Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have endured a crushing blow in recent months, but that doesn't mean investors should blow off the underlying blockchain technology that underwrites them.

"Cryptocurrency is one application of blockchain technology, but there's a whole range of other ways to use this technology that may be able to abstract pieces of cryptocurrency or maybe not using cryptocurrency at all," Case Kuhlman, CEO of blockchain and contract software company Monax told TheStreet. 

He cited the use cases for banks, supply chain companies, and even legal companies adopting the underlying technology to streamline the services they provide.

Most famously,  Walmart (WMT - Get Report) which has employed blockchain for its leafy green tracking and reduced the discovery time of contaminants in its romaine lettuce supply from about one week to merely two and a half seconds seconds.

"Lots of companies are starting to look at this potential [in blockchain] and it has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies," Kevin Werbach, professor of business ethics and legal studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business told Real Money in a December interview.

"They're solving a real business problem."

The space has only attracted more attention as new broke that Facebook (FB - Get Report) is building its own blockchain dedicated division to apply to its own business problems.

"It's another data point for the uses of the technology by large companies," Kuhlman commented.

So, with some of the largest companies in America like Facebook and Walmart dipping into blockchain for their various needs, how big can blockchain be? Is it the next cloud?

Possibly, according to Kuhlman.

"What cloud platforms like Salesforce (CRM - Get Report) and others have traditionally done is separate the installation of software on a particular computer with the ability to interact with that piece of software.

That was a real fundamental change for device mobility and a whole range of other things," he explained. "What blockchains do, is they sit behind an application and they enable us to divorce a single operator of a dataset or a system with that dataset or system.

So in other words, now a group of companies, or an ecosystem can all collaboratively manage a system."

With such a tangible use case and lofty comparison, Kuhlman suggested that a "cambrian explosion" is ahead for the space in 2019.

To find out more on what to expect from the "explosion" of use cases, check out the interview above.

A robot on display at the World Economic Forum - Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, People's Republic of China 2016.

Who’s coming?

Our Pioneers come from all around the globe. They include business leaders at the frontier of many technology fields including AI, robotics, blockchain, 3D printing, cybersecurity and genomics.

Just as our Technology Pioneers represent diverse businesses, they also have diverse leadership. Over half of our Technology Pioneers come from outside the United States with many from emerging markets. Furthermore, one out of three of 2018 Tech Pioneer companies is female led.

Attendees include Frida Polli, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Pymetrics, a company using neuroscience games and bias-free AI to predictively match people with jobs where they will perform at the highest levels. 

Also attending is Matt Barnard, Chief Executive Officer of Plenty, a company that is combining leading agriculture and crop science with machine learning to create indoor farms that produce crops using 1% of the water and less than 1% of the land used in traditional farming.

This is just a small sample of our Tech Pioneers who are all leading equally groundbreaking work that will shape society and business in the coming years.

Additional Technology Pioneer companies attending the 2019 annual meeting include: 1928 Diagnostics AB, Apeel Sciences, BenevolentAI, BestMile, Bitpesa, Cadenza Innovation, Code.org, CognitiveScale, Color Genomics, CUJO AI, Cymmetria, Delair-Tech, Desktop Metal, Everledger, EVRYTHNG, Fetch Robotics, Grid Singularity, Indigo Agriculture, Malong Technologies, Melonport, Modern Meadow, Ovamba Solutions, Precognize, QuintessenceLabs, Soft Robotics, Suade Labs, Tulip Interfaces, Upskill, and WaystoCap.

How do they participate?

Over the course of the week, our pioneers will discuss this year’s theme of ‘Globalization 4.0’ with their peers as well as with participating Forum members. Our contributing Tech Pioneers are given the opportunity to have candid discussions with top business leaders about innovation and the future of technology and business.

However, these Tech Pioneers are not just here to learn from larger business leaders. They are also here to share the groundbreaking ways their companies are using technology to impact business today and in years to come.

In past years, our attendees have participated in multiple panels and workshops, leading discussions on how emerging technologies will affect the future of industries as diverse as finance, energy, healthcare, and manufacturing.

This year is no different with Tech Pioneers participating in many different sessions, panels, and as speakers. Events that Tech Pioneers will contribute to include Building Sustainable Markets, A New Kind of Learning, Advancing Africa’s Growth Agenda and many more.

What’s on the agenda?

Technology Pioneers Community Impact BuildingTechnology Pioneers will take part in a peer-to-peer exchange session where they will discuss Globalization 4.0. This means they will discuss the future of globalization under the Fourth Industrial Revolution which accelerates innovations at an unprecedented speed.

These Technology Pioneers are set to discuss changes the next wave of globalization will bring, a topic they are most qualified to comment on. Emerging technologies open doors to substantially enhance services in the areas of health, transportation, financial services, energy and more.

Technology Pioneers’ insights are crucial to forming thoughts and best practices for the next stage of globalized trade. This discussion will bring into focus their contributions to the annual meeting discussions, and well beyond, in shaping Globalization.

Market Place with Technology Pioneers and other InnovatorsTechnology Pioneers will also have the chance to engage with titans of industry. During this session, International Business Council members and the Community of Chairmen will have an opportunity to exchange with our Technology Pioneers about how to use emerging technologies to maximize benefits to business and society while minimizing the risk.

These attending CEOs of innovative companies will host small circle discussions during which IBC members and Chairmen are invited to circulate and exchange insights with Tech Pioneers on emerging technologies and their future implications from their differing small and large company perspectives.

Technology Pioneers Welcome Reception and Dinner

The Technology Pioneers will celebrate the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting by engaging in serious discussions such as universal basic income, how the future of work will change and the role of technology leaders in the age of Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Technology Pioneers will hear from entrepreneur and robots expert Cynthia Breazeal of MIT and well-known author and historian Rutger Bregman of De Correspondent, a crowdfunded news site in the Netherlands. Robert Muggah, a widely cited expert in cities, security and new technology, and Director of Igarapé Institute, is also invited to speak.

All experts will add their unique voices to this important discussion.Technology Pioneers Partners WorkshopTechnology Pioneers and their Community Partners will explore leading an organization through a new age of distributed trust.

Special guest, Rachel Botsman, a Visiting Academic from Said Business School, University of Oxford, will engage participants on the topic of what trust is, how it works, and why it matters more than ever in the digital age.

Participants will discuss trust barriers to stakeholders having complete confidence in their product or service.

A Conversation with Doug McMillon

This year Technology Pioneers will meet with Doug McMillon, President and CEO of Walmart for a candid discussion about leadership and innovation.

Mr. McMillon will share his own leadership challenges and lessons learnt while spurring Technology Pioneers to reflect on their own leadership journeys and the legacy they wish to leave.

We are the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation and engage the foremost political, business and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.

On this account, we publish insights and analyses from our network of constituents o...MORE

A new report published January 9 by the European Banking Authority (EBA) has recommended further research into cryptocurrency and is calling for a number of actions to be carried out in the cryptocurrency sector throughout 2019.

The report delves into the standardization of regulations pertaining to cryptocurrency businesses operating within the European Union, and the EBA believes this is a much-needed move to eliminate unfair regulatory arbitrage and protect investors.

“Applicability and Suitability of European Union Law to Crypto-Assets”

In the newly-released document, Europe’s banking watchdog (EBA) admits that cryptocurrency and crypto-related businesses do not fall under the European Union law.As stated in the document’s summary:

Typically, crypto-asset activities do not constitute regulated services within the scope of EU banking, payments, and electronic money law, and risks exist for consumers that are not addressed at the EU level.

Now that the EBA has addressed that the crypto sector requires a new standardization of regulation to comply with European law, they have recommended that the European Commission carry out further analysis in order to take action.

The EBA is beginning to tackle the issue of cryptocurrency regulations because different cryptocurrency laws among member states would create undesirable regulatory arbitrage, unfair competition, and a congregation of crypto businesses in countries with less stringent rules.

Overall, the report is focused on the research and analysis of issues relating to crypto-assets and businesses. The EBA is simply calling for a nuanced approach to developing a regulatory framework with rules and standards for the emerging asset class.The EBA report noted:

Given the pace and complexity of change, it would be desirable for a technologically neutral and future-proof approach to be adopted in developing any proposals should it be concluded that EU-level action is needed.

Other Crypto and Blockchain Initiatives in Europe

While the EBA is just now taking initiative to develop a standardized regulatory environment for the cryptocurrency sector, other countries in the EU have already been addressing cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.

For instance, 7 European Union countries have formed what they are calling the “Mediterranean Seven,” which aims to improve blockchain education, increase awareness, and spur the usage of blockchain technology across an array of industries.

This “Mediterranean Seven” initiative was largely started because of the EU’s struggles in gaining a strong foothold in blockchain and cryptocurrency.Another example of EU members taking blockchain and crypto into their own hands is the Italian government which recently established a 30-member blockchain advisory board.

All in all, regulatory clarity is needed in the blockchain and crypto industry so that businesses can flourish and investors can be protected. The EBA has addressed this need and we can expect to see some regulatory improvements as we head into 2019.

Do you think the EBA will actually establish any kind of cryptocurrency regulatory framework this year? If so, will it foster or hinder blockchain and crypto innovation? Let us know what you think in the comment section below. 

The world’s most popular cryptocurrency is a now a little bit more decentralized, thanks to the waning influence of Bitmain and the return of the anonymous Bitcoin $BTC▼2.39% miner.Blockchain research unit Diar has published new data revealing exactly who has been validating the Bitcoin network.

Analysts determined that mining pools either owned by or heavily tied to Bitmain (Antpool, BTC.com, and ViaBTC) are now validating far less Bitcoin blocks than this time last year.In fact, it is “unknown” anonymous Bitcoin miners who are currently validating more blocks than any individual pool.





“[Unknown] miners closed December having solved a whopping 22 [percent] of the total blocks, up from 6 [percent] at the start of last year,” reported Diar. “The Bitcoin network is currently less likely to experience an attack given the fact the BTC.com controlled pools have lost dominance over the network.”At pixel time, “unknown” miners accounted for more than 23 percent of the computing power driving the Bitcoin network (hash power).






Source: blockchain.com

Does this actually make Bitcoin ‘safer’?

Bitmain is the world’s leading manufacturer of cryptocurrency mining equipment, and has historically been a powerhouse of the Bitcoin network.

Diar reports that in early 2018, Bitmain’s mining pools accounted for 53 percent of Bitcoin’s hash power.

Theoretically, this would have allowed them to collude to take control of Bitcoin with a “51-percent attack.”Indeed, a reduction in their influence is surely a big relief for those wary of 51-percent attacks on Bitcoin, like the one suffered by Ethereum Classic that effectively led to $1.1 million being stolen from cryptocurrency exchanges.


For this to happen, major players such as Antpool and BTC.com would need to team up to control a majority of the network’s hash power. This would allow them approve, censor, or even rollback transactions as they please.

Diar conceded that while the threat of that happening may now be much lower, miners have no obligation to share details related to the pools to which they may be contributing.This means that some (or all) of the “unknown” miners could really be working with one of the larger mining pools.

