water on long-term sentiment."They were not a part of the ecosystem yet, but to the extent that they represent the institutional herd, this is a negative," Kelly said.

“You do not want to give Jeff Bezos a seven-year head start.”Hear what else Buffett has to say





Bitcoin has been selling in a narrow corridor around $7,000 for the past month. Late Tuesday night, it drove up to $7,400, its highest point since the first week of August, according to data from CoinDesk.Joe DiPasquale, CEO of cryptocurrency fund of hedge funds BitBull Capital, said that price level represented a selling trigger for some investors who had been waiting for prices to recover.

"Until there's additional institutional investor interest to drive demand in pricing, many active managers in the space are going to continue to buy low and sell high," DiPasquale said.Institutional interest has been a barometer for prices, especially this summer.

Rumors of the first-ever bitcoin ETF being approved drove prices over $8,000 in July. Prices later slipped back below $7,000 after the Securities and Exchange Commission rejected the bitcoin exchange-traded funds from ProShares and other crypto ETF plans by GraniteShares, Direxion and the Winklevoss brothers.

Bitcoin prices have struggled to recover to their high near $20,000 hit in December. The entire market capitalization for all cryptocurrencies is down roughly 63 percent this year, according to data from CoinMarketCap.com.

Cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin known as "alt coins" fared even worse on Wednesday. Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency was down 13 percent, XRP fell 11 percent, while bitcoin cash and EOS were down 13 and 16 percent respectively.


Jordan Belfort: The SEC won't get involved in Bitcoin  2:26 PM ET Mon, 27 Aug 2018 | 04:59

Reuters contributed to this report.



Michael Sheetz
Markets and Space Reporter

Kate Rooney
Markets Reporter

The Super Rich of Silicon Valley Have a Doomsday Escape Plan

Wealthy Americans have stepped up investment in New Zealand. Parliament votes to ban foreigners from buying bolt-hole homes.

By Olivia Carville

September 5 2018

ç












Years of doomsday talk at Silicon Valley dinner parties has turned to action.In recent months, two 150-ton survival bunkers journeyed by land and sea from a Texas warehouse to the shores of New Zealand, where they’re buried 11 feet underground.

Seven Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have purchased bunkers from Rising S Co. and planted them in New Zealand in the past two years, said Gary Lynch, the manufacturer’s general manager. At the first sign of an apocalypse — nuclear war, a killer germ, a French Revolution-style uprising targeting the 1 percent — the Californians plan to hop on a private jet and hunker down, he said.

“New Zealand is an enemy of no one,” Lynch said in an interview from his office in Murchison, Texas, southeast of Dallas. “It’s not a nuclear target. It’s not a target for war. It’s a place where people seek refuge. ”The remote island nation, clinging to the southern part of the globe 2,500 miles off Australia’s coast, has 4.8 million people and six times as many sheep.

It has a reputation for natural beauty, easy networking, low-key politicians who bike to work, and rental prices half those of the San Francisco Bay Area. That makes it an increasingly popular destination not only for those fretting about impending dystopia, but for tech entrepreneurs seeking incubators for nurturing startups.

“It’s become one of the places for people in Silicon Valley, mostly because it’s not like Silicon Valley at all,” said Reggie Luedtke, an American biomedical engineer who’s moving to New Zealand in October for the Sir Edmund Hillary Fellowship, a program created to lure tech innovators.


Luedtke, 37, said people in California have asked him if he’s relocating as part of a doomsday contingency plan, because “that’s what the country is known for.”Such notoriety has made New Zealand’s isolation, once deemed an economic handicap, one of its biggest assets. The nation allows emigres to essentially buy residency through investor visas, and rich Americans have poured a fortune into the country, often by acquiring palatial estates.

Billionaire hedge-fund honcho Julian Robertson owns a lodge overlooking Lake Wakatipu in Queenstown, the South Island’s luxury resort destination. Fidelity National Financial Inc. Chairman Bill Foley has a homestead in the Wairarapa region, north of Wellington, and Titanic director James Cameron bought a mansion nearby at Lake Pounui.

