By Elizabeth M. Renieris, Dr. Sherri Bucher, and Christian Smith



Image via CDC.gov

Despite limited backing from civil society or public health experts, as well as warnings from historians and bioethicists, technologists are racing ahead to build and deploy digital certificates that would allegedly let individuals “prove” whether they have recovered from the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), have tested positive for antibodies, or have received a vaccination, should one become available.

One such initiative is based on a combination of an emerging W3C standard for Verifiable Credentials (VCs), non-standard decentralized identifiers (DIDs), and distributed ledger technology (DLT) or “blockchain.”¹In this article, we examine why such proposed technological interventions lack sufficient supporting scientific and public health evidence or legitimacy.

As a result, we believe such interventions, if adopted or implemented by public authorities, would pose an unjustified interference with, and serious threat to, our fundamental human rights and civil liberties, in violation of the principles of legality, necessity, and proportionality.

In this article, we outline our concerns from a legal, public health-based, and technical perspective.

A Legal Perspective

Blockchain-enabled “immunity certificates” or “immunity passports” for COVID-19, if implemented by public authorities, would have serious consequences for our fundamental human rights and civil liberties.

The introduction of these artifacts could interfere with our right to privacy; freedoms of association, assembly, and movement; our rights to work and education; and otherwise seriously limit our freedom and autonomy, even where not compulsory.

For example, while not expressly mandated by law, individuals in post-lockdown China must be able to produce a “green” QR code of health status on their mobile device in order to access public transportation, enter workplaces or residences, and more, and have virtually no way of challenging the automated determinations of status.

While drastic measures that interfere with fundamental rights may be justified in extraordinary circumstances, such as a pandemic, under most international human rights and civil liberties laws, they must first satisfy a three-part test.

The interference must be:

(1) in accordance with or prescribed by, law (i.e. the legality principle),
(2) necessary to achieve a certain aim (i.e. the necessity principle), and
(3) proportionate to the aim pursued (i.e. the proportionality principle).

These principles have specifically been reaffirmed in jurisdictions around the world in the context of COVID-19, including by the Israeli Supreme Court (that a measure is unconstitutional unless it is prescribed by law) and the European Data Protection Supervisor (that a measure must be necessary and proportionate).

In addition, as related to initiatives that have a strong public health component, the science underlying any extraordinary claims in regard to an alleged need to suspend human rights and civil liberties must be data-driven and evidence-based.

That is to say, the efficacy of a proposed intervention is closely linked to its necessity — it’s hard to argue something is necessary without any evidence that it would work or do what it purports to do.

This principle was recently reaffirmed by the French data protection regulator CNIL, which observed that a mobile contact tracing app known as “StopCovid” could only be deployed if its usefulness for managing the crisis is sufficiently proven and if certain guarantees to its efficacy are provided.

The legality principle does not necessarily require a specific law authorizing the interference in question.

However, in the absence of a bespoke legislative measure, there must be some other existing legal framework that provides sufficiently clear and precise rules to govern the use of the technology — a framework that is adequate to ensure individuals have advanced notice of and can foresee its application.

At this time, we know of no specific or general legal frameworks which would provide individuals with sufficient clarity and precision as to how any data processed in connection with such blockchain-enabled immunity credentials would be governed or processed, or that could provide individuals with sufficient safeguards or protections in respect of their use.

To the contrary, blockchain raises a host of critical, open questions about privacy, data protection, liability, and accountability, among others, which remain wholly unanswered at this stage.

Thus, it is hard to argue that the proposed interference would be in accordance with, or prescribed by, law.Even if the proposed immunity credentials could satisfy the legality test, it is hard to argue they are necessary or proportionate interventions, as further outlined below.

A Public Health Perspective

There are at least three reasons why, from a public health perspective, immunity passports are an unwise option to pursue:

(1) current SARS-CoV-19 antibody tests are highly unreliable and the immune response to COVID-19 is poorly understood;
(2) a COVID-19 vaccine is a long way off; and
(3) while some have suggested that the International Certificate of Vaccination for Yellow Fever serves as an example of “immunity certification” that is nearly identical, or similar to, that proposed for COVID-19, there are crucial differences in the public health context for yellow fever vs. COVID-19, discouraging immunity passports for the latter.

Current SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests are highly unreliableThere is currently more unknown than known, in regard to COVID-19.

This is due, in large part, to the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic is being fueled by a novel pathogen, SARS-CoV-2, which only recently emerged within the human population.

There has simply not been time for the scientific community to characterize the human immune response to SARS-CoV-2, or to generate sufficient evidence in regard to the sensitivity and specificity of antibody tests.

We currently lack accurate, population-based estimates of prevalence and incidence of COVID-19 due to severe constraints in the ecosystem for the provision of widespread diagnostic testing.

This, in turn, results in an inability to calculate the predictive values for COVID-19 antibody tests. Without a reliable estimate of predictive validity, COVID-19 antibody test results cannot be trusted.

The most troubling problem, currently, in regard to COVID-19 antibody tests is an inability to determine the rates of “true positive” and “true negative” results.

In particular, although hundreds of COVID-19 antibody tests have been developed, the reliability of these tests, to accurately detect SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, even within the blood samples of persons who have been previously diagnosed with COVID-19, via nasal swab diagnostic testing, is unreliable, and highly capricious. 

If COVID-19 immunity certificates were currently available, and issuance of these immunity credentials was dependent, in large part, on existing COVID-19 antibody test results, then an undetermined number of individuals with “false negative” results would be unjustly denied immunity certification.

The opposite problem occurs with “false positive” results, in which persons who have never been infected with SARS-CoV-2 might mistakenly be issued immunity certification when, in fact, they have not previously suffered from COVID-19, and are still vulnerable to exposure, themselves, as well as spreading the disease to others.