… but the miners could be waiting for Bitcoin to bounce

The analysts also noted that miners who have turned off their equipment are likely waiting for an uptrend in Bitcoin‘s price before they resume validating transactions.Last month, when Bitcoin‘s price briefly jumped from $3,200 to over $4,000, the overall Bitcoin hash power increased for the first time since August.





This indicates a distinct correlation between Bitcoin‘s price and the number of miners who are prepared to participate in the network.Diar did warn that January’s growth in hash rate is unlikely to be sustainable, especially if the price returns to its now-typical bearish ways.

This means if Bitcoin‘s price bounces, mining pools controlled by Bitmain could come back online.At least for now, let’s enjoy the new Bitcoin with more decentralization (and less Bitmain).

THE BLOCKCHAIN, the technology that underlies bitcoin, has yet to live up to the hype surrounding it. Promising blockchain-based projects, such as a land registry in Honduras, have fallen short of expectations.

Ersatz securities listings, called “initial coin offerings”, have attracted unfavourable attention from regulators. Kevin Werbach is a legal scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and an expert on digital technologies.

In the 1990s he was one of the leading thinkers, from his perch at America’s Federal Communications Commission, on how the internet would reshape regulatory policy.

In his latest book, “The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust” (MIT Press, 2018), Mr Werbach explains how, far from being a radical technology that makes government obsolete, the blockchain relies on the social cohesion, political stability and rule of law that governments often provide.


The Economist’s Open Future initiative asked Mr Werbach to answer five questions, with replies of around 100 words apiece. His responses are below, and are followed by an excerpt from the book, on the idea of “law and quantum thought”.*   *  

*The Economist: There is so much hype over organisations using blockchain to “solve problems” where ordinary databases or non-blockchain systems would do, that it is hard to appreciate its real importance.

In what sort of situations does blockchain technology best apply?

Kevin Werbach: Blockchains are trust machines, as The Economist recognised in a cover story over three years ago. They’re useful when trusted institutions and intermediaries are problematic, or to overcome a trust gap between transacting organizations.

The issue isn’t whether a centralised database could be employed in theory; it’s whether one would be in practice. In contexts like supply-chain management, provenance and trade finance, companies lack a unified view of information because they don’t fully trust their business partners.

Blockchain enables what I call “translucent collaboration”: sharing data without giving up control. Whether it’s an improvement over the status quo, however, is highly context-specific.  



The Economist: You argue in the book that blockchain doesn't remove the need for law or governance but changes where it happens.

Explain. Mr Werbach: To be successful, blockchains must be trusted. They can produce immutable consensus over a transaction history. They can't guarantee you can trust who is transacting, what is transacted or who can change the rules.

When someone exploited a hack to steal $60m from a blockchain-based crowdfunding system, or when $150m of cryptocurrency was locked irretrievably thanks to a programming bug, the blockchains themselves immutably executed the undesired transactions.

Dealing with such inevitable problems is the domain of law, regulation and governance. These mechanisms must be called into play to help prevent conflicts, set boundaries and resolve disputes.

The Economist: What is needed, in terms of regulation, to enable blockchain technology to become widely adopted in mainstream areas?

Mr Werbach: Regulation and innovation are not necessarily opposed. Regulators can foster adoption of new technologies by removing barriers to competition, highlighting public-policy objectives and promoting consumer trust. Investors lost billions of dollars last year in initial coin offering (ICO) scams and thefts.

A “Wild West” environment advantages only the bad actors. Regulators can start by going after the easy cases through aggressive enforcement. Then they should identify where existing rules may unintentionally restrain activities, as with the application of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation to immutable decentralised ledgers, or financial regulations assuming clearing and settlement processes that blockchain replaces.

The Economist: Will bitcoin still exist in ten years?

Mr Werbach: Bitcoin is a cockroach. And I mean that as a compliment. It’s shown itself to be incredibly resilient over the past decade, through technical problems, developer personality conflicts, business disputes, price bubbles and price collapses. Resilience might be bitcoin's signal achievement; it certainly hasn’t become the widespread payment mechanism its early boosters envisioned.

 There will always be a community pursuing an uncensorable global digital currency, whether for illegal activity, creating “sound money," subverting authoritarian regimes or just making a quick buck. I expect bitcoin will represent a smaller share of cryptocurrency value in ten years, but it won’t be zero.  

The Economist: Your book mentions the crisis of trust in institutions. Can blockchain overcome these human-specific, cultural forms of lack of trust? Or will that "trust gap" between people and power persist, even as blockchain use expands?

Mr Werbach: A blockchain by itself can’t redress structural power imbalances. It can even make them worse, by circumventing protective rules and intermediaries. And if you can’t trust those putting data into a blockchain, it doesn’t matter that no one can alter that data after the fact. In time, though, new institutions could arise that are built on blockchain trust.

Some functions that required centralised power will shift to decentralised collaboration. As I stress in my book, blockchain is neither the end of, nor the solution to, trust. It’s a new form of trust that must develop and be evaluated on its own terms.*   *  

*Law and Quantum Thought Excerpt from “The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust” (MIT Press, 2018), by Kevin Werbach

There is a factor that is often missing from business accounts of technological innovation: law. Law’s relationship to the blockchain is widely misunderstood by both its advocates and its critics.

The blockchain is not a technology of radical lawlessness, any more than of radical trustlessness. Nor does it represent a full-blown alternative that will decisively shrink law’s application in the world.

Whether and how blockchain-based systems will be regulated are important challenges to resolve, but even more important is the question of how blockchains regulate. These systems operate as mechanisms of law and governance, which will interact with established ones.

There will be no universal answer. And in most cases, blockchain technology is likely to supplement or complement conventional legal regimes, not replace them.




“Quantum thought” is Nick Szabo’s term for simultaneously considering two mutually contradictory ideas, analogous to the odd finding in quantum mechanics that light exists simultaneously as a particle and a wave.

Szabo is a computer scientist who conceptualized smart contracts, an important element of blockchain-related systems. He argues that this mental approach is important when operating at the edges of existing fields to create new concepts.

Blockchain technology draws upon cryptography, computer science, economics, and political theory, among other bodies of knowledge. Those who fixate on one dimension, whether as advocate or critic, tend to miss out on other factors of critical importance.

Lawyers are also very familiar with arguments in the alternative: “Your Honor, my client was miles away from the scene of the crime.

But if he was there, he did not fire the gun. And if he did fire the gun, it was in self-defense.

” This much-mocked mode of reasoning is a valuable intellectual stance in the face of uncertainty. The judge or jury will resolve the outcome, but until that happens, the failure to fully evaluate any possibility is a mistake. Sometimes the unexpected happens.

Sometimes it happens as a consequence of decisions based on other assumptions. Technologists inhabit the worlds of deterministic logic and computable probabilities, but lawyers are at home amid unpredictability, noncompliance, and even the possibility of catastrophe. Law has much to contribute to the blockchain community.

Concerns about money laundering, consumer protection, and financial stability do not disappear even when the cryptography works as promised. Taxation does not become unnecessary when there is a new mechanism for moving money secretly.

Disputes do not go away because a computer can execute a transaction without human intervention. Bad actors will act badly. All these scenarios will give rise to calls for legal or regulatory action.

Some will be justified. If the community flatly rejects every effort to ensure compliance with legal obligations, the blockchain will be an outlaw technology, active in the dark spaces online but largely irrelevant to the mainstream economy.

That would be a tragic waste of potential.At the same time, the blockchain offers important lessons for the legal community. Bitcoin demonstrates that a distributed network with no one in charge can govern itself well enough to avoid collapse and scale in value over an extended period.

Trust, which previously required either the delegation of power or tight-knit relationships, can arise from a collection of independent actors running open-source software. The most important contribution that law can make here is not any particular set of rules, but the jurisprudential discipline of rule-making and rule enforcement, or what is often called “governance.

” The communities building blockchain technologies and systems can in many ways govern themselves, but only if they take this challenge seriously. Regulators can also improve their effectiveness by leveraging the technology.

Alternatively, ill-considered regulatory actions could push blockchain activity to other countries, send it underground, and stop valuable innovation in its tracks.In fast-changing environments, there is a danger both of regulating too early and of regulating too late.

The best approach is to use quantum thinking to assess the risks of each. Law and the blockchain are bound to engage in a shifting dance. This begs the question of what values should shape their relationship. Technology implemented in the world is never neutral.

Transformative innovations can have various impacts based on their technical architectures, as well as the legal regimes under which they operate. Decisions made early on have an outsized impact.

Once architectures and legal environments are put in place, they often become increasingly difficult to change. _________________

Excerpted from “The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust”.
Copyright © 2018 by Kevin Werbach.

Used with permission of MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. All rights reserved.

Anthony Grisanti, a CNBC guest and futures trader, recently sat down with the outlet’s “Futures Now” segment to talk about Bitcoin (BTC). While he claimed that he had no reservations against the cryptocurrency, Grisanti seemed overly bearish on BTC, even though fundamentals for the underlying blockchain are relatively outperforming.

Grisanti, the founder of GRZ Energy, noted that BTC, a supposed non-correlated asset, should have popped when U.S. equities, like a number of stocks listed on the Nasdaq, sold off. The fact that Bitcoin’s bear trend only saw a brief abatement (if at all) is a worrying sign in Grisanti’s eyes, so the trader noted that he expects for the low-$3,000 level to be tested.

In fact, the CNBC guest noted that as investors continue to liquidate their holdings, whether it be through the spot or futures market, BTC could fall to retest $3,000, with a break under this pertinent psychological, technical level catalyzing a further sell-off. He explained:

A move down to $3,000 would represent a real weakness in this space. This could be the driver that would get people to bail out of [Bitcoin], and push [the asset] even lower.

Another guest to the segment, Scott Nations, claimed that he “absolutely wants to be short here,” explaining that there’s no value in Bitcoin. He explained that millennials, which is the generation behind much of the cryptosphere, haven’t seen assets bubbles, adding that cryptocurrencies are inflated in value.

Nations noted that the “glue is coming undone,” explaining that the bottom isn’t even in sight yet.Funny enough, the seeming anti-Bitcoin comments sparked controversy in the crypto community, as users began to draw attention to the fact that CNBC’s reports are often a contrarian indicator to BTC’s movement.

Per analysis completed by Jacob Canfield in August, CNBC’s tweets on Bitcoin could be used as a contrarian price indicator with upwards of 95% accuracy.Yet, it remains to be seen whether CNBC’s newfound bout of bearish sentiment will be a precursor to a move higher.

Crypto Commentators Expect Lower Lows, But Eventual Rebound

While a number of analysts and commentators are convinced BTC will fall below $3,000, unlike the CNBC trader, they believe the asset will return. And return with a vengeance at that. Per previous reports, Fred Wilson, a leading venture capitalist and co-founder of Union Square, which held shares in Twitter, Tumblr, and Kickstarter, claimed that a bottom for large, liquid, and lasting cryptocurrencies is festering.

Yet, he explained that before the bottoming process plays out, likely in late-2019, Bitcoin could easily re-test its yearly lows at $3,150, potentially breaking lower before a long-term floor is tapped.