The Investor Plus Visa, which requires a minimum investment of NZD$10 million ($6.7 million) over three years, attracted 17 U.S. applicants in fiscal 2017, after President Donald Trump’s election. Previously, it averaged six applicants a year.

See also: Trump escapees flock to New Zealand’s immigration website

More than 10 Americans from the West Coast have bought multimillion-dollar properties in the Queenstown region in the past two years, said Mark Harris, managing director of the local Sotheby’s real estate office.

In August, partly in response to Americans gobbling up swaths of prime real estate, New Zealand’s government banned foreigners from buying homes, with the restrictions set to take effect in coming months.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, ignited an uproar when he was granted citizenship after spending just 12 days in the country, prompting allegations that New Zealand’s passport was for sale. Thiel, 50, owns a $13.8 million home on 477 acres (193 hectares) in the lakeside town of Wanaka, with views of snow-capped mountains, and purchased another property in Queenstown, outfitted with a safe room.

“If you’re the sort of person that says ‘I’m going to have an alternative plan when Armageddon strikes,’ then you would pick the farthest location and the safest environment — and that equals New Zealand if you Google it,” former Prime Minister John Key said in a phone interview.

“It’s known as the last bus stop on the planet before you hit Antarctica,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of people say to me that they would like to own a property in New Zealand if the world goes to hell in a handbasket.”

 


Kiwis would find this both crazy and amusing, Key said, but it makes sense for some of the wealthiest people on the planet. “We live in a world where some people have extraordinary amounts of wealth and there comes a point at which, when you have so much money, allocating a very tiny amount of that for ‘Plan B’ is not as crazy as it sounds.

”At three recent Silicon Valley dinner parties, guests discussed bugging out to New Zealand if there’s trouble, according to attendees who asked not to be identified because the events were private.

At one, a prominent venture capitalist was said to have told fellow diners of his escape plans. In the garage of his San Francisco home, he told guests, is a bag of guns hanging from the handlebars of a motorcycle. The bike will allow him to weave through traffic on the way to his private plane, and the guns are for defense against encroaching zombies that may threaten his getaway.

He intends to fly to a landing strip in Nevada where a jet sits in a hangar, its sole purpose to whisk him and four billionaire co-owners to safety. Their destination: New Zealand — or Aotearoa, which means “Land of the Long White Cloud” in Maori.In the event of a pandemic, Sam Altman, president of Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator, plans to escape to New Zealand with Thiel, the New Yorker reported in 2016. Now he says he was just joking.

“The world is so interconnected now that if anything was to happen, we would all be in pretty bad shape, unfortunately,” Altman, 33, said in a phone interview. “I don’t think you can just run away and try to hide in a corner of the Earth.

”Still, Altman said biological warfare is the biggest threat to civilization and that people aren’t “as scared enough about that as they should be.”He has a go bag stuffed with a gun, antibiotics, batteries, water, blankets, a tent and gas masks.













Doomsday fantasies run deep in American culture.Think of schoolchildren practicing the duck-and-cover maneuver during the height of the Cold War. Apocalyptic religious cults never seem to end well, from Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple in the 1970s to Heaven’s Gate and the Branch Davidians in the 1990s.

 Just six years ago, many Americans believed the world was ending because of a Mayan prophesy.

What’s different about Silicon Valley is that those entertaining fears of the eschaton have the means to put elaborate plans into action.Robert Vicino, founder of the Vivos Project, a builder of massive underground bunkers, said Silicon Valley elites discussed detailed plans to flee to New Zealand last year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

He said they foresaw “a revolution or a change where society is going to go after the 1 percenters.” In other words, them.New Zealand isn’t the best solution, he said, because a tsunami caused by an asteroid strike in the Pacific could submerge the island’s highest point.