No one knows if, or how, exposure to SARS-CoV-2 confers subsequent immunity

Even if a highly sensitive and specific SARS-CoV-2 antibody test, with high predictive validity, eventually emerges, pinning immunity certification efforts on an individual’s antibody test results is problematic, for other key reasons.

 For example, it is unknown, at this point in time, whether infection with SARS-CoV-2 confers subsequent immunity.

Fundamentally, this means that, even if SARS-CoV-2 antibodies are detected in a person’s blood sample, it is currently unclear if this indicates that the person is actually “immune” to SARS-CoV-2, and/or protected from future COVID-19 illness.

Most likely, as is typical for exposure to similar pathogens, some immunity is conferred as a result of infection with SARS-CoV-2.

However, many additional questions remain with regard to:

a) how COVID-19 disease severity and progression is related to the development of immunity;
b) the manner by which individual demographic or contextual determinants (e.g., gender; race; ethnicity; socioeconomic status) may, or may not, mediate the human immune response for the development of detectable SARS-CoV-2 antibodies; and
c) if, in fact, immunity does develop after infection, how long it lasts.

In order to find the answers to these critical questions, the scientific evidence-base regarding the human immune response to SARS-CoV-2 exposure must be much better characterized, preferably via data gathered from a series of large, representative (e.g., across gender; racial, and ethnic groups), population-based studies.

This has not yet been accomplished. The long, winding, and uncertain road to a COVID-19 vaccineIn addition to natural exposure to a pathogen, immunity to infectious diseases can also be conferred via vaccination.

There are a tremendous number of infectious diseases for which there is a broad and deep evidence-base in regard to the course of the illness, diagnosis, and treatments, as well as good characterization of both disease-related and/or vaccine-initiated immune responses.

As a result, there are also a vast number of virulent infectious diseases for which safe and effective vaccines have been developed. COVID-19, however, is not one of these.

There are myriad scientific challenges presented by the development of a safe and effective SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, and numerous technical hurdles to be surmounted prior to global distribution.

While several vaccine development and testing initiatives are underway around the world, none has generated sufficient peer-reviewed data with regard to safety or efficacy. Vaccine development is a notoriously laborious process with very high rates of failure, and coronaviruses are particularly tricky in this regard.

At best, it is highly unlikely that we will have a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine available for widespread global distribution prior to 2022 and even then, it would have to be delivered in an almost unprecedented global immunization campaign due to the pandemic nature of the crisis.

The only precedent for such a Herculean global health effort is the eradication of smallpox, and more recently, attempts to eliminate polio, both of which required many years and billions of dollars in investment, as well as collective global mobilization toward a common goal.

Thus, most consensus, within the scientific community, is that, despite vigorous on-going international efforts by a wide variety of partners to develop an effective vaccine to prevent COVID-19 illness, we are still a long way off.

Linking COVID-19 immunity passport efforts, then, to either antibody testing or vaccination, is not supported by the existing evidence-base.

The Yellow Fever vaccination card is not a roadmap for COVID-19 immunity passports

A comparison of the public health landscapes for yellow fever vs. COVID-19 reveals that these two infectious diseases have much less in common, than one may initially believe, in terms of support for the concept of immunity passports.

Among dozens of vaccine-preventable diseases, yellow fever is the only infectious disease for which the World Health Organization advocates for universal proof of vaccination (i.e. immunity), and only for the limited purpose of traveling to/from particular global regions.

The International Certificate of Vaccination for Yellow Fever or “Yellow Card” (Carte Jaune), which verifies that a traveler has been vaccinated against the severe, mosquito-borne, viral illness, is required for entry to 40 countries/territories in sub-Saharan Africa and South America.

In contrast to yellow fever, COVID-19 has been confirmed in 185 countries/territories and every continent with the exception of Antarctica.

Thus, with regard to global endemicity, and, perhaps contagiousness, COVID-19 is less comparable to yellow fever, and more comparable to the measles, prior to the availability of a safe and effective vaccine.

Currently, however, even within the context of a well-characterized disease and decades-old effective measles vaccination, there is no requirement or calls for a “Measles Immunity Passport.

”Yellow fever is an extremely well-characterized tropical infectious disease, with a long history of scientific study and a deep repository of biomedical knowledge; the antibody response is also extremely well-characterized.

A safe and effective vaccine for yellow fever has been available for 80 years. A single yellow fever vaccine confers lifelong immunity.

Citizens are only required to receive the vaccination if they plan to travel to a yellow fever endemic country. In contrast, as previously noted, the human immune response for SARS-CoV-2 is very poorly understood, and currently, there is no safe or effective vaccine.

Yellow fever incidence and prevalence are tracked within a well-established and highly organized global surveillance system; diagnosis, treatment, and control strategies are supported by agreed-upon standards, guidelines, and lead partners such as the World Health Organization, whose recommendations and policies align with other national and regional affiliates such as the Centers for Disease Control.

There are strong networks of laboratories, established diagnostic, preventative, treatment, and immunization protocols, and a robust supply chain for essential commodities related to yellow fever diagnosis, treatment, and vaccination.

Due to the swiftness of the COVID-19 pandemic, lack of an established repository of biomedical knowledge for the novel pathogen SARS-CoV-19, fear and anxiety kindled by its rapid global spread, and political machinations during this acute, first wave of the disease, stakeholders at the global, regional, national, and local levels have not coalesced around clear leadership in terms of developing established international standards and guidelines for COVID-19. 

Supply chains for essential commodities such as swabs and reagents for COVID-19 diagnostic testing, personal protective equipment, and medical equipment (e.g., mechanical ventilators and oxygen) are significantly strained.

How could partners and stakeholders coalesce around a viable immunity certification process, whether paper-based, digital, or otherwise, amid such uncertainty, a lack of evidence, and paucity of tools like reliable diagnostic and antibody tests, or safe and effective vaccines on which to anchor immunity status?