However, he explained that with the arrival of Ethereum Constantinople, promising projects like Filecoin and Algorand, and industry competition, this market will eventually enter a “new bullish phase.”

Moon Overlord, a respected crypto trader, recently echoed these comments. The Twitter commentator noted there’s a fleeting chance that Bitcoin has another “substantial draw-down” ahead of itself, citing historical data from the previous bear season in 2015.

As the harrowing, yet also optimistic adage goes, “history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” So, if historical trends prove to be an accurate indicator, the flagship cryptocurrency could fall to as low as $1,700 before another “knock your socks off” rally.

Another industry pundit, the so-called Dollar Vigilante claimed that he expects that cryptocurrency prices have hit (or are nearing) the bottom by and large. Yet, in spite of his bottom call, he noted that Bitcoin could remain in a lull until 2019’s end.

However, Berwick noted that with the arrival of institutional money (which he isn’t necessarily a fan of), via platforms like Bakkt, a potential Bitcoin ETF, and Nasdaq’s proposed futures, will “change the game completely.

” He noted that as soon as institutional capital starts flowing, this market will explode en-masse, as there are presumed trillions waiting on the sidelines.

In 2019, blockchain will continue to be deployed in new ways – and in sectors not always associated with the adoption of new technology. Santander estimates the blockchain could save the banking industry $20 billion by 2022.Demand for blockchain skills in the freelance job market has grown by 6,000 per cent in the past year.

 In both public and private sectors, blockchain is beginning to bear fruit in the form of greater security, smart contracts and easier logistics management. In the coming year, the art market will join the party, deploying blockchain in innovative ways.

A decentralised and distributed digital ledger has clear applications for buying and selling of art, an industry worth $63.7bn in 2017. Blockchain’s cryptography will keep online transactions secure. Transparent trading histories will speed transactions and help prove ownership, demonstrating that a seller has the right to trade.

And by allowing more trading to take place digitally, blockchain will open up the art market to a wider range of people.

At present, proving a piece’s provenance relies too heavily on trust, on outdated, paper-based systems and on single, authoritative bodies.

As such, art fraud remains a major issue. At least half of the works examined by the Fine Art Experts Institute in Geneva are fake or have been attributed to the wrong artist.In 2019, blockchain will play an important role in countering this – offering a permanent record of a piece’s history from initial authentication to present ownership. 
London-based startup Verisart, which creates blockchain-based digital certificates for artworks and collectables, is already working with contemporary artists to create a secure provenance for a piece of art from the moment of its creation. 
New York-based Artory and Bidpoc, based in Shanghai, are doing the same. Expect this to become standard practice for new artworks as they enter the market.
Older pieces will need to be verified as genuine by a specialist or the artist’s estate before being linked to blockchain certificates. This will be a slower process, but expect uptake to increase as buyers and sellers appreciate the guarantees such certification offers.
For digital art, of course, the opportunity is immediate. Due to the ease of replicating these works, attributing them within the blockchain from the offset maintains their scarcity.

Ascribe, founded in Berlin in 2014, is one of a number of startups that use blockchain to enable digital artists to maintain control over where and how their work is seen, copied and distributed.

It also provides a platform for digital artists to license their work and receive royalties for reuse.

Blockchain will also change the way collectors own art and use the art they own. A 2018 report published by the Oxford Internet Institute, the Alan Turing Institute and DACS, which campaigns for visual artists’ royalty and ownership rights, argues that blockchain could allow more art to be owned jointly by a number of people, or to be used as collateral against loans

Some banks do lend money to collectors against the value of the artworks they own, but they are often hesitant to do so as the illiquidity of the art market (the relative infrequency that artworks come to market) means that estimating a piece’s value is hard.

What’s more, there’s no guarantee that the bank will find a buyer for the artwork if the creditor is unable to pay off the loan. Blockchain will address this by making the market more liquid.Blockchain is now being explored across the art world.

Verisart is working with New York-based ArtSystems, which supplies software to galleries, and utilises a blockchain-based certificate that galleries can use to catalogue the items in their collections.In July, London-based Vastari, a museums consultancy, jointly ran a blockchain-focused Art + Tech Summit with Christie’s.

And in 2018, the world’s first cryptocurrency art auction took place – using the Maecenas platform, buyers were offered the chance to own a fraction of Andy Warhol’s 14 Small Electric Chairs, valued at £4.2m.

At present, just five per cent of the $500bn blockchain industry is focussed on the art market. But that will change in 2019 as blockchain increases the speed, transparency and volume of art sales globally – and, most importantly of all, democratises the sector so that we all, artists, collectors and viewers, can benefit from its riches.

Ed Vaizey is a member of the UK parliament and served from 2010 to 2016 as minister for culture, communications and creative industries

Right now, the focus in the blockchain industry is on ecosystems and how to build them. It’s not something that happens overnight with a snap of the fingers.

When you’re working for a startup, it’s normal to find yourself with some responsibilities that don’t quite fit under your job title. And when you’re working at a startup in an emerging industry, it’s almost a given that your role won’t really jive with your title.

So, what do you do when your title doesn’t fit your role?You make a new one, of course.

Right now, the focus in the blockchain industry is on ecosystems and how to build them. It’s not something that happens overnight with a snap of the fingers. So, everyone has to combine a number of different elements and strategies to help build and maintain our ecosystems.

Which is why I finally sat down one day and wrote the description for a new position, one unique to the industry: Chief Ecosystem Officer (CECO).

Here’s why I did it, and why every blockchain company should seriously consider hiring one.

The Road To The CECO Role

After getting involved in the blockchain and crypto industries, I spent a lot of time working on educating the market about blockchain technology. Most people didn’t know what it was, they didn’t know why they needed it, and it was difficult to get media coverage for the industry.

In 2017 and 2018, blockchain found its way into the public sphere. The explosion of ICOs created a new awareness in the market, but it also presented a number of challenges. Instead of simply trying to educate customers about the benefits of the blockchain, I also had to begin actively battling misinformation.

Many people had a vague knowledge of blockchain or Bitcoin, but they were being bombarded by what I would generously call less-than-accurate information.

So, I knew the space needed to focus more effort on thought leadership, education, and helping people understand what they could and couldn’t do with the technology.

Because honestly, you can send around as many infographics as you want, but the information doesn’t really click with people until you begin explaining use cases and showing them examples.

The issue was that a lot of this work felt like pure marketing. I had moved from the position of Chief Product Officer into the position of CMO, but I knew that a traditional CMO title wouldn’t really fit this industry or my own capabilities.

There’s nothing conventional about what we’re doing in this space, so why use a conventional role?That notion was the spark that created the CECO role.

The Responsibilities Of A Chief Ecosystem Officer

The CECO role is a combination of business development, growth, marketing, thought leadership, product development and business model development. 

With such a large number of potential responsibilities, it’s easier to break the position down into three main components:

1. Ecosystem Acquisition / ConversionThis portion of the job is a little more like tradition enterprise business development, but it also mixes in evangelism—which could be anything from consulting or outreach to education or requirements gathering. The CECO will also handle inbound requests and working to convert them.

Outreach includes meeting with people who have the potential to be “ecosystem champions.” These are individuals who hold leading positions in an industry with strong potential use cases for blockchain.

2. Ecosystem Incubation

This portion of the role deals with internally incubated ecosystems, businesses and tools.It's important to note that all of them are exactly alike. For example, some companies build and launch ecosystems internally for use by one particular industry, while other ecosystems are built on top of existing protocols.

So, the CECO is responsible for a range of ecosystems and initiatives that have to be cultivated until they can stand on their own two feet.

3. Ecosystem Growth And Retention

This part of the CECO position involves technical evangelism, as well as generally ensuring the developers running ecosystems on top of your network are aware of what’s going on.For instance, let’s say in a few months you’re launching a protocol to automate payments.

That protocol release will involve standard marketing elements, but it also needs to include education about the protocol’s potential. Users have to be shown how they can be creative and incorporate the new protocol into their ecosystem and improve their business models.

The Skill Set Required To Become A CECO

The CECO role requires a lot of creativity, but it also has a strong analytical aspect to it. I think the role is ideal for someone who has a mix of experience—someone who has started or scaled companies but who is also capable of working creatively with product design and development.

On the one hand, looking at hundreds of potential inbounds requires something similar to an investor mentality, examining and evaluating the potential growth inherent in each.You also have to be creative enough to envision capabilities within the ecosystem that simply weren’t possible in the past.

The position is very cross-functional and involves a number of different skill sets. Eventually, I envision teams will grow to include all of them. Business analyst, customer acquisition and conversion specialists, ecosystem managers—they may all fall under this umbrella.

The creation of ecosystems is an integral part of building a successful blockchain company, and I’d encourage any business in the space to begin seriously looking at their strategy for doing so. Hiring a Chief Ecosystem Officer is only one step, but it’s a step in the right direction.

I am a technology entrepreneur, engineer, and academic focused on blockchain technologies. A reformed gamer, I started studying virtual currencies in 2009 while writing my undergraduate anthropology thesis on currency exchanges in the virtual world, “Second Life.

” Since then...MORE

Disclaimer: Any opinions expressed are those of Samantha Radocchia and not those of Chronicled, Inc. This information is for educational purposes and does not constitute financial and/or legal advice.

Blockchain has the ability to transform the supply chain discipline and the businesses that rely on it for the better. It has many other applications beyond Bitcoin. File Photo: IOL

JOHANNESBURG – One technology with enormous promise is blockchain. Surprised? Don’t be – there’s much more to blockchain than the world of cryptocurrency and finance.

Blockchain has the ability to transform the supply chain discipline and the businesses that rely on it for the better. It has many other applications beyond Bitcoin.

Imagine a simple head of lettuce on a supermarket shelf. What farm was it grown on? What methods were used in the growing? How far did it travel to the store? When a business deploys blockchain, consumers can track the lettuce from the time it was sown to when it reaches the store shelves.

Whether it’s a head of lettuce grown on a farm or a server farm itself, everyone wants to know where their purchases came from. Blockchain will add visibility and trust to the supply chain – benefits that will help everyone.

If business is about creating customer value, then the supply chain is about delivering that value to the customer in the most efficient and effective manner.

Blockchain technology strengthens the supply chain by hardcoding that trust with security, bringing reliability with better asset management, and optimising manual work – by saving hours of laboUr spent on reconciling accounts and settling disputes.

Blockchain’s security blanket

People want to know where their servers were built, understand what components are in those servers and how those components were manufactured.

What blockchain does though is to wrap the information in a security blanket so that no one can hack, alter or destroy it. If a customer wants to check it after 20 years, the integrity of the information will be sound.

Optimising manual laboUr and efficiencyHow much does the manual laboUr that goes into all the paperwork in supply chain operations cost a company? If you are talking multiple large deals, the paperwork will cost you hundreds of thousands of rands a year.

Millions of rands can be saved by eliminating unnecessary paperwork by using blockchain.

There is also the perennial problem of reconciling accounts receivables and payables. The amount of time, human intelligence and intervention that goes into resolving disputes is considerable. With blockchain, you minimise the work and time that’s wasted on these today.