 

Photos from the Rising S factory in Murchison, Texas

But Vicino is a businessman, and demand dictates he get to work on a bunker on the northern tip of the South Island that would accommodate about 300 people. The price: $35,000 a head.That’s a bargain compared with the most expensive bunker Lynch’s Rising S has shipped to New Zealand — $8 million.

The two 1,000-square-foot bunkers sent earlier this year had to be divided into sections and loaded onto 19 tractor-trailers to start the trek from Texas, he said.

One landed in Picton, across the Cook Strait from Wellington, to be transported to a sleepy town on the West Coast. The other arrived at Auckland’s Waitemata Harbor and settled into the dirt somewhere in Northland, a rugged region fringed by wild beaches.

A spokeswoman for the New Zealand Customs Service declined to confirm that the bunkers had arrived in the country, citing privacy reasons.It takes about two weeks to excavate the land and bury the average bunker, Lynch said. It’s all done secretly so local residents aren’t aware.

Once installed, passersby would have no way of knowing it’s there.“There’s no clue left behind, not even a door,” Lynch said. So the sight of an American billionaire wandering the sheep meadows consulting his GPS and kicking at the dirt can only mean one thing: It must be New Zealand.



With assistance from Susan Warren and Matthew Brockett
Illustrations by Steph Davidson

The blockchain technology market could top $2 billion in three years as companies, NGOs and governments understand the potential create customer trust, cut down on counterfeit goods, reduce transaction costs, and reach emerging markets.

While there are a growing number of ways blockchain is being used in banking, retail, and education, it’s still relatively difficult to learn the skills to compete for lucrative new jobs being created.

According to largest global freelancing website Upwork, blockchain is ranked as the hottest technology in its quarterly skills index.  Even with the cool down of the cryptocurrency markets, the demand for blockchain job skills grew six thousand percent in just the first quarter of this year.

Juha Mikkola, co-founder of Wyncode Academy, a coding school, said some developers are being paid double the going rate for their blockchain experience. "It's not just tech companies that need this talent, it's real-estate, non-profits, and banks," Mikkola said.

Early Blockchain Education Initiatives

Leading university computer science programs have been quick to respond. According to new research, 42 percent of the top 50 universities in the world offer at least one course on cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. MIT offers a six-week online blockchain certificate program (in partnership with 2U).

 Oxford offers a similar six-week certificate program (also powered by 2U).Coursera offers a four-course specialization in blockchain. Udacity offers a six month nanodegree for blockchain developers. Courseware is supplemented with office hours with their Experts-in-Residence.

Atlanta-based Kingsland University (founded ten years ago as Social Media Marketing University) offers an accredited blockchain training program for developers. The hybrid program involves four weeks of face to face training and four weeks of project work. They are offering scholarship funds to reach students in countries where such training is not available. They claim 275,000 students in countries globally including the US, Singapore, Australia, and the Philippines. 

Kingsland also offers a two-day executive course.

Blockchain Council (@ChainCouncil) is a group of subject experts and enthusiasts evangelizing  Blockchain for global impact. They offer a self-paced training program to become a Certified Blockchain Developer. Participants learn the discipline of Distributed Ledger Technology from a vendor-neutral perspective.

A federation of trade unions in Singapore, the National Trading Union Congress Learning Hub (NTUC), in partnership with Huobi Group, announced this week a series of new courses on Blockchain for cryptocurrency enthusiasts and fintech professionals. The courses will cover the basics of bitcoin and distributed ledger technology, with an emphasis on practical uses of the cryptocurrency (see the outline of the introductory course).

Aeternity ventures sponsored the first blockchain course at SoftUni, Bulgaria, and recently launched the first decentralized blockchain incubator program which saw ten dynamic startups battle it out for $1.3 million in funding.

London-based education startup B9lab (@b9lab) launched an online Certified Ethereum Developer Training program in 2016 (powered by edX). They also offer an executive course.  Education is core to the philosophy of engineering companies like IOHK. 