Yellow fever and COVID-19 are both frightening infectious diseases with severe disease states resulting in extreme illness and significantly increased risk for mortality.²

But there is a key difference with regard to the yellow fever virus vs. SARS-CoV-2 when it comes to the relative benefit of requiring immunity certification.

The yellow fever virus is a mosquito-borne pathogen with a profound risk of spread from endemic to non-endemic regions in an era of rapid global travel and connections among international hubs.³

The primary function of the yellow fever international certification of vaccination is to prevent the spread of this disease into non-endemic settings.

By contrast, COVID-19 is a viral respiratory illness already classified as a pandemic. Immunity passports will, in no way, put this particularly terrible genie back into the bottle.

Looking forward, even limited use of immunity credentials, such as among particular “high risk” or “essential” sub-groups (e.g., health care providers; factory workers; farm laborers), within a context of more reliable antibody testing, or an effective vaccine, is still troubling.

Immunity passport efforts, as related to infectious diseases, come with a wide variety of potentially devastating moral and ethical consequences, as outlined in detail by historians and bioethicists.

The historical precedence for “acclimation” to yellow fever, prior to the advent of a vaccine, was fraught with numerous ethical challenges and deleterious impacts, particularly for vulnerable populations–enslaved persons, the poor, migrants, and economic refugees.

A poorly executed immunity certification effort, particularly when not grounded in an established scientific and public health knowledge base, and when tied to the ability of people to economically support themselves and their families, is often rife with corruption, desperation, and perverse incentives, such as intentional self-infection with a potentially deadly disease.

 The risks of exclusion and stigmatization are only amplified where a public, immutable ledger is part of the solution.

Thus, from a public health perspective, the relative utility of a COVID-19 immunity certificate as compared to the yellow fever vaccination card, is of little benefit and riddled with risks.

On the contrary, the relative risks of a certificate or credential requiring the use of blockchain far exceed any potential benefits to public health.

A Technical Perspective

COVID-19 “immunity passports” based on a combination of Verifiable Credentials (VCs), decentralized identifiers (DIDs), and blockchain, would be an excessive and disproportionate technical means of achieving any limited public health outcomes.

The technical architecture is arguably a product of premature standardization, speculative requirements, and highly experimental technologies, rather than the harmonization of existing, widely deployed, and battle-tested solutions.

As a result, there is ample reason to question whether they are adequate to support credentials that would play a critical role in public safety.First, VCs, DIDs, and related APIs are largely built on web technology such as HTTP and URLs, which generally presume internet connectivity and online use.

In fact, the entire purpose of web protocols is online communication of documents and data. However, the primary need for immunity credentials would not be online but rather for safeguarding in-person interactions, where there is a risk of transmission.

Credentials for in-person use would ideally be designed to work on mobile devices similar to contactless payments such as Apple Pay. However, the web standards on which VCs are based offer nothing to support this capability.

Potentially suitable communication methods such as NFC and Bluetooth are not directly compatible with the internet protocols underlying the Web. Aside from being a poor fit for mobile devices, offline use of W3C VCs and DIDs is a non-trivial problem to solve, because the nature of both the Web and DIDs is to link to remote documents or data.

Ensuring offline usability requires eliminating dependencies on remote resources, such as public keys linked to blockchains.

A second major gap in such an approach is the lack of a proven method of private key management for end users.

Proponents of the VC/DID method do attempt to address public key management with blockchains. However, blockchain solutions have failed to provide credible methods of private key management.

Without this, users are subject to elaborate inconveniences that also negate the security assurances expected from credentials. The use of a blockchain typically only addresses the management of public key material and, in doing so, creates additional obstacles to offline credential use and verification, while facilitating potential collusion, passive surveillance, and re-identification through data inference.

A third issue is the lack of well-defined security protocols. The scope of the W3C recommendations are currently quite limited — the VC specification merely provides a data model, not a complete protocol or end-to-end solution.

Early versions of APIs in development for exchanging VCs currently leave important security features such as subject authentication optional. While not every use case for credentials requires this type of authentication, implementers have been inconsistent about using the feature correctly.

Combined with the lack of viable private key management, this means there is currently no strong assurance that the presenter of a credential is its subject.

Elaborate identity proofing measures are pointless if the means of conveying such proof are vulnerable and easy to exploit. Effectively, the door is wide open for improperly borrowing or stealing these credentials.

Using a hypothetical immunity credential based on the VC standard, an infected person could feasibly impersonate a vaccinated person, creating a false sense of security while the virus is spread.

This last point — security — deserves special consideration with respect to the use of blockchains. It has long been recognized in the field of cryptography that haphazardly copying techniques from one protocol to another leads to security flaws.

The idea of blockchain, however, takes the peril a step further by attempting to generalize an entire protocol designed to solve the very specific problem of electronic cash. It is wrongly believed that security characteristics of cryptocurrency are universally lent to any problem one might address with a distributed ledger.

In practice, blockchains have turned out to share common vulnerabilities with run-of-the-mill IT infrastructure, while creating new and equally concerning problems for privacy and data protection.

The challenge posed by these gaps and the false generalization of blockchain cannot be overstated. Security protocols are notoriously difficult to design and prone to subtle, hard to detect flaws, while also being relatively easy to circumvent.

Before entrusting any technology to protect people from the spread of infectious disease, it should be subjected to rigorous formal analysis and security review. At this stage, W3C VC, DIDs, and related technologies have not yet undergone sufficient scrutiny.

Even if the standards become more mature, this approach to any kind of immunity-related credentials will likely still be disproportionate and excessive.

There are myriad other permutations of digital certificates, traditional public key infrastructure (PKI), and even other kinds of databases that don’t raise the same concerns as a distributed ledger.

Moreover, it is unclear why you would ever need a global public registry of any kind in connection with immunity classifications or status, particularly in light of the risks outlined above.

In fact, because ledgers are logically centralized and actually a single point of failure, any problems with the ledger, including collusion or malicious attacks, could compromise the ability of individuals to produce or manage their credentials.