These improvements that blockchain technology will bring to business operations will result in huge cost savings and positively impact the customer experience.

Jim Holland, Country Manager at Lenovo Data Center Group Southern Africa.

The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Independent Media.

The future anticipation of IoT where all devices are connected and are smart enough to automate everything while keeping the data private is still far-fetched. Unfortunately, IoT industry is at a standstill. A traditional cloud-based approach has provided complete connectivity to the internet, but it has pitfalls in interoperability, automation, and data privacy. 

Blockchain technology can provide a decentralized approach to these pitfalls.The convergence of blockchain and IoT has transformed into a vibrant ecosystem of companies. The intersection of these two industries has enabled companies to develop blockchain components and solutions for smart cities, renewable energy, supply chain, transportation, and other IoT-enabled sectors.

It is simple to categorize all of these companies together as ‘blockchain and IoT,’ but they differ in scope, approach and focus on different layers of the blockchain and IoT tech stack.IoT devices are interconnected, and they capture and transmit data to the blockchain. IoT devices support one or more types of connectivity networks.

A blockchain platform enables the building and running of Decentralized Applications (DApps) which is user-facing software built on blockchain infra that uses data, user inputs and smart contracts to perform specific tasks. DApps consists of infrastructural components like compute, storage, network resources.

It includes protocols like consensus, permissions, other network rules and it also includes services, tools, and modules to facilitate DApps. IoT devices bind the physical and the digital world. It can increase the reach and impact of many applications.

IoT enabled applications can send and receive data from IoT devices which operate as nodes in the network, unlike non-IoT applications that only process data from user-generated actions.

Experts estimate 100 billion IoT devices in the market by 2023 that will digitally record the physical history of the world. Connectivity is information passing down between devices, gateways, and servers.

To optimize performance and minimize costs, it is critical to understand the characteristics and compatibility of various connectivity types because every IoT use case is unique.

Significant innovation in blockchain is done in the base platform layer to support future heavy duty applications. All blockchain platforms are unique but share the same vision of attracting developers to their platform by providing superior technology, governance, and user experience.

These platforms enable developers to build, deploy, and maintain software applications within the same technical environment. DApps powered by blockchain run on decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. 

The intersection of the blockchain, IoT, and connectivity technologies are giving birth to new possibilities. Blockchain and IoT provide data privacy solutions and drive data ownership to consumers.

On the other hand, they provide trust amongst otherwise untrusted parties, new business opportunities, and brand new engagement models to enterprises. Blockchain industry is at the threshold of a technological breakthrough in scalability, interoperability, and privacy.

Current state of cryptocurrencies may suggest how blockchain technology is at the edge of the “trough of disillusionment”, but it only serves to highlight how there is still a long way yet before the real opportunities for it to add value to the economy are realized

The plummeting price of bitcoin has dominated headlines for the past weeks and months, with analysts cautioning any price recovery to be a dead cat bounce. In fact, the digital currency once heralded as the symbol of a decentralized economy has lost over 80% of its value in 2018, and over 50% in the last month alone.

Already, the cryptocurrency bull run of 2017 and the record-breaking number of ICOs it powered feels like a distant memory. The ailing fortunes of bitcoin and other major altcoins beg the question – is this the death knell for mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies?

DLTs at an inflection point

On the 10th anniversary of blockchain’s public debut, it is perhaps a fitting opportunity for the industry to reassess it as the underlying technology intended to catalyze a breadth of business cases, instead of a get-rich-quick scheme it perpetuates – and as it is often unfairly portrayed as.

The ICO hype of yesteryear has sufficiently proven a distraction from the actual development of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) for conventional enterprise adoption.

Rather than fuel the glut of speculation on when bitcoin prices will bottom out, the industry sorely needs to accelerate efforts to scale the technology which ultimately transcends cryptocurrencies and offers the distinct possibility of a decentralized global economy predicated on trust and security.

Scaling blockchain for mass adoption

Deloitte’s 2018 global blockchain survey revealed 84% of respondents expressed confidence that blockchain technology is broadly scalable and will eventually achieve mainstream adoption. Yet, vexing concerns persist around its current performance, governance, and the lack of trust and interoperability in the ecosystem, resulting in many organizations finding it difficult to justify its implementation.

While the number of use cases have swelled across sectors such as financial services, supply chain and healthcare, until the deficiencies which currently plague the most commonly known proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain are addressed, real adoption remains a pipe dream.

Indeed, the staggering fall of bitcoin only serves to underscore the fundamental deficiencies of PoW protocols. The required mining is heavily consumptive of energy and extremely cost inefficient, while there are also limited use cases due to its sluggish throughput.

In contrast, newer models like proof-of-stake (PoS) and proxy staking algorithms remove the energy and computational power requirement of PoW, bringing a more advanced level of security and decentralization to distributed ledger technology.

High-profile projects such as EOS and Cardano run on PoS algorithms, while the proposed Ethereum Casper Protocol has also reinvigorated the DLT community.

At Hedera, the proxy-staking implementation of the hashgraph consensus algorithm we have developed provides a new platform for achieving distributed consensus, similarly enabling developers to build an entirely new class of decentralized applications. Ultimately, any successful DLT needs to fulfill the basic requirements of being fast, fair and secure.

The hashgraph consensus algorithm has been validated as asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerant (ABFT) – mathematically the highest possible level of security for distributed systems – Coq proof Only when the ecosystem recognizes this and commits the necessary resources to accelerate the development of performance and security standards, will we begin to observe signs of blockchain scaling for enterprise adoption.

Also read: Hedera Hashgraph, Mind Fund team up to launch DLT-focussed accelerator in Hong Kong

Regulation needed for blockchain to mature

While the current state of cryptocurrencies may suggest how blockchain technology is at the edge of the “trough of disillusionment”, it only serves to highlight how there is still a long way yet before the real opportunities for it to add value to the economy are realized.

On that note, increasing regulatory frameworks initiated by government institutions are a welcome sign. In fact, the lack of oversight to begin with arguably led to the wild west of cryptocurrency.

There remains a compelling need for such regulation primarily because blockchain’s applications in domains such as cryptocurrencies and fundraising have become a target for bad actors.

Judicious governance and regulation applied can not only cohesively improve safety and performance standards, but also underscore the recognition of distributed ledgers as a technology which truly have the potential to change our economy. 

Crypto companies are already taking their first steps towards acknowledging this. It is time for the rest of the world to do the same.

Who is the product for? Have you tried pitching it to your potential clients? Do you speak the language of your clients? What was their feedback?

I was standing outside of the Theater Casino in Zug where people were discussing the speech Vitalik Buterin had just given.Someone said:

I am a professional pitcher, and I don’t understand Vitalik’s phenomenon. Most ICOs that are raising now indeed have poorly structured, confusing and simply pathetic pitches. However, if that is a criterion for investors, Vitalik shouldn’t have gotten a single dollar.

I agree and disagree with this comment at the same time. Best if we look at facts behind each story.

Fact 1: Vitalik never pitched Ethereum to VCs or big institutional investors, or asked people to give him a few million dollars

And ICOs today do. They do require a minimum investment during their private pre-sale to be $250k or $500k. They do want VCs on board. They do want institutional money. Most projects today do want to never have to do a public sale, and close everything in a private round.Vitalik was pitching to developers because they spoke the same language. He essentially created his project for developers.Here is a quote from his pitch in 2014:

Ethereum is a platform that makes it possible for any developer to write and distribute next-generation decentralized applications.

If you look at the video where he is trying to explain what Ethereum is to the public, and then read the comments:




Yes, his communication skills are not the strongest and it’s not easy for him to explain how he sees things to someone who has no idea… has never written a line of code, has never done so much work on blockchain, or simply someone who’s not that good with numbers and formulas. Yet he got the funds.There is no conflict here.

He created a product for developers, pitched it to developers in their language, got the funds from a supportive community of developers who understand this language.

The conflict is, however, always there, when ICOs today claim they are changing the world by making blockchain mainstream…. And yet they can’t explain in the language of “mainstream people” what it is they are doing.

Pitching to fellow-developers and pitching to a VC are two different stories. And yes, powerful communication skills are essential when you pitch to a fund or pitch your project from stage – to people who have not acquainted themselves with your work yet.

In Vitalik’s case, people who bought Ether during a crowd sale had been following his work and his writing for quite a while before he announced a public sale.

I’m being spammed by at least 5 ICOs a day that think I should make an investment decision (to be more precise, I should allocate at least $250k in their project) based on 8-10 paragraphs of text they put together for me in the first message.

Weird people, indeed…. They mass email people irrelevant information and call it pitching.

Also read: Fintech and blockchain pitches can be so ugly, but here’s some communication advice for fundraising startups to get the point across

Fact 2: Vitalik was and is still driven by purpose, not by profit

He talked a lot about creating the public good, though only a few people understood what he meant by this back in 2014. He’s not the most eloquent speaker but he never needed to be. He had been sharing his vision with people who were driven by a similar purpose or could relate to his purpose. It’s all about speaking to your audience in the same language.

I am sure most CEOs and CMOs today will find it hard to explain the value of their solution to developers, for example. They simply speak different languages.

The universal language though that startups and investors understand is the language of purpose. Many startups talk a lot about the revenue flows and forget to say why they even care.

Who is the product for? Have you tried pitching it to your potential clients? Do you speak the language of your clients? What was their feedback?

This is what an investor would love to hear. Purpose. Reason. Feedback.Instead, projects at every conference copy each other and repeat themselves. We hear a lot of long, confusing, sophisticated pitches that “mainstream” people can not relate to.

Fact 3: Fraudsters have the best presentation skills

They can give a beautiful, convincing, and motivational talk while, in fact, they have no idea how this thing works and they absolutely don’t care.

These people are driven by their commission, not the idea.

The ability to articulate well and the ability to connect are two different things. When teams invite paid speakers to pitch on their behalf, it’s usually a failure. It’s obvious to the audience when a person is just a hired “speaker” driven by their commission, and it’s a shame when a founder can’t explain their own project.

Here is the catch: Most great creators are really bad at explaining what they do

They live in their own world where things work in a very weird way, and only they get it at this point.

I always recommend teams to find a way to relate to their audience instead of training technical presentation skills: “how to have a powerful voice” or “how to move your hands” during a presentation matters a lot less than helping people see what you see.

Also read: 

Pro pitch deck tips for beginners

Help people understand why you care. Explain what exactly your solution will change, but in their language. It’s really hard to see for someone in the team, but very easy to see for someone from from outside the project. Get a mentor, learn to share your ideas, not just talk for 15 minutes on stage.

• Communication directly affects how much money you’re going to raise.
• Communication is not about developing a pitch that you’re going to repeat at every conference. It’s about building relationships with clients, investors, audiences, media… well, with people.
• Relationships never have deadlines. Most ICOs do, and teams hurry a lot. Changing this one thing can create tons of opportunities for most startups.

Hope you are reading this in the same language I have written it;)

Yours,
Natalia Tokar—-

e27 publishes relevant guest contributions from the community.