Director of Education  Lars Brünjes, a Ph.D. in Pure Mathematics, is a specialist in Haskell, a functional and secure programming language chosen to construct the leading cryptocurrency Cardano. Lars has also led courses worldwide in the durable Haskell programming language in Athens and Barbados, with the best graduates from the program offered full-time positions at IOHK.Want a free introduction?

Start with the Blockchain Innovation podcast and Frederick Munawa’s (@FrederickMunawa) free videos. BlockGeeks has a basic tutorial. The Linux Foundation offers a free course on Hyperledger (an open source business blockchain software). The space is moving fast and some providers have come and gone, so test drive where you can and ask for graduate referrals. For more, see:

• 20 Ways Blockchain Will Transform (OK, May Improve) Education
• Imagining a Blockchain University
• Camp C-Block Introduces Blockchain Technology to Black Girls

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“We came here for the friends.” In the face of a reputation crisis, Facebook is investing heavily in a nationwide advertising campaign to remind us that it is a community first, a business second.

The campaign has gone so far as to recognize that spam, clickbait, fake news, data misuse, and political scandal have eroded public trust in the social network’s ability to police and protect its users. Far from its much-professed community values, Facebook’s treasure trove of personal data has been abused – both knowingly and unknowingly – to fundamentally undermine the trust people place in the platform.

Why, then, should Facebook turn to blockchain, a technology that has staggered from one reputation crisis to another – to rebuild trust in its ability to foster communities?

While it may sound far-fetched, Facebook recently announced that David Marcus, formerly head of Messenger, would lead a new blockchain research unit supported by several key Instagram executives, including VP of Engineering James Everingham and VP of Product Kevin Weil.

The simple answer is that blockchain – and the distributed ledger technology that underpins it – is rooted in community. Every distributed ledger technology requires a network of developers to build the product together, run it together and, crucially, govern it together.

You might not think of blockchain in this way — all the talk of ICOs, block sizes, forks, and cryptocurrency wallets can obscure the community values of blockchain.

But if we rebrand distributed ledger technology as “community apps” – the ability of the technology to distribute governance and trust throughout a network of users — we could enable consumers to connect with a vision of community.

“Normal” communities simply do not scale – the classic economic problem of the “tragedy of the commons” shows that there is a tipping point beyond which self-regulation by individuals begins to damage the health of the community. Wikipedia has suffered from this issue.

This is where the technological breakthrough that blockchain tech enables becomes evident: It allows community governance to scale.Where better to apply this vision than Facebook.

One of the critical issues facing the social network has been its inability to self-govern and self-regulate – the scale of the task in front of Facebook became apparent when it went on a prolific hiring spree to attempt to police the content being posted to its site.

Between May 2017 and February 2018, Facebook hired 3,000 content moderators – equivalent to Twitter’s entire headcount. Estimates suggest that around 147,000 photos are uploaded to Facebook every minute – no single network of content moderators could ever begin to contend with that scale.

In its current model, Facebook attempts to address widespread misuse of its platform through relying on a sense of citizenship alone – and some AI algorithms – to motivate users to report inappropriate content, which is then passed along to the army of moderators.

Through community apps, Facebook could create a governance system that rewards users for reporting malicious posts, punishes abusers of the platform, and imposes weights against anyone seeking to manipulate the system. Such incentive-based governance systems have worked for Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchain communities, where distributed voting mechanisms reward appropriate actions and discipline misuse of votes.

The power of community apps is its ability to move control of applications and data from a single party – in this case Facebook – to a network of users. Instead of having one central intermediary extracting value from its trusted status, you build upon distributed, or community, trust.

Joe Gebbia, cofounder of Airbnb, once commented that his platform’s success was proof that “hospitality, generosity, and the simple act of trust between strangers can go a long way.” He was wrong – the trust is not between strangers.

The hosts and the guests using Airbnb put their trust in the platform first, the people and community second. Community apps built on the blockchain could begin to transform this model that has dominated the rise of platforms, shifting the trust from the platform to the community.