This could result in severe interferences with their fundamental rights, while offering limited recourse or accountability for parties involved in maintaining the ledger.

Concluding Remarks

At this stage, based on the state of public health and scientific evidence surrounding COVID-19, we remain unconvinced that “immunity passports” or even immunity certificates are possible, let alone desirable.

Should they become possible, we are also unconvinced of their necessity, given the limited precedent for such artifacts among other infectious diseases.

And even if they should become possible and necessary, we believe the use of VCs, DIDs, and blockchain in connection with their issuance would be excessive.

Finally, we would be skeptical of any solutions put forward by private sector actors, without significant public sector, civil society, and other stakeholder engagement.

The prospect of severely curtailing the fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals through ill-thought-out plans for “immunity passports” or similar certificates, particularly ones that would leverage premature standards and a highly experimental and potentially rights-infringing technology like blockchain, is beyond dystopian.

We urge law and policymakers to think twice before entertaining such industry-driven, technology-first solutions to complex public health and humanitarian crises.

Rather, we should pursue more ethical, scientifically sound, and human rights-preserving alternatives spearheaded by a diverse group of stakeholders, and which rely on tested and proven technologies that exist within a clearer legal framework. If ever there was a time to avoid moving fast and breaking things, this is it.

¹ CCI, self-described as “a direct response to the many calls for an ‘immunity passport,’” is led by for-profit companies eager for a use case for their as-yet unadopted technologies. Notably, participants do not include any public health experts.²

Among patients who suffer from severe yellow fever disease, there is a 30%-60% mortality rate. While the estimated overall mortality rate of COVID-19 and accurate mortality estimates for those who suffer from severe illness are still emerging, the prognosis is bleak among patients who require mechanical ventilation due to severe COVID-19 illness.

In both diseases, survivors often face a long period of recovery with additional complications.³ Non-immune humans infected with yellow fever in sub-Saharan Africa or South America who travel to Europe, North America, or Asia, and are subsequently bitten by an uninfected mosquito in the non-endemic country, can serve as vectors for rapid spread of the disease among in previously unaffected regions.

Elizabeth M. Renieris (@hackylawyer) is the founder & CEO of HACKYLAWYER, a privacy expert (CIPP/E, CIPP/US), fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a Technology & Human Rights fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Dr. Sherri Bucher is Associate Research Professor of Pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine, and Adjunct Associate Special Professional in maternal-newborn-child health at Eck Center for Global Health, University of Notre Dame. Christian Smith is the CEO and co-founder of Stranger Labs.

Previously, he led a research engineering team developing privacy enhancing technologies at MIT, and built open source software and implemented emerging identity standards and security protocols at Anvil Research.

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An adviser to the ID2020 Alliance, which aims to bring digital identities to billions of people, has resigned over the organization’s direction on digital immunity passes and COVID-19. 

In her resignation email Friday, Elizabeth Renieris cited ID2020’s opacity, “techno-solutionism” and corporate influence along with the risks of applying blockchain to immunity passes.

“At this stage, I can no longer even describe what ID2020’s mission is with any confidence,” wrote Renieris, who was one of six members of ID2020’s technical advisory committee. “All I can perceive is a desire to promote decentralized identity solutions at all costs.”

Renieris (an occasional CoinDesk contributor) is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and an expert in cross-border data protection and privacy issues. She was previously in-house counsel at two digital identity startups. 

Her concerns about the technology, which highlight the trade-offs between health and privacy during the pandemic, are spelled out in a white paper published in mid-May. She says the introduction of immunity passes could interfere with people’s privacy, freedom of association, assembly, and movement. 

“Blockchain-enabled ‘immunity certificates’ or ‘immunity passports’ for COVID-19, if implemented by public authorities, would have serious consequences for our fundamental human rights and civil liberties,” she writes.

The discord within ID2020 hints at larger debates around where to use distributed ledger technology (DLT), and where it may create more problems than it solves. But when it comes to the issue of immunity passes, the stakes seem higher. 

Renieris worries about how the influence of corporations like Microsoft may influence the development of these systems.

Kim Cameron, Architect of Identity at Microsoft, sits on ID2020’s board, and Kim Gagné, newly appointed as Board Chair, also worked at Microsoft. 

“Who is doing the building here is a critical vulnerability, as critical as any technical challenge,” said Renieris. “This is 100% a hammer looking for a nail.”

Ticket to ride?

Immunity passports or certificates are digital or physical documents that individuals would receive if they had tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies. Traditionally, development of antibodies after a disease offers some level of immunity, though scientists are still working to sort out whether this is the case, or how long such immunity might last, when it comes to COVID-19.

Potentially, immunity passports allow people to return to work and have greater freedom of movement. 

See also: Immunity Passes Explained: Should We Worry About Privacy?In late April, the World Health Organization warned against the idea of immunity passports, and said there was “no evidence that people who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.

” But countries such as Chile said they would move ahead with such passes, despite the WHO’s warning. 

The ID2020 Alliance is a public-private partnership, with partners including Microsoft, Accenture and Hyperledger. It hopes to develop a global model for the design, funding, and implementation of “digital ID solutions and technologies,” according to the website.

ID2020 published a white paper in April urging policymakers, technology providers, and civil society groups to collaborate to ensure that digital health credentials or “immunity certificates,” if implemented, are designed to protect privacy and civil liberties.

THIS IS 100% A HAMMER LOOKING FOR A NAIL.

According to Renieris, the paper initially cited the Covid Credentials Initiative (which is advocating for immunity passes based in part on blockchain) and Microsoft’s work with blockchain. It said these are potential solutions for privacy and identity questions around immunity passes.

But when Renieris queried their inclusion, the section was dropped because, says Renieris, ID2020 did not want to deal with the tech problems those initiatives would raise.