Share your honest opinions and expert knowledge by submitting your content here.

Ajit Tripathi 
Ajit Tripathi is a partner at ConsenSys, where he specializes in global financial services business development, corporate venturing and strategy.The following is an exclusive contribution to CoinDesk’s 2018 Year in Review. 



One year ago, I wrote an article for CoinDesk in which I humbly argued that the price of ether didn’t matter and what everyone in the blockchain community should focus on is building useful applications instead.Hate to say I told you so, but… I did.

A few short months later, CryptoKitties were chased away by the bears, the initial coin offering (ICO) boom was gone, and the euphoria of $1,000 ether and $20,000 bitcoin had been replaced by the dire prognostications that crypto was “ded.

”Below I review what I regard as the major developments of 2018, and what lies ahead in 2019. And at the risk of being accused of double-spending, I’m going to quote freely from my earlier article, since many of the points I made have been vindicated or bear repeating.

When you’re #ODL and you know it…

Until June 2018, enticing crypto engineers to work on any enterprise product was hard, very hard. The lure of tokens ran rampant.Most people in my dot-com generation learned the hard way that showing up at 8 a.m. and burning brain fuel until 10 p.m. is kinda the only way.

But what 24-year-old who can write a grammatically correct sentence with “token” and “moon” in the same breath wants to do that?When the dot-com microcaps were booming, I didn’t either. What exactly are these cash flows… duh! But, as I wrote a year ago:

“One day everyone in crypto will have to generate fiat revenues and profits in some form.”

When most of the tokens later crashed spectacularly, moon and lambo swiftly retreated from the social discourse and boring middle class concepts like enterprise technology, real human users and a fiat salary re-entered human conversation.Deja vu, deja vu…

The year of regulation

I quote myself, yet again: “Dealing with other people’s money is always going to be regulated”.In 2018, when folks in crypto weren’t talking about the tanking prices, we were talking about regulation or hoping it’d go away.

Well, it didn’t.In February, Chairman Christopher Giancarlo of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission advocated a “do no harm” approach to crypto regulation, referring to the erstwhile U.S. approach to the internet.

The clearest and most concise guidance from a regulator came in February from the Swiss, who, to their credit, have been forward-looking in their acknowledgment of the potential of blockchain technology so far.

The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, or FINMA, clearly laid out the various types of tokens and what makes a token a payment token or a utility token or a security.

Both sides of the securities law debate were woken up by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) director of corporate finance, William Hinman, when he stated in June that to his understanding, “the ethereum network and its decentralized structure, current offers and sales of ether are not securities transactions.

”We the British, maintained our classical studious approach, studying and further studying the space and to our credit, doing no damage, either in support or opposition of the crypto space while calling for good behavior and manners… yes, manners all this time.

On the policy front, the European Commission led the way with a systematic approach to engaging with the blockchain community through the EU Blockchain Observatory.

The year of ‘ded’ ICOs

That said, the news flow in 2018 was dominated not by hardworking engineers building great technology but by traders and bankers mooning and REKTing things, as they do best.Against the flow, as ICOs boomed I mused…

“I suspect that each year, half of the ICO-funded startups from the previous year will die – if they even make it that long.”

Well, they didn’t.As EY reported:

“86% are now below their listing price; 30% have lost substantially all value. An investor purchasing a portfolio of The Class of 2017 ICOs on 1 January 2018 would most likely have lost 66% of their investment. Of the ICO start-ups we looked at from The Class of 2017, only 29% (25) have working products or prototypes, up by just 13% from the end of last year.”

Forgive them for they know not of which they speak

So many many folks mused that since ICOs were doing so badly and since most ICOs were launched on ethereum, ethereum must also be “ded.” Well, the price chasers were wrong then and they are wrong now.

As I said to CoinDesk editor in chief Pete Rizzo in a video interview at Consensus 2018, “cryptocurrencies are online community assets.

”Any token that has survived at least one boom or bust and has a thriving community (of people, not trolls and trading bots) has the potential to be used by many many more people over the next two decades as this technology matures and as these platforms scale.

We haven’t even scratched the tip of the iceberg with our ice skates yet. Further, ethereum is the leading platform today because of its ecosystem, which only seems to grow and accelerate…

The year of the ecosystem

Turns out, the price of ether is the least interesting feature of ethereum. I said back then…

“Ethereum has momentum, developer adoption, and a team that is willing to address the technical limitations even at risk to the price of ether. This is why I am making a big bet of time on ethereum rather than a bet of money in crypto. It has people who are serious about the Web 3.0 vision and solving real consumer and business problems.”

At DevCon4, Joseph Lubin, the illustrious co-founder of ethereum, made his famous “killer ecosystem” speech. The way I understood it was that we’re so early in this technology that it’s the quality and depth of the ecosystem surrounding a blockchain platform that’d define its long-term success or failure.

Waiting for a killer app is a fool’s errand because killer apps don’t quite tell you in advance that they are killer apps. The way to get to a whole range of killer apps is to unleash the creative power of developers, enterprises, investors and other agents of society.

That to date has been ethereum’s singular achievement.The week before, Joe received a memorable reception at Sibos, the biggest conference in banking.

Sibos featured enterprise platforms like komgo, Adhara and Trustology in addition to solutions from DAH, Hyperledger, Corda and Ripple and ran talks to packed business audiences.At the end of Sibos, the most common refrain from the attendees was… “blockchain is here to stay”.Indeed, the crypto ecosystem of hoodies had just started to merge with the enterprise ecosystem of suits

The year of #buidl

I am insufferable… I quote myself again:

“The question is what did we solve, enhance, or deliver that will make individuals, companies or governments produce more, be more efficient, or enjoy their lives and relationships more?”

In my book, the crowning glory of the year for the entire enterprise blockchain community, and not just the ethereum community, was the production release of VAKT, a platform for trading of physical commodities and komgo, a trade finance platform for commodities that interoperates seamlessly with VAKT.

These two platforms were built from start to finish within 2018 on ethereum and marked the arrival of enterprise ethereum in real production use.The coolest piece of kit produced by enterprise blockchain in 2019 was Kaleido.

Built by ex-IBM engineers at ConsenSys, Kaleido enabled one-click industrial-grade deployment and support of enterprise ethereum-based applications. This is a much bigger deal than it sounds.

Development is arguably less than 20 percent of the effort over the lifetime of any enterprise application. Deployment and support are the other 80 percent. Kaleido took 80 percent of the effort out of that 80%.

The most valuable piece of engineering in blockchain was Open Law which enabled the creation of smart contracts whose execution corresponds demonstrably with the underlying legal contracts.

In essence, Open Law put the “contract back in smart contracts” and opened up a vast range of real-world applications in financial and non-financial asset markets.

The most readable news in blockchain was Evan Van Ness’ “This Week in Ethereum,” a relentlessly BUIDL focussed newsletter that was a source of perspective through the amusing hysteria and paranoia of the #crypto investor community.

The year tokens came to enterprise

While no one was watching, tokens came to enterprise financial services as Euronext and other ecosystem partners went to pilot at Liquidshare, a consortium re-engineering the interaction between post-trade parties by leveraging blockchain technology and developing a new infrastructure for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) in Europe.

In June, the South African Central Bank. working on Project Khokha, proved that a new wholesale payment system built on ethereum can process a day’s worth of interbank payments in less than two hours, that too with full confidentiality and finality.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore and SGX, the city-state’s stock exchange, announced in September that they have successfully developed delivery versus payment (DvP) capabilities for the settlement of tokenized assets across different blockchain platforms.

The public blockchain space started to create enterprise-friendly (and -unfriendly) fiat tokens at pace. As CoinInsider reported, 45 stablecoin projects had raised $350 million in funding by November.

The jokes about a stablecoin going to the moon suddenly didn’t sound like jokes anymore.

2019… The year of enterprise tokens

When you follow the market news too closely, it’s difficult to not be blinded by the obvious. So what’s really going on?It turns out that the first killer app of the internet was not email. It was the ridiculously simple web page. The first killer app of blockchain is the ridiculously simple token.

A token is a mere smart contract that encapsulates the rules governing the exchange of an asset. Once this contract can be generated from an underlying legal contract and shown to execute in line with the legal contract, regulated, legally sound applications of blockchain become possible.

This is a big deal.It turns out, all economic activity, micro or macro is built on top of legal contracts. Unfortunately, because of information asymmetries, cost of enforcement, the risk of disputes and uncertainty in legal systems, the cost of contracting in too many transactions can exceed the benefit of the transaction.

Smart contracts that execute in line with legal contracts provide evidence of state on-chain and ship with dispute resolution systems can dramatically reduce the costs of contracting and the cost of enforcement, unlocking economic activity across industries and economies.

All that in a little token…

Ok, so should I buy? SODL? HODL?

I quote myself again

“Does that mean you should buy ether today? I can’t and don’t offer investment advice.”

In 2019, tokens will invade the enterprise in full force. The de-siloing of systems that began with multiple energy and bank companies creating VAKT and komgo will accelerate exponentially across applications such as gaming, securities markets, trade finance, intellectual property, digital collectibles, patents and licenses, real estate and many many more, and by 2020, start to show what all the fuss around blockchain was really all about.

Even more importantly, the boundary between public and private networks will start to disappear as assets on one network need to be exchanged with assets on another.

Ethereum is uniquely position to grow from this phenomenon.To conclude, indulge me as I quote myself one last time:

“When we are dead, it’s not what we HODL or SODL that matters. It’s what we BUIDL.”

Rebirth image via Shutterstock.

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

Professional Capital Sources Scouting for Entry Points in the Blockchain

Between January 2017 and January 2018, Bitcoin’s price rocketed from $800 to nearly $20,000. Over twelve months, we watched the explosion of cryptocurrencies – moving them from the periphery firmly into the mainstream and putting blockchain at the front of the corporate agenda.

When we predicted a crypto bloodbath in our 2018 research report “Token Frenzy – The fuel of the blockchain”, precisely specified as a 90% correction of the overall market with a wipe out of the majority of cryptocurrencies in the course of 2018, we saw the need for a correction at a time of unprecedented global blockchain and crypto euphoria.

The velocity with which the market plummeted and many cryptocurrencies went to zero value after reaching an overall market cap of over $800bn, has nonetheless surprised. Also Initial Coin Offerings (“ICOs”) stalled to centre around fewer projects such as Telegram and EOS.

But we haven’t seen the last of blockchain.Underneath the surface, activity in Distributed Ledger Technology (“DLT”) is in full speed, even within financial institutions.

Clearly, no one wants to take the lead, but given the pace of innovation, there is a thin line between being first and being last. Since many market participants on the financial and strategic side are aware they largely missed benefiting from the digital revolution, we expect they’ll ensure they do not miss out on the blockchain and cryptocurrency revolution.




We predict 2019 will be the year of institutional capital inflow into blockchain, which will not be solely financially motivated, but backed by increasing demand we see on the corporate and family office side and their desire to build positions.

Initially this will happen through funds, equity investing into blockchain technology projects as well as financial instruments and derivative products related to major cryptocurrencies.