Perhaps then we could begin to remind ourselves that we came here for the friends.

Eyal Malinger, Investment Director, Beringea, the transatlantic venture capital investor.

Blockchain has the potential to create upheaval in the way lots of day-to-day processes and transactions are conducted--and banking is one of them.

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For example, blockchain -- defined as a "single version of the truth" made possible by an immutable and secure time-stamped ledger, copies of which are held by multiple parties -- could provide people with access to funds without the need for banks.

Also: The blockchain explained for non-engineersWhile it's too early to say if blockchain will revolutionize the banking industry, it most certainly is having an impact.

BLOCKCHAIN'S IMPACT ON BANKING

Experts say blockchain will have a transformational impact on the banking industry.  "I see banks adopting blockchain technology to improve efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and security throughout the entire spectrum of financial services," said Param Vir Singh, Carnegie Bosch associate professor of business technologies at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.

Banks have already started moving in this space, Singh said. "Some of them have already started forming consortiums where they are testing out use of blockchain for inter-bank transfers," he says. "I think the key applications would be in space of payments, fraud reduction, know your customer, and loan processing.

Banks realize that there are tremendous incentives to streamline and automate their processes through smart contracts."PNC bank is collaborating with Carnegie Mellon through the PNC Center for Financial Services Innovation to figure out what solutions a bank could provide on a blockchain -- through the CMU Coin initiative, a cryptocurrency test bed at CMU -- and also what internal processes of a bank can be improved with blockchain technology.

Also: Why VMware is involved in blockchain

For many, though, blockchain efforts are on hold.

The banking industry is heavily regulated, Singh noted, and as a result banks are playing a waiting game for regulations to emerge before they make a big move.

For mainstream adoption in the industry and for blockchain to be a scalable solution for banks, it "has to be built with a critical mass of ecosystem players," said Kapil Bansal, a managing director with Deloitte Consulting's banking and capital markets sector.

"It's unclear what benefits blockchain [can] deliver in a single bank environment. The nature of blockchain technology lends itself to be leveraged for solutions that are multi-party platforms.

"Therefore, it's critical that several market participants also agree on common standards before a blockchain solution can be implemented, Bansal said.

A REPLACEMENT FOR BANKS?

Although the impact of blockchain on banking could potentially be significant, experts don't expect it to replace traditional banking for transactions such as lending anytime soon -- if ever."Blockchain technology still has a lot of limitations due to tradeoffs between scalability and security," Singh said.

"The technology needs to evolve significantly before it starts making a serious impact

." On the other hand, there is a lot of uncertainty regarding regulation related to blockchain technology.

Also: Finding a job or saving democracy: Blockchain to the rescue? 

"The regulation on blockchain technology, particularly in financial services, need to emerge before we see large-scale adoption by banks," Singh said.

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It's much too early to say whether blockchain will replace aspects of banking, said Rajesh Kandaswamy, research director at Gartner Inc."The technology has potential, but the adoption rate is so little worldwide," he said. "The hurdles are that the current systems -- institutions, processes, culture, and technologies -- have massive network effects and might not have the incentive for radical change."

ACCESS FOR FUNDS

The original hope of blockchain technology was that it would reduce transaction costs and make micropayments possible, and as a result bring under-banked or unbanked individuals into the system, Singh said.

"However, as we have started to understand blockchain technology better, we have also come to realize this would not happen," Singh said. "A blockchain is made secure through a consensus mechanism.

As the computing power required to contribute to the consensus mechanism increases, the blockchain becomes more and more secure -- unless the computing power required is so much that it may lead to centralization, in which case the blockchain would fail.

"Also: What CIOs need to know about getting started with blockchain 

TechRepublicTo compensate banks for devoting high levels of computing power, the blockchain needs to reward them with high transaction fees. "As a result, you will note that bitcoin transaction fees are not trivial," Singh said.

"For low-value transactions, bitcoin would be very expensive.