The initiative neglects to acknowledge any technology-specific risks of a blockchain based approach, instead highlighting generic risks that could apply to any technological solution, said Renieris.

While she says she was told the paper would be published as Executive Director Dakota Gruener’s personal view, the press release that was put out around the paper framed it as an ID2020 paper. 

“I cannot be part of an organization overly influenced by commercial interests that that only pays lip service to human rights,” she wrote in her resignation. “The stakes are simply too high at this stage.”

ID2020, Microsoft respond

In a statement to CoinDesk, Gruener said technology solutions are not a panacea for the pandemic and must be accompanied by robust, fit-for-purpose trust frameworks and legislative and regulatory actions to ensure ethical implementation and transparency.

ID2020 has sought feedback from civil liberties and digital privacy groups to ensure that these considerations are built into the technical architecture of any digital health certificate system.

“The stakes are high and we have one chance to get this right,” said Gruener. “Even with these safeguards in place, digital health certificates may still be insufficient to meet the current challenge. However, absent such safeguards, we can be assured that they will do more harm than good.”

Microsoft, for its part, says it’s deliberately trying not to have an outsized influence in this area.

“For the last two years Microsoft has been working with industry partners in the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) and ID2020 to lay the groundwork for an open standards-based, privacy-enhancing, identity system which will give people control over where they store their personal information and who they share it with,” said Alex Simons, the company’s corporate vice president for identity program management.

“A key tenet of this effort is designing the system so that no single company or organization, including Microsoft, owns or controls it. Instead, to be trusted, we believe the system has to be inherently decentralized,” Simons said in a statement.

As CoinDesk reported previously, a number of organizations and companies are actively exploring the idea of immunity passes based on blockchain technology. 

See also: Citizen App’s New Contact Tracing Feature Raises Privacy Red Flags

Renieris wrote the paper published in May with global health researcher Sherri Bucher of Indiana University School of Medicine,and Christian Smith, CEO of Stranger Labs, which researches, develops, and designs advanced technologies that enhance privacy and security. 

In it they criticize the CCI initiative ID2020 initially touted, which proposes combining a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard for Verifiable Credentials (VCs) with non-standard decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and DLT.

 The architecture is a product of premature standardization, experimental technologies, and speculative requirements, the authors argue, questioning whether these solutions can support such a critical role in public safety as immunity passes. 

They also criticize the lack of a proven method of private key management for end-users, especially in offline instances, which digital immunity passports would likely have to include, and say the VC specification merely “provides a data model, not a complete protocol or end-to-end solution.”

UPDATE (May 29, 00:15 UTC): 

This article was updated after publication with additional comments from Elizabeth Renieris and from a Microsoft executive.

Since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, world-class hospitals from New York to Atlanta to San Francisco struggled with shortages of basic safety equipment.

Masks, gowns, and face shields have all been in short supply, and the race to get more has meant hospital staff and public officials desperately searching for reliable suppliers.

Elsewhere on the front lines, there have been critical shortages in the test kits that experts agree are essential to reopening economies the world over.Swift escalation in demand meant staff couldn’t rely on long established procurement processes.

They needed to source new vendors and find and reallocate supplies quickly — and this pressure brought new visibility to long-festering problems in the medical supply chain. In the U.S., CDC and FDA officials warned that fraudulent respirators are in distribution and fraudulent test kits for Covid-19 are being sold online. The federal government recently placed more than $110 million in N95 mask orders at high prices with unproven vendors.

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Problems in the medical supply chain are neither new, nor uncommon, and it’s easy to see why:

These products can travel through tangled, global supply chains in which documentation is often manual and paper based, piling up at each handoff and border crossing.

As a result, theft and quality control issues are common, and regulators and distributors struggle to locate substandard products that have entered the system.

The World Health Organization estimates that one in 10 medical products — including pills, vaccines, and diagnostic kits — are substandard or falsified in low- and middle- income countries. In other regions, theft is the greater problem.

BSI Group, the national standards body of the U.K., estimates pharmaceutical cargo theft at over $1 billion a year, with the U.K. and U.S. accounting for nearly half of all theft.Unfortunately, today’s chaos may prove to be a practice run for even more concentrated pressure on our health care supply chains.

When we do produce effective treatments or, eventually, a vaccine, millions — and even billions — of people around the world will simultaneously want the same thing, and it will be in limited supply.

To fix some of these supply chain vulnerabilities, the industry is turning to blockchain technology.

With a blockchain — which can make it cheaper, easier, and faster to verify what is true when a business process spans organizations with competing interests — companies can safely work together in a shared, permanent ledger.

They can do this without giving up control of or even revealing their data, as mathematical proof of data can stand in as a trustworthy proxy for actual data. Instead of being owned and managed by a single company that everyone must trust, the ledger is governed by all members of a network.

Because this makes it possible to delegate the work of checks and balances to cryptography and code, blockchains can reduce friction, expose fraud, and assure product authenticity with new speed.

Better Together

The advantage of a blockchain-based system is that competitors can collaborate on a shared platform to, say, raise drug safety without sharing sensitive information.

That’s exactly the idea behind the MediLedger Network, a consortium focused on pharma supply chains that counts leaders including Gilead, Pfizer, Amgen, Genentech, AmerisourceBergen, and McKesson among its members. Chronicled, a startup, provides the underlying technology.

The first solution in production from MediLedger is a product verification system that makes it easier to verify that a returned drug is authentic — a common, but difficult process. According to the Healthcare Distribution Alliance, approximately 60 million units of saleable drugs are returned annually.

The work of verifying that these drugs are authentic before they’re resold falls to wholesalers, who must contact manufacturers to track down serial numbers, a process that can take up to 48 hours.

Using blockchain, wholesale distributors can make the same verification in less than a second using a barcode scanner, so product can be quickly put back into commercial distribution, and manufacturers maintain control of their data.