But the question remains: what obstructs professional capital inflow?Regulation: The regulator has taken a thoughtful approach on cryptocurrencies of which most are categorized as securities apart from Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Both now officially classified by the SEC as non-securities, with Bitcoin being considered a replacement for sovereign currencies and Ethereum a commodity, like oil or gold – with the rationale mainly linked to their level of decentralization.

The regulatory security, particularly among those two protocols, is expected to be reflected in how capital is allocated in the sector, directly and through derivative products.

Most other ICOs and cryptocurrencies are in fact security offerings and increasingly will need to adhere to regulation and AML/KYC, most of which is troublesome if not impossible ex-post.

There is a massive wave of fully compliant security token offerings (“STOs”) lined up and also the developments around tokenization of assets (“TOAs”) is extensive – both are expected to continue to raise the bar on market standards very fast and hence become a focus area of activity, also because they resemble blockchain equivalents of existing banking products that investors are very familiar with.

Custodianship: The market needs banking-grade custodian solutions of which many promising initiatives are underway. Most of the large volume trades are done over-the-counter (“OTC”) mostly via as yet unregulated intermediaries.

Absorbing the risks in executing these transactions through standardized and audited processes as well as later on the risk of total loss through errors in managing custody will be key comfort to the broader scale of professional investors.

Offerings structured as tokenized financial products are expected to initially absorb substantial volumes and allow avoidance of direct handling of cryptocurrencies.

Liquidity: We have seen an increase in the number of regulated exchanges and large banks getting involved in the cryptocurrency exchange field. There is strong activity in launching index and derivative products as well as Exchange Traded Funds (“ETFs”) for Bitcoin and eventually some major altcoins soon.

Lastly, stablecoins – 1:1 fiat backed tokens – will serve as a haven for investors to deal with liquidity and to manage the still high volatility. More institutionally backed projects will go live soon and contribute to liquidity and hence adoption.

Overall, the correction is ongoing and healthy for the sector to allow the technology to catch up. The main activities we currently see are around building the products and services aimed at reducing the barriers of adoption both on the retail and institutional side.

The capital formation at the exchange and issuance platform level is expected to catalyze near-term consolidation aimed at growing the number of wallets, users and trading volumes. We look forward to an interesting 2019 in DLT and expect another wave of hype – this time more technology and product focused.

Source: CoinMarketCap; cryptofundresearch.com, *A simplified representation

Expert View: Olga Feldmeier, CEO Smart Valor

The past 12 months have seen cryptocurrencies become a mainstay of international headlines and face the ups and downs of fast-moving market trends.

Speculation in the second half of 2017 led to a cryptocurrency boom as buyers searched for quick wins. However, reality kicked in when market opportunities were not immediately as lucrative as some speculators had imagined.

But, like all major technologies, it will take time to find its feet – this is, after all, a marathon and not a sprint. Cryptocurrencies have a fundamental security advantage and therefore have a safe place in our financial world. However, there are still hurdles to mass adoption that need to be removed – and these are not just of a technical nature.

Regulations will need to keep up on all things crypto in order to protect investors and provide more trust in these new asset classes, which is the ultimate prerequisite for broader adoption.

Right now, smaller jurisdictions are moving quickly to stay ahead of the regulatory curve, for example the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) recently announced a new fintech license to support innovative financial companies.

Blockchain, the technology that enables cryptocurrencies to operate, is also backing asset tokenization, which is disrupting how we manage ownership of real assets.

By converting rights in an asset into tokens, transactions can be handled faster, can be done peer-to-peer without the middlemen taking a margin. But most importantly, the minimum investment threshold are much lower, allowing access to asset classes that were out of reach for many.

At SMART VALOR, we are building the first regulated exchange and investment platform for such tokenized assets. We have requests from over 50 projects so far and we get ten requests every week.We’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg at the moment, with more than $1bn-worth of assets tokenized so far.

In H1 2019 I expect this figure to pass $10bn, which is just a tiny fraction of the massive trillion-dollar opportunity that alternative investment methods offer.

Adoption of tokenized assets is occurring most where there is less effort required on the back-end, in terms of complex documentation of ownership and transfer of it. Alternative investments such as private equity funds, venture capital funds as well as tokenized fungible commodities are three areas progressing at pace.

But the biggest challenge remains the regulatory environment, as we are comprehensively leaving the beaten path by pursuing these innovations.

We at SMART VALOR are discussing these topics with the regulatory offices here in Switzerland and Liechtenstein and get strong support for the industry innvoations required for these asset classes, while staying 100% compliant with regulations to protect investors.

As for what investors need to do today: as usual, they have to determine what level of risk they are willing to take – remember these are until now unregulated waters, and they are operating under unclear legal and regulatory conditions for now.

But Financial authorities, for their part, have stepped up their efforts to protect investors and are shutting down uncompliant players in the market.

The crypto market is still in its early stage and so high volatility is to be expected. Over the mid-to-long term, cryptocurrency is a new alternative class of digital financial products that offers many benefits. And there will be offerings that are fully regulated and under a reliable legislation like SMART VALOR.

That’s why I am certain they will find mass adoption – first with progressive, innovative investors, and then others who will follow in their footsteps.

Cryptocurrencies will continue to innovate beyond the well-known bitcoin and Ethereum, and we will see many more coin and payment products emerging. All that will clear the way for mass adoption, which we will see in the second half of 2019.

ABOUT THE AI NOW INSTITUTE 


The AI Now Institute at New York University is an interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to understanding the social implications of AI technologies. It is the first university research center focused specifically on AI’s social significance. Founded and led by Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker, AI Now is one of the few women-led AI institutes in the world. 


AI Now works with a broad coalition of stakeholders, including academic researchers, industry, civil society, policy makers, and affected communities, to identify and address issues raised by the rapid introduction of AI across core social domains. 


AI Now produces interdisciplinary research to help ensure that AI systems are accountable to the communities and contexts they are meant to serve, and that they are applied in ways that promote justice and equity. The Institute’s current research agenda focuses on four core areas: bias and inclusion, rights and liberties, labor and automation, and safety and critical infrastructure. 


Our most recent publications include: 


● Litigating Algorithms, a major report assessing recent court cases focused on government use of algorithms 
● Anatomy of an AI System, a large-scale map and longform essay produced in partnership with SHARE Lab, which investigates the human labor, data, and planetary resources required to operate an Amazon Echo 
● Algorithmic Impact Assessment (AIA) Report, which helps affected communities and stakeholders assess the use of AI and algorithmic decision-making in public agencies 
● Algorithmic Accountability Policy Toolkit, which is geared toward advocates interested in understanding government use of algorithmic systems We also host expert workshops and public events on a wide range of topics. 


Our workshop on Immigration, Data, and Automation in the Trump Era, co-hosted with the Brennan Center for Justice and the Center for Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, focused on the Trump Administration’s use of data harvesting, predictive analytics, and machine learning to target immigrant communities. 


The Data Genesis Working Group convenes experts from across industry and academia to examine the mechanics of dataset provenance and maintenance. Our roundtable on Machine Learning, Inequality and Bias, co-hosted in Berlin with the Robert Bosch Academy, gathered researchers and policymakers from across Europe to address issues of bias, discrimination, and fairness in machine learning and related technologies. 


Our annual public symposium convenes leaders from academia, industry, government, and civil society to examine the biggest challenges we face as AI moves into our everyday lives. The AI Now 2018 Symposium addressed the intersection of AI ethics, organizing, and accountability, examining the landmark events of the past year. 


Over 1,000 people registered for the event, which was free and open to the public. Recordings of the program are available on our website. More information is available at www.ainowinstitute.org. 


Download the full December 2018 Report here: https://ainowinstitute.org/AI_Now_2018_Report.pdf



EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 


At the core of the cascading scandals around AI in 2018 are questions of accountability: who is responsible when AI systems harm us? How do we understand these harms, and how do we remedy them? Where are the points of intervention, and what additional research and regulation is needed to ensure those interventions are effective? 


Currently there are few answers to these questions, and the frameworks presently governing AI are not capable of ensuring accountability. As the pervasiveness, complexity, and scale of these systems grow, the lack of meaningful accountability and oversight – including basic safeguards of responsibility, liability, and due process – is an increasingly urgent concern.


Building on our 2016 and 2017 reports, the AI Now 2018 Report contends with this central problem and addresses the following key issues: 


1. The growing accountability gap in AI, which favors those who create and deploy these technologies at the expense of those most affected 
2. The use of AI to maximize and amplify surveillance, especially in conjunction with facial and affect recognition, increasing the potential for centralized control and oppression 
3. Increasing government use of automated decision systems that directly impact individuals and communities without established accountability structures 
4. Unregulated and unmonitored forms of AI experimentation on human populations 
5. The limits of technological solutions to problems of fairness, bias, and discrimination Within each topic, we identify emerging challenges and new research, and provide recommendations regarding AI development, deployment, and regulation. 


We offer practical pathways informed by research so that policymakers, the public, and technologists can better understand and mitigate risks. Given that the AI Now Institute’s location and regional expertise is concentrated in the U.S., this report will focus primarily on the U.S. context, which is also where several of the world’s largest AI companies are based. 


The AI accountability gap is growing: The technology scandals of 2018 have shown that the gap between those who develop and profit from AI—and those most likely to suffer the consequences of its negative effects—is growing larger, not smaller. 


There are several reasons for this, including a lack of government regulation, a highly concentrated AI sector, insufficient governance structures within technology companies, power asymmetries between companies and the people they serve, and a stark cultural divide between the engineering cohort responsible for technical research, and the vastly diverse populations where AI systems are deployed. 


These gaps are producing growing concern about bias, discrimination, due process, liability, and overall responsibility for harm. This report emphasizes the urgent need for stronger, sector-specific research and regulation. 


AI is amplifying widespread surveillance: The role of AI in widespread surveillance has expanded immensely in the U.S., China, and many other countries worldwide. This is seen in the growing use of sensor networks, social media tracking, facial recognition, and affect recognition. These expansions not only threaten individual privacy, but accelerate the automation of surveillance, and thus its reach and pervasiveness. 


This presents new dangers, and magnifies many longstanding concerns. The use of affect recognition, based on debunked pseudoscience, is also on the rise. Affect recognition attempts to read inner emotions by a close analysis of the face and is connected to spurious claims about people’s mood, mental health, level of engagement, and guilt or innocence. 


This technology is already being used for discriminatory and unethical purposes, often without people’s knowledge. Facial recognition technology poses its own dangers, reinforcing skewed and potentially discriminatory practices, from criminal justice to education to employment, and presents risks to human rights and civil liberties in multiple countries. 


Download the full free report here: https://ainowinstitute.org/AI_Now_2018_Report.pdf

After the Great Crypto Bull Run of 2017 and the monumental crash of 2018, blockchain technology won’t make as much noise in 2019. But it will become more useful.

• by Mike Orcutt
•  

In 2017, blockchain technology was a revolution that was supposed to disrupt the global financial system. In 2018, it was a disappointment. In 2019, it will start to become mundane.