However, it will be quite lucrative for high-value transactions. I see blockchain technology giving a huge boost to large-value transactions but potentially not helping small-value transactions much."

IMPROVING INTEGRITY

Could blockchain prevent people from lying about their incomes on mortgage applications?

"A blockchain-based automated system that tracks all income and other financial information, yes," Kandaswamy said. "But that could be done with other technologies as well.

"In an ideal world blockchain could prevent people from providing false information, Singh said. "If the employees and the employers were part of a blockchain and the mortgage lender is also part of the same blockchain as well, certainly it could prevent people from lying about their incomes on the mortgage applications," he said.

CONTROLLING THE LEDGER

Another question that needs to be asked is if a bank decides to alter the ledger, who can stop it?

"There is no one answer to this," Kandaswamy said. "It depends on the context of use of blockchain. If it is an industry consortium, they might not be able to unless it is validated by others."A blockchain is a decentralized system, Singh said.

"The technology works because you do not need to trust any individual node in the network," he said. "If a bank were to have a decentralized ledger and retain the rights with itself on making changes in the ledger, I would not say it is a decentralized system at all.

"Also: Someone wrote a kids' book to explain bitcoin and blockchain 

CNET

In the end, a blockchain provides its code in public. "We trust a blockchain because we trust the code, which has all the checks and balances to ensure trust," Singh said. "If a bank launches a blockchain where it holds all the power for updating the ledger, I don't see people adopting it. In the end, regulators need to create clear guidelines for banks for using blockchain technology."

BLOCKCHAIN VS. BLOCK LATTICE

Is block lattice -- a technique used by digital cryptocurrency Nano aimed at providing a platform for instant transactions with no fee charges -- better than blockchain?

It's still an open question, Singh said. "Block lattice still needs to be tested out in terms of security," he said.

"Block lattice is more scalable than a bitcoin largely because it uses a proof-of-stake based consensus mechanism. However, there are blockchains that use proof-of-stake consensus mechanism as well and are scalable.

"Also: Growth of IBM/Maersk platform proves blockchain is upending global trade

TechRepublic

The other key difference between a blockchain and a block lattice is that in block lattice, each user account has its own blockchain and they transact by interactions across blockchains, Singh said. "This is an interesting concept," he said. "We will see how it performs once it is rigorously tested in the open like a bitcoin."

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The World Bank has announced that it has hired one of Australia’s biggest banks to manage a bond that will be issued using a blockchain—one of the clearest signs yet that the technology is going mainstream.

The “bond-i”: The World Bank, which issues between $50 billion and $60 billion annually in bonds to fund sustainable development in emerging economies, believes that blockchain technology can make the process more efficient by reducing the number of necessary intermediaries.

The bank did not say when the new “blockchain operated new debt instrument” (apparently named after a famous Australian beach) will launch, but investor interest “has been strong,” according to a press release.

Not like Bitcoin: There aren’t many details available yet on how this will actually work from a technical or logistical standpoint. But unlike Bitcoin, where anyone can engage in mining, the process of verifying new transactions, the World Bank will use a private version of Ethereum in which validators must have permission.

The computing infrastructure will run on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.An emerging trend: The idea of using blockchains to manage bonds is gaining traction.

Last year, a company in the UK issued a bond using Ethereum’s public blockchain. The city government of Berkeley, California, is exploring the use of blockchain technology to issue municipal bonds. The World Bank’s endorsement of the idea is the highest-profile one to date.

Crypto is making its entrance into the world’s academic scene, and students are lining up to learn.

A recent Coinbase study reveals that University students want to learn more about cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. Commissioned by Coinbase in partnership with Qriously, the survey sampled 675 U.S. students, and it found that students across all majors have an interest in blockchain technology.

Some have literal vested interest in the cryptocurrency market itself, while others are looking to leverage blockchain courses to break into the space’s developing job market. Of those surveyed, 18 percent reported holding some value in cryptocurrency.

Another 26 percent indicated that they’re interested in taking a blockchain-related course in the future, with the most immediate interest coming from social science (47 percent) and computer science (34 percent) majors.