This rapid serial number verification can also be used to help hospitals and pharmacies. With no infrastructure beyond a web browser and a barcode scanner, staff can verify that a drug is authentic as it is placed on the shelf.

Counterfeiters could still copy barcodes in an attempt to pass drugs off as legitimate — but the ledger will flag and permanently record suspicious activity.

MediLedger is working on a next phase: to apply this technology to “track and trace,” the process of identifying where a specific box of drugs is and where it has been, at any time. With the blockchain, this process can be done without revealing confidential business intelligence to anyone in the ecosystem.

MediLedger recently completed a pilot using a blockchain for track and trace with 25 participants, including retailers Walgreens and Walmart, transportation provider FedEx, standards organization GS1, wholesale distributors including AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health, and manufacturers ranging in size from 100 employees to 125,000.

Ultimately, MediLedger Network participants will be able to enforce business rules in real-time as a box of drugs travels from one handoff point to another across an entire supply chain, even in the outer recesses of an ecosystem, far beyond a manufacturer or distributor’s control.

Along the way, auditing is automated and embedded, flagging problems and who has custody as it happens. When drugs reach their final destination, it’s as if they arrive with a black box of data to assure not only authenticity but they have complied with business rules during their entire journey.

In an interview, Chronicled CEO Susanne Somerville said, “It’s like placing your own embassy behind a trading partner’s firewall.”

Forging the Links

There is, of course, a catch: Blockchains are an ecosystem technology and only bring benefit when the technology is not only broadly adopted, but when physical systems work with it. More industry standards are needed to make it all truly interoperable.

For example, the visibility of any technology is limited by manufacturers’ packaging. In some of the countries with the greatest fraud, serialized numbers are not yet required on a box of drugs; pharmacies move drugs into hoppers before they repackage them; hospitals use dispensing systems. Full track and trace, for example, would need to connect the network to these systems.

However, there are new, strong incentives adding to the pressure for change. New regulation is amplifying pressure for the pharmaceutical industry to work better together on developing standards.

In the U.S., the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA), which was signed into law in 2013, has a deadline of 2023 for manufacturers to achieve track and trace of all transactions involved in transporting medications from factory to patient.

The E.U.’s Falsified Medicines Directive lays out rules to combat fake medicines in the region, and includes anti-tampering security on packaging and tracking requirements.

As both the technology and the industry’s processes for working together matures, blockchains could help us get better and faster at getting medicines and vaccines to where we have the most epidemiological urgency.

With more granular visibility, stakeholders could better zero in on clogs in supply chains, more quickly locate and remove expired, damaged, or fraudulent products, see where supplies are low, and efficiently redistribute inventory to where it is needed most.

This will most certainly not be our last global health crisis. Blockchains could not only help us increase agility during extraordinary black swan events, but also help us operate better in day-to-day operations.

While this work is focused on the pharmaceutical industry, the underlying protocol can be repurposed and customized to advance any supply chain — from the personal protective equipment that has been in such short supply to products in any industry.

As we wake up to the fact that our health and economic welfare is interconnected with those thousands of miles away, it becomes clearer that we need to leverage our global resources to effectively fight large-scale problems.

Blockchains could help us do this more safely and efficiently.

The COVID-19 pandemic has ignited a reassessment of the role that technology can play in tackling health crises, as well as citizens’ right to privacy.

This is particularly the case in the ongoing development of contact tracing apps, which have been heralded as the ticket out of the pandemic.Another tool that has been suggested as one way of bringing the crisis under control – and has gained more and more attention over the last few weeks – are so-called ‘digital immunity passports’.

This is a topic that requires some further consideration, particularly in the ongoing review of the role that technology, and blockchain more specifically, can play in ending this crisis.

What are immunity passports and how could they work?

The basic idea of an immunity passport is to link an individual’s identity with their COVID-19 test status. In other words, an immunity passport would rely on antibody tests – which are intended to show whether someone has recovered from the infection – to then provide certification that a person is immune and cannot catch the virus again.

As this concept is still a work in progress, the practicalities of how it could be enacted are still under debate.

However, the majority of backers say that those who qualify could receive digital certificates displayed like smartphone boarding passes, also known as ‘digital immunity passports’.

The central issue relating to digital immunity passports is that, if an individual needed to prove their health status, that information would need to be unalterably linked to their identity for it to be considered acceptable and the risk of the virus spreading kept to a minimum.

So, the key question is: how can we ensure that any roll-out in digital immunity passports satisfies the stringent security and data protection protocols required to ensure health data is both protected and unalterable?

Secure and tamper-proof

Cue blockchain; this is where the technology would be able to come into its own if it is placed at the heart of any development in digital immunity passports.

This is because it would not only ensure that the end-user remains in complete control of how their health data is being used, but it would also give employers and other stakeholders peace of mind that this data is unalterably linked to their identity.

How? Firstly, any blockchain-enabled immunity passport would need end-users to provide proof of ID before testing.

Then a permanent digital fingerprint of the double-signed certificate is then placed on the blockchain, which is used by a verifier, such as an employer, to check authenticity. Crucially, as sensitive medical data, such as COVID-related test results, is stored as a ‘fingerprint’, this offers a form of encryption and ensures that the digital certificate provided to the end-user is secure and tamper-proof by design, which means it is securely linked to their identity.

For those most concerned about the security of personal data, as each fingerprint is individual and does not reveal any information about who the document belongs to, it also safeguards the information it contains.

Looking beyond the crisis and toward a time where a vaccine for COVID-19 is found, blockchain technology should also be at the cornerstone of a future secured digital vaccination record, giving citizens a secure, portable form of vaccination credentials that they could share with anyone.

A word of warning: the science must dictate any passport rollout

Before we get ahead of ourselves, however, a strong dose of caution needs to be caveated here.The World Health Organisation (WHO) has consistently warned about a lack of scientific evidence for COVID-19 immunity, saying those who wrongly believe themselves to be immune could get reinfected or transmit the disease further.

At present, scientists simply don’t know how long someone remains immune to the coronavirus — or even if they can become immune at all.This has the potential to derail the concept of digital immunity passports entirely.

As such, a more sensible line of action would be to follow the science; for a blockchain-enabled immunity passport to truly work effectively and be taken seriously, the antibody test must be proven to show that end-users cannot get infected again.

However, this should not mean that the government and healthcare bodies abandon the development of digital immunity passports altogether, as the time may come when this sort of technology could be highly effective and has to be rolled out quickly.

Tencent, the creator of messaging service WeChat, is investing 500 billion yuan ($70 billion) into “new infrastructure” based on emerging technologies over the next five years, according to market sources.

Tencent is a Chinese multinational conglomerate holding company founded in 1998. Its subsidiaries specialise in various Internet-related services and products, entertainment, artificial intelligence and technology both in China and globally.

The Most Diverse Audience to Date at FMLS 2020 – Where Finance Meets InnovationI

n an interview with state media Tuesday, Dowson Tong, Tencent’s senior executive vice president, confirmed the company had also earmarked investment for sectors such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity.

The sources said that it isn’t clear how much of the $70 billion investment Tencent will ultimately set aside for blockchain, nor has it elaborated on what specifically it will be investing in.

They added that the firm has acknowledged that its cloud offerings have been hit by the coronavirus-induced economic slowdown as the nation starts its return to normality.

BSN

The move comes a month after China’s Blockchain Services Network (BSN) was rolled out for commercial use. Blockchain is a critical part of the country’s tech strategy, and the government hopes BSN will form the backbone infrastructure for services that leverage the technology all around the country.

China’s steadfast support for DLT is paying dividends, Haipo Yang, founder and CEO of Chinese crypto exchange CoinEx, said in an interview.

He explained this unambiguous approach has helped create a “good environment for blockchain technology,” improving China’s credentials as an innovation hub and leading to the emergence of a vibrant blockchain investment scene.

Last year, Tencent launched a DLT-powered invoice system and received permission from the Hong Kong regulator to start work on a blockchain-based virtual bank.

Along with a number of its competitors, the firm also became a member of a new national committee to help set industry standards for blockchain technology.

Modern-day supply chains are managed at a global scale, and continue to become increasingly complex. ST has published a whitepaper on how to build smarter end-to-end supply chains.As the internalisation of flows and operations continues, the need for smarter end-to-end supply chain networks has never been so crucial.

The ability to track product flows, share accurate information and data amongst stakeholders and integrate wide product portfolios is essential to supply chain leaders.One way that supply chain complexity can be eliminated is by combining blockchain technology with RFID/NFC solutions.

Near Field Communication (NFC) technology is a contactless solution based on a radio frequency field, designed to exchange data between two devices through a simple touch gesture. Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) uses electromagnetic fields to identify and track tags attached to objects.

Combining the two of these with blockchain solutions can lead to flows with increased transparency, more security and automated administrative operations through the use of smart contracts.

NFC technology provides a safe connection to data about product origin, certifications, and the journey through the supply chain.

These insights provide key benefits to all stakeholders, from suppliers through to consumers.

As Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, such as blockchain, become increasingly prominent in the supply chain, smarter networks assisted by digital and physical infrastructures are cropping up more and more.

These networks contain objects that are capable of communicating and collaborating without human intervention.

Stakeholders’ abilities in supply chain management can shift from decision support to decision delegation through this increasing level of intelligence.

Blockchain technology stands to be a true game-changer within the industry, with the capacity to enable predictive capabilities and improved tracing and tracking.

The authenticity and quality of physical assets can be verified by blockchain technology with a cost-efficient, two-party-only concept, therefore creating reliable, end-to-end visibility.

This then helps build both company success and customer satisfaction, focusing on the four pillars,  ‘security, transparency, trust and speed’.IoT technology is bringing in more and more connected devices every day.

Gartner estimated that there were 8.4bn IoT devices in 2017, and expects that figure to exceed 500bn by 2030. The digital pairing of NDC/RFID-enabled devices and blockchain solutions creates a reliable, concrete and permanent channel that users can collect, communicate and aggregate data from. 

Supply chain entropy will be mitigated by the combined technologies, whilst visibility and transparency are significantly enhanced. 

Learn more about the benefits of pairing NFC/RFID technology with blockchain here.

Many enterprise IT teams feel there is no justifiable use case for blockchain. At the other end of the spectrum are those who believe in storing every last bit, byte and nibble of data on the blockchain. Neither of these is overly helpful in supporting the adoption of blockchain networks in industry.

A foundational premise of applying blockchain to solve business problems is Minimum Effective Blockchain (MEB).

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Tim Ferriss, in his book The 4-Hour Body, refers to the principle of Minimum Effective Dose (MED). The definition is straightforward: The MED is the smallest dose that will produce the desired outcome. Of course, in Tim’s context, it was related to sports nutrition and supplements. This principle can also apply in the context of blockchain.

Minimum Effective Blockchain (MEB) is the smallest combination of data and nodes to create value for the broadest range of stakeholders.

Minimum Effective Blockchain (MEB) is the smallest combination of data and nodes to create value for the broadest range of stakeholders. Good data architecture design is critical. Blockchain networks are not designed for storing large amounts of data.

Neither are they intended for storing high volumes of transactions. Blockchain networks do not perform as efficiently as relational databases.

The data stored in the blockchain should be the minimum set of information necessary to ensure trust between counterparties and satisfy the requirements around tracking and tracing assets.And what of the rest of the data?

A blockchain project will often require more data than that which is on the blockchain. The additional data may exist in a distributed database or filesystem. These data stores can be designed to prevent unauthorised access using encryption and other established technologies. 

In these cases, the information stored on the blockchain can contain time-stamped records of the original data. Any tampering with the data becomes immediately evident.

The blockchain can also store records of access to data and granting/revoking access to information. Inevitably, the distributed data will have a central point of control. However, so long as the underlying blockchain is decentralised, counterparties can be confident that the data integrity is maintained.

What is the minimum number of nodes necessary to ensure the integrity of the network?

With the data architecture planned, what is the minimum network architecture required? Or, to put it another way, what is the minimum number of nodes necessary to ensure the integrity of the network? (A node in a blockchain network is a computer which contains a copy of the blockchain and participates in the process of adding new data to the blockchain) A vital aspect of the Bitcoin network’s security is a large number of nodes.

As a public permissionless blockchain, the Bitcoin network has an estimated 10,000 nodes. To compromise the network, an attacker must take control of more than half (the 51% attack problem). 


In enterprise blockchain projects, there are a range of additional factors to consider.The minimum number of nodes necessary for network integrity varies based on how the network achieves consensus related to adding data to the blockchain. The Bitcoin protocol uses something called Proof of Work. A large number of nodes is critical for this protocol.

Other protocols like Hyperledger Fabric, use a different consensus mechanism and can operate with only a few nodes. A further consideration for enterprise or industry blockchains is private versus public. If a blockchain network is private, then all members are known to each other.

The closed nature of the network affords a trust which arises from every member knowing every other. Any node that attempts to behave like a bad actor is caught out and potentially thrown off the network. Operating and maintaining a blockchain node is one of the costs of the network. It is not likely that every member will want to run their node.

Many smaller stakeholders will have neither the competence nor the desire to run their nodes. The decisions of who will run the nodes – and how the cost will be absorbed – is part of the design.In applying the MEB principle to enterprise blockchain projects, determine the minimum number of nodes necessary for the network to be fully trusted and to operate securely.

As with many things, the MEB approach – if taken to an extreme –  can go too far.

As with many things, the MEB approach – if taken to an extreme –  can go too far. In the case of blockchain it is possible to reduce the number of nodes and data to such a small amount that it is no longer blockchain – but only a DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology approach) – or possibly not even DLT.

If stripped back far enough, the solution has value only to one stakeholder. And for that, you can use a database.

Today’s primary objections to the use of blockchain technology focus on issues of scalability, performance and transparency. These objections are genuine and can happen with flawed blockchain design from the start. 

When looking at how to solve a multi-enterprise industry problem with blockchain technology, begin by deciding the minimum amount of information which must exist on a blockchain network that is distributed and decentralised where data is immutable.

Then look at what data should reside in a decentralised filesystem or database with traditional technology solutions for scalability, performance and access control. Not everything belongs on the blockchain. Not every stakeholder should run a node.

Blockchain cannot solve every problem. To avoid problems in the future, apply the principle of Minimum Effective Blockchain (MEB) to the design in the beginning.





Get in touch with us [email protected] 
/ Twitter @igetblockchain

• On Wednesday, Goldman Sachs released a report that outlined five reasons that cryptocurrency is not an asset class or a suitable investment.
• The report drew backlash from cryptocurrency fans, mostly on Twitter. 
• "Hey Goldman Sachs, 2014 just called and asked for their talking points back," Cameron Winklevoss, the co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange platform Gemini said in a tweet. 
• Watch Bitcoin trade live on Markets Insider.
• Read more on Business Insider.

Goldman Sachs just made new enemies in the world of cryptocurrency. On Wednesday, the bank released a report that outlined five reasons that crypto is not an asset class or a suitable investment, drawing the ire of those that support the digital currency. 

"We believe that a security whose appreciation is primarily dependent on whether someone else is willing to pay a higher price for it is not a suitable investment for our clients," said Goldman.

The bank also called out cryptocurrency's popularity with hedge funds, saying "while hedge funds may find trading cryptocurrencies appealing because of their high volatility, that allure does not constitute a viable investment rationale."It didn't sit well with supporters of cryptocurrency.

The Winklevoss twins, who co-founded Gemini, a cryptocurrency exchange platform, responded with vocal backlash to the report. "Hey Goldman Sachs, 2014 just called and asked for their talking points back," Cameron Winklevoss said in a tweet. His brother, Tyler Winklevoss, also joined in the fray, tweeting, "the more I think about it, the Goldman report is probably a head fake.

" Read more: A Wall Street firm studied every crash over the past 100 years — and concluded that the unusual performance of 7 tech stocks is masking the risk of a prolonged meltdown

In addition, Goldman compared crypto's popularity and epic 2017 rally to Dutch tulip mania, which occurred in the 17th century and is one of the most famous examples of a speculative bubble. 

"Goldman Sachs served a cold dish to the crypto community, which was largely expecting them to come out with a bullish call on the world's number one digital asset," Mati Greenspan, founder of Quantum Economics, wrote in a note, Bloomberg reported. 

He continued: "Perhaps Goldman is just trying to jawbone Bitcoin to buy more for themselves at a cheaper price. Who knows?"

Shopify's (NYSE:SHOP) platform allows its merchants to accept payments in bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and over 300 other types of cryptocurrencies.

It recently expanded that reach by partnering with cryptocurrency payments processor CoinPayments, which helps merchants process 1,800 types of cryptocurrencies.

Shopify claims the partnership will "make cryptocurrency transactions easier and more accessible while reducing transaction fees." CoinPayments CEO Jason Butcher declared the partnership would deliver a "seamless process for anyone looking to do business using cryptocurrencies.

"CoinPayments has processed over $5 billion in cryptocurrency payments since its founding in 2013 and provides clients with various APIs, shopping cart plugins, and digital wallets. Shopify's cryptocurrency expansion isn't surprising, but will this new partnership widen its moat?

How many people actually use cryptocurrencies for payments?

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have gained a lot of attention among speculators in recent years. However, the broad price swings -- which have ranged from about $500 to $19,000 for bitcoin over the past four years -- made them tough to accept as mainstream