Some cryptocurrencies are down more than 90% from their peak in late 2017, but the technology underlying them is by no means out. Although still new to many people, blockchains are a decade in the making (with precursor technologies that are even older), and the crypto world has recovered from massive (in percentage terms) price declines before.

Many of the developers who flooded into the space in 2017 are still working in it; innovative-sounding projects are still alive and even close to bearing fruit. And several big corporations plan to launch major blockchain-based projects in 2019.Here are three reasons why 2019 will be the year that blockchain technology finally becomes normal.

Big plans from Walmart—and Wall StreetWalmart has been testing a private blockchain system for years as a food supply tracker. It says it will start using the system next year and has instructed its suppliers of leafy greens to join by September.

Meanwhile, on the cryptocurrency side, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the owner of the New York Stock Exchange and one of the most influential players on Wall Street, plans to launch its own digital asset exchange in early 2019. And Fidelity Investments recently created a new company called Fidelity Digital Assets.

The main thing Fidelity brings to the table is a so-called custody service for crypto-assets. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts have argued that big investors like hedge funds, family offices, and sovereign wealth funds are itching to put billions of dollars into digital assets but can’t because there isn’t enough regulator-approved infrastructure.

In the US, for example, big investment funds are required to store their clients’ assets in individual accounts with banks or other entities—“custodians”—that can protect them from theft or fraud.

Securely storing crypto-assets is a technical challenge, however, since unlike transactions made with conventional money, blockchain transactions can’t be undone if they turn out to have been fraudulent.  Fidelity, whose solution involves a variety of sophisticated security measures, has called this “the most pressing unanswered question” for institutions.

In recent weeks, however, it’s become clear that the lack of infrastructure is not the only big thing keeping them away. Fidelity and ICE still seem committed even as other major Wall Street firms hesitate. But this is crypto, and things can change fast.

Smart contracts: finally good for something in the real worldSmart contracts are bits of code that execute an agreement between two parties—for instance, a flight insurance policy that automatically pays out if your flight gets canceled.

In principle, they would eliminate the need for all sorts of costly intermediaries. The idea has been around since the 1990s, and Ethereum was devised in 2013 specifically as a blockchain that could run smart contracts.

However, for that automated flight insurance policy to work, it would need a trustworthy source of real-time flight data—an “oracle,” in industry parlance. Otherwise, what’s to stop hackers from feeding it fraudulent flight delays and claiming payouts? The lack of reliable oracle technology has limited the use of smart contracts thus far.

Now that technology is improving. A startup called Chainlink recently teamed with academic researchers at Cornell to create what it calls the first “provably secure, decentralized oracle network.” Its oracles use cryptography and a type of secure hardware called a trusted enclave to securely feed data to smart contracts on the blockchain.

One practical use of smart contracts that might appear in 2019 is in legal technology. Chainlink has partnered with a project called OpenLaw, which is developing simple smart-contract-based legal agreements (for example, an agreement between a worker and a company). And OpenLaw has partnered with Rocket Lawyer, a popular online service that lets users create their own legal documents.

The idea behind the collaboration, according to Rocket Lawyer’s CEO, Charley Moore, is to use smart contracts to track the rights and obligations in legal agreements (like a freelance contract) on the blockchain and, once the contract’s conditions have been met, automate payments using cryptocurrency.

Moore says the plan is to launch sometime in 2019 and that the system should be easy to use, even for people who aren’t familiar with cryptocurrency.

Rocket Lawyer isn’t alone. A startup called Monax recently launched a private beta phase for a similar-sounding platform for blockchain-based legal agreements that runs on a new smart-contract platform called the Agreements Network. And a startup called Clause says it is working with LegalZoom to create smart contract-based legal services.

State-backed digital currencies

Though Venezuela’s oil-backed national cryptocurrency, the petro, appears to have been either a scam or a flop, at least 15 countries’ central banks are taking a serious look at launching national digital currencies.

Even if none are issued this year, expect the discussion about them to heat up in 2019 as cash use continues to decline around the world and new payment technologies, including cryptocurrencies, improve.

The International Monetary Fund’s head, Christine Lagarde, examined the case for central-bank-backed digital currencies in a recent speech. State-backed digital money, she argued, could reach more people, and offer better security, privacy, and consumer protection, than private cryptocurrencies or commercial payment technologies.  

A digital form of banknotes guaranteed by governments? In many ways, it’s the opposite of the revolution the original cryptocurrency pioneers envisaged. But revolutions don’t always unfold the way the revolutionaries had in mind.



 


Mike Orcutt Associate EditorI’m an associate editor at MIT Technology Review, focusing on the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchains. My reporting, which includes a twice-weekly, blockchain-focused email newsletter, Chain Letter… More

Could data pay for global development? Introducing data financing for global good

• Author
• Vili Lehdonvirta
  
•  
  

“If data is the new oil, then why aren’t we taxing it like we tax oil?” That was the essence of the provocative brief that set in motion our recent 6-month research project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The results are detailed in an extensive report to Download here:  Data Financing for Global Good: A Feasibility Study.

The parallels between data and oil break down quickly once you start considering practicalities such as measuring and valuing data. Data is, after all, a highly heterogeneous good whose value is context-specific — very different from a commodity such as oil that can be measured and valued by the barrel.
 
But even if the value of data can’t simply be metered and taxed, are there other ways in which the data economy could be more directly aligned with social


good?



Data-intensive industries already contribute to social good by producing useful services and paying taxes on their profits (though some pay regrettably little). But are there ways in which the data economy could directly finance global causes such as climate change prevention, poverty alleviation and infrastructure?

Such mechanisms should not just arbitrarily siphon off money from industry, but also contribute value back to the data economy by correcting market failures and investment gaps. The potential impacts are significant: estimates value the data economy at around seven percent of GDP in rich industrialised countries, or around ten times the value of the United Nations development aid spending goal. 

Here’s where “data financing” comes in.

It’s a term we coined that’s based on innovative financing, a concept increasingly used in the philanthropical world. Innovative financing refers to initiatives that seek to unlock private capital for the sake of global development and socially beneficial projects, which face substantial funding gaps globally.

Since government funding towards addressing global challenges is not growing, the proponents of innovative financing are asking how else these critical causes could be funded. An existing example of innovative financing is the UNITAID air ticket levy used to advance global health.

Data financing, then, is a subset of innovative financing that refers to mechanisms that attempt to redirect a slice of the value created in the global data economy towards broader social objectives.

For instance, a Global Internet Subsidy funded by large Internet companies could help to educate and and build infrastructure in the world’s marginalized regions, in the long run also growing the market for Internet companies’ services.

But such a model would need well-designed governance mechanisms to avoid the pitfalls of current Internet subsidization initiatives, which risk failing because of well-founded concerns that they further entrench Internet giants’ dominance over emerging digital markets.

Besides the Global Internet Subsidy, other data financing models examined in the report are a Privacy Insurance for personal data processing, a Shared Knowledge Duty payable by businesses profiting from open and public data, and an Attention Levy to disincentivise intrusive marketing.

Many of these have been considered before, and they come with significant economic, legal, political, and technical challenges. Our report considers these challenges in turn, assesses the feasibility of potential solutions, and presents rough estimates of potential financial impacts.

Some of the prevailing business models of the data economy — provoking users’ attention, extracting their personal information, and monetizing it through advertising — are more or less taken for granted today. But they are something of a historical accident, an unanticipated corollary to some of the technical and political decisions made early in the Internet’s design.

Certainly they are not any inherent feature of data as such. Although our report focuses on the technical, legal, and political practicalities of the idea of data financing, it also invites a careful reader to question some of the accepted truths on how a data-intensive economy could be organized, and what business models might be possible.

Read the report: Lehdonvirta, V., Mittelstadt, B. D., Taylor, G., Lu, Y. Y., Kadikov, A., and Margetts, H. (2016) Data Financing for Global Good: A Feasibility Study. University of Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute.

Note: This post was originally published on the Policy & Internet blog on 3 January 2017 3:12 pm. It might have been updated since then in its original location. The post gives the views of the author(s), and not necessarily the position of the Oxford Internet Institute.

Turning Point: A World Bank report concludes that more than 143 million people will become “climate migrants” escaping crop failure, water scarcity and sea-level rise.When culture and recreation come together communities emerge. 

When communities become societies a settlement is formed.
In those realities we inhabit our aspirations of togetherness.Sustainable cities are like a forest: ever-growing and diverse. In a forest, each branch, each trunk, each tree is unique, blossoming in its own way.

Yet everything is connected. Everything in the forest has its role in a cosmic symphony. The city is no different.The city, too, is an organism, both stable and fluid, static and constantly transforming. Humans are a part of the city’s inner mechanism, just as our cells are a part of us. Streets act as veins, connecting us to a network of life similar to a bio-diverse forest.

So why do we not see our cities, our towns, our hamlets as biotechnological entities? Why do we do not plan and build them in natural ways that reignite the spirit of community, the spirit of a positive participatory culture?Consider Jaipur, where Maharajah Sawai Jai Singh II ruled in 18th-century India. He envisioned the city as a paradise on earth.

Taking into account the constantly changing climate, as well as the movement of the sun, Mr. Singh created a city built around guilds and clusters of sustainable, cooperative housing. As Jaipur cultivated the body, the mind and the spirit, it thrived socially, economically and culturally.

Jaipur recalls the ancient vastu purusha mandala — a philosophy of design that aims to create a balanced and healthy environment. This ancient science shaped most of India’s traditional settlements, where seasonal activities such as festivals and fairs take place. The mandala adapts to totally different climates and places, and, in turn, inspires them.

Unfortunately, we have since forgotten this soulful approach to architecture and design, following instead the prevailing planning model of big budgets, large-scale structures and isolated behaviors. Consequently, our habitations have become fragmented and we fail to see the city’s infrastructure and life in an integrated way.
The Palace of Winds in Jaipur, an Indian city that thrived in the 18th century.CreditVijay Mathur/Reuters


Image

The Palace of Winds in Jaipur, an Indian city that thrived in the 18th century.CreditVijay Mathur/Reuters


Instead of building more megastructures — which constantly consume time, energy, and human and natural resources — should we not follow a more natural, biological approach to architecture that would foster small but comprehensive clusters of settlements and perhaps create a new world?

These smaller settlements would be sustainable and replicable. They would be full of energy and vitality, but they would not grow beyond a certain size. They would possess the same virtues as a bio-diverse network.Such settlements would not waste time or energy or natural resources. The inhabitants would have global skills and a suitable, fulfilling lifestyle.

This, as a result, could help salvage our planet from the present disasters and disparities that spawn anxiety and doubt about the future. Often while visiting ancient towns and cities, which are socially, economically and culturally well-knit, we are struck by a strange, unexpected silence and slowness.

Our desire to push, to achieve, to conquer dwindles, and we think more of how nature connects us and how we can share and revere our intrinsic selves.In addition to such quietude, other aesthetic measures of settlements include grace, love, compassion and humility.

To animate a settlement one must create humble and tender connections, which encourage humans to come together and to share and to feel themselves a part of a larger order, a part of Mother Earth.In ancient Indian texts, the sthapati (the architect or planner) has to be aware of the sustainable cycles of nature, following the laws of time and energy, just as our ecosystem does.

The sthapati is obliged to integrate this natural flow with the lives of a settlement’s inhabitants. This method of interdependent planning allows for cultural activities and social integration. This form of sustainable architecture gives all individuals, regardless of class or creed, the ability to connect with their true natures.


Balkrishna Doshi

Isn’t this why some Japanese homes have a small bonsai tree to remind them of their connection to the eternal mystery of existence?Today, though we are globally connected, we are lost spiritually.

Prana — the subtle energy that can only be felt — is the missing link that, if ignited, could enliven the spirit of the community once again.Can we not apply these planning philosophies in the present to create a lasting environment of positive participatory culture?
Watch Oscar-nominated short documentaries from around the world made for you.

Balkrishna Doshi is the Pritzker Prize laureate for 2018, the first Indian winner of the architecture world’s most prestigious award. This is an article from Turning Points, a magazine that explores what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

“Few tangible uses for Bitcoin (BTC) and its underlying blockchain technology have emerged,” according to a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article published Jan.


1.According to WSJ, in 2017 actual crypto development “took a back seat to getting rich.”

The article also states that “at the beginning of 2018, the question was whether Bitcoin could live up to the hype of 2017’s manic rally,” and at the end of 2018 the answer was “no.

”Andy Bromberg — the founder of Coinlist — a platform for running regulatory-compliant token sales, explained that the next step for crypto was figuring out “how we can turn this technology into products for people to use.

” However, according to the article:

“Bitcoin and the hundreds of other digital currencies that have popped up over the years are still largely usable only by developers.”

Developing apps for the Ethereum (ETH) platform is much less intuitive than for other non-blockchain platforms, according to the WSJ. For Ethereum, there are no developer kits which are currently available to build an app for iOS or Android, so “building a similar app for the Ethereum platform involves developing an entire suite of tools to connect the app to the platform itself.

”Still, WSJ admits that new institutional investors could get into the space when Bakkt will be launched by the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the operator of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

As Cointelegraph reported yesterday, the launch timeline for the Bakkt Bitcoin (USD) Daily Futures will be clarified in early 2019.The article states that “despite the entry of some established Wall Street players, scammers abound.

” This idea is in line with the declarations of Jed McCaleb — Stellar’s co-founder — who recently said that “ninety percent of these projects [that aren’t Stellar, Ethereum (ETH) or Bitcoin] are B.S.

”The Wall Street Journal recently published research in December, according to which hundreds of crypto offerings showed signs of fraudulent activity, improbable returns, and plagiarism.

Shutterstock photo


The Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) -- or blockchain -- remained shrouded under the frenzy around the Bitcoin for a long time. The attempts made to understand and control Bitcoin unveiled the genius of the blockchain technology behind it.

Blockchain offers decentralized, secure, transparent, and immutable transactions.This means that blockchain could potentially disrupt almost every sector in some way. This technology has garnered interest from governments, institutions, start-ups and corporate giants alike.

Here’s a look at how Amazon.com (AMZN) is working with that technology.There is a rising interest in testing and implementing blockchain networks, however there are a number of hurdles in doing so. Creating a blockchain platform from scratch is time and cost intensive, especially when it is still in the trial-and-test phase.

Further, companies are reluctant to commit a huge amount of resources towards those efforts before understanding its efficacy. Some of these challenges are addressed by technology giants through their Blockchain-as-a Service which gives enterprises a chance to get familiarized with the technology.

The term Blockchain as a Service (BaaS), a cloud-based service is inspired by the likes of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) wherein companies are provided with plug-in, scalable, consumption-based services via cloud.

The ‘as-a-Service’ model on cloud comes with a number of advantages such as flexibility, reduced capital expenditure, easy anytime-anywhere access, disaster recovery, and opportunity for smaller enterprises to use infrastructure which cannot be afforded in-house—all for a fixed subscription.

The year 2018 witnessed the leader in cloud computing—Amazon—enter the blockchain domain with its BaaS. In November 2018, Amazon launched a managed blockchain, a fully managed service that makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks using open source frameworks such as Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum in just a few clicks.

Amazon’s managed blockchain provides a cost-effective way to create the network by eliminating the overheads and provides the benefit of scalability to meet the demands of thousands of applications running millions of transactions.

To enable easy analysis of the network activity outside the network and gain insights into trends, the managed blockchain replicates “an immutable copy of your blockchain network activity into Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), a fully managed ledger database.

”This isn’t Amazon’s first foray into blockchain. Back in April, AWS blockchain templates were introduced by Amazon for Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric. These templates allow its users to focus on building blockchain applications instead of spending time and energy on manual setup of blockchain network.

In May, the technology giant partnered with Kaleido, an offshoot of the blockchain incubator ConsenSys to make it simple for organizations to adopt the decentralized technology for their businesses.

In October, QTUM partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to establish Blockchain-as-a-Service through AWS, primarily focused on creating the bases for enterprise-grade solutions.

The interest in blockchain is evident from the service providers in this segment. Microsoft was the pioneer in the field with its BaaS through its cloud computing platform Azure in November 2015. Microsoft was joined by IBM with its enterprise-ready blockchain services on IBM Cloud in March 2017, although IBM had been working on blockchain much before that.

Oracle was next with the launch of its enterprise-grade blockchain cloud service in October 2017. It was soon followed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) BaaS solution for enterprises. In June this year, enterprise software giant SAP introduced its cloud platform to facilitate corporates to develop blockchain applications while in July, the integration of some companies with Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP) was announced for developing and running blockchain-based applications.

It is estimated that the business value-add of blockchain will grow to slightly more than $176 billion by 2025, and then it will exceed $3.1 trillion by 2030, per Gartner.

While the BaaS market is expectedto grow from $623.0 million in 2018 to $15.45 billion by 2023, at a compound annual growth rate of 90.1% during the forecast period. In a recent report, the Bank of America (BOA) estimates the technology could be a $7 billion market, even if 2% of servers one day run on blockchain.

The participation of technology giants into the blockchain space will provide a stimulus to its growth while opening a revenue segment for their respective cloud computing divisions.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

Central banks must embrace new financial technologies to boost market stability

Adopting distributed ledger technology could transform modern financial systems, which are rife with inefficiencies

The plunging prices of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are validating sceptics who deride them as pure speculative bubbles, enabling a global cesspool of illegal commerce.

The environmental cost of the massive energy consumption needed to create bitcoin is another strike against it. Whatever happens to bitcoin, its underlying technology, called blockchain, could transform the worlds of finance and central banking.


Central banks, including the US Federal Reserve, need to figure out the implications of such distributed ledger technologies and how to adapt to them. At the very minimum, there are looming changes to how central banks run monetary policy and ensure financial stability. 

Unofficial cryptocurrencies are not about to displace central bank currencies.

Moreover, the Fed arguably has little to worry about given the dominance of US financial markets and the dollar in global finance. Still, even the Fed risks being outrun by rapid technological change in financial markets that could strike at its core functions. It should instead seize the opportunity to lead the world’s central banks by harnessing the powers of the new technology. 


 Blockchain is an electronic distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way. Each transaction is recorded on multiple electronic ledgers, is visible to anyone with a computer, and cannot be manipulated by any one party. 

This process is the crux of the technology’s appeal.

Rather than having transactions verified by a central bank or commercial bank, blockchain does so through people power. Trust comes from the public verification by multiple agents in a network, who must all agree. 

Adopting distributed ledger technology could transform modern financial systems, which are rife with inefficiencies.

Making payments, verifying different stages of a transaction, and ensuring the finality of such transactions remains time-consuming and costly. Banks charge steep fees to process domestic payments. International transactions are even worse, with the process taking days and involving a stiff fee. 


 The new technology can make these processes more efficient, quicker and cheaper. It could allow a group of banks to settle transactions without having to go through a trusted middleman such as a central bank. Unlike bitcoin’s public ledger, they could restrict access to the ledger to a network of participating banks. This would also make it easier to transfer funds across countries, cheaply and with instant verification. 


 This is all good for financial institutions and their customers, but could leave central banks with a diminished role, making it harder to monitor and control domestic and cross-border financial transactions.

Some central banks, such as those of Singapore and Sweden, plan to issue digital versions of their currencies to retain their key role in domestic payment systems. 

Many emerging market economies, including China and Uruguay, have similar plans in the works. Their governments view official digital currencies as a way to also broaden financial inclusion. 

The Fed is undertaking a major effort to improve retail and interbank payment systems in the US. But it remains sceptical about whether digital currencies can contribute to this effort. 

Attempts by Russia and Venezuela to issue their own cryptocurrencies to evade financial sanctions have heightened scepticism about the necessity and legitimacy of official digital currencies.

This could be a lost opportunity. 

The Fed and other central banks can deploy the technology to benefit their countries. Unlike paper currency, digital cash is potentially cheaper and easier to use, and makes it harder to evade taxes or fuel illicit activities.

Central banks could also use the technology to improve the speed and efficiency of payment systems, rendering it easier to make and verify payments across people, businesses and financial institutions. 

Should central banks merely accommodate newer cryptocurrencies and decentralised payment systems?

This comes down to whether the trust that individual citizens and financial institutions place in central banks can ever be replaced by decentralised verification mechanisms. These alternatives might work fine in normal times.

But during times of financial market stress, public trust in decentralised payment systems could vanish, bringing financial systems and economies to a grinding halt. 

Central banks will need to innovate and adapt to changing financial technologies.

But their biggest asset is the trust that households and businesses have in them. In finance, people power may go a long way but will not be a substitute for that trust.

The Fed and other central banks should embrace new financial technologies to build on that trust and use them to make financial markets more efficient and stable. 


The writer is a professor at Cornell University and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution

I believe Katie Martin (“ Year in a Word: Crypto”, December 22) will later find herself in the awkward category of “predictions that people really regret”, much like Clifford Stoll, who once confidently claimed that “no online database will replace your daily newspaper”.


 Ms Martin argues that the value of cryptocurrencies has collapsed and that one bitcoin now only fetches a “measly $3,380” (the equivalent of three shares in Alphabet).

Unfortunately, she fails to grasp the potential effect of cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology on the infrastructure of the internet, the architecture of software systems and, eventually, society itself.


 Being an information systems researcher myself, I have been investigating the impact of blockchain technology on our existing software and database systems and can sometimes only marvel at the future solutions this technology can offer us (think smart contracts, for example).

Cryptocurrencies, and the start-ups behind them, are the first generation of companies exploring the use of blockchain in our everyday life.

Ms Martin concludes that “ultimately it was common sense that killed crypto. An internet search on the subject yields the frequently asked request for someone to ‘explain cryptocurrency like I’m five’.

” Does that mean she believes that the inherent difficulty of explaining other complex concepts, such as artificial intelligence or the internet protocol, to a five-year-old will eventually bring about their downfall?


 She ends by saying that those who do understand cryptocurrencies are surely clever enough to know the game is up. I would dare to say that the game has only begun!


 Michaël Verdonck
Ghent, Belgium