Benedikt Bunz, a doctoral student at Stanford, said the "tremendous excitement" around the blockchain and cryptocurrency courses is due to the ease of getting a job after graduation due to the high demand for blockchain experts.

“If you’re an expert in cryptocurrencies and cryptography you’ll have a difficult time not finding a job,” he noted.The survey also studied the top 50 universities in the world as ranked by the U.S. News and World Report, and it found that 42 percent offer at least one class on relating to the blockchain industry.

Geographically, the study indicates that cryptocurrency courses are more popular in the U.S., with Stanford and Cornell University topping the charts for most individual offerings. Outside of the U.S., only "five of the 18 international universities" surveyed offer at least one class on blockchain technology or cryptocurrencies in general.

One of its more salient findings, the survey highlights the high demand for crypto and blockchain courses across a wide spectrum of departments.

Unsurprisingly, most of this demand stems from the finance and computer science disciplines . “Coinbase’s analysis found that, of the 172 classes listed by the top 50 universities, 15 percent were offered by business, economics, finance and law departments, and [4] percent were in social science departments such as anthropology, history, and political science,” the report notes.

Dawn Song, a computer science professor at University of California, Berkeley, said the rise in the interest in blockchain courses is due to the potential impact the technology can have on society.

“Blockchain combines theory and practice and can lead to fundamental breakthroughs in many research areas. It can have really profound and broad-scale impacts on society in many different industries.

”Song, who co-taught the “Blockchain, Cryptoeconomics, and the Future of Technology, Business, and Law” in the spring semester of 2018 said the course was so popular that they had to turn students away because the auditorium was filled up.

Elsewhere, David Yermack from the New York University Stern Business School plans to offer his blockchain course in both semesters this academic year as opposed to just one semester like last year.

Yermack launched his course on blockchain and financial services in 2014, and with an original enrollment of 35 students, it featured a smaller class size than the school's typical elective at the time.

By spring 2018, however, the number of enrolled students had increased to 230, a tangible reflection of the growing interest and enthusiasm students are exhibiting toward the field.

Bitcoin hovered just above $7,000 Friday, on track to record its third consecutive winning week.

At 5 p.m. Eastern, one bitcoin BTCUSD, -0.30%  fetched $7,043.36, up 1.8% since Thursday at 5 p.m. on the Kraken crypto exchange.

Despite volatility, the No. 1 digital currency has not broken out of the $5,500 to $8,500 range in more than three months, a tendency that one asset management firm pins on the dominance of short-term traders.

“Within our own team, we tend to believe the market is in an ultra reflexive state currently. It moves within a range in response to seemingly every bit of news,” wrote Thejas Nalval, portfolio director, and Kevin Lu, director of quantitative research at Element Digital Asset Management.

“This is likely the result of trading having been dominated by short-term players that are using structured derivative vehicles with leverage to express intraday speculation,” Nalval said.

Technical formation could send bitcoin to $3,000

It’s this tight trading range that has one analyst thinking the market is on the brink of a triangle breakout, one that will not please owners of digital currencies.

“The inability of bitcoin to grow above $7,000 seems to be a serious caution,” wrote Alexander Kuptsikevich, analyst at FX Pro, adding that the support near $6,000 is creating a potential bearish technical signal.

“The technical analysis teaches us that the movement within such a triangle often ends up with a breakdown of support and a sharp impulse to decline,” he said. “In this case, bitcoin has a serious chance to reach the level of $3,000” to complete the triangle.

Read: Opinion: If you want financial secrecy, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can’t deliver it

Bitcoin futures were outperforming spot markets Friday. The Cboe Global Markets Inc.’s September contract XBTU8, +2.94%  ended 2.5% higher at $7,047.50, while the CME Group Inc.

August contract BTCQ8, +1.61% gained 1.6% to end at $6,925.56

CryptoWatch: Check bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices, performance and market capitalization—all on one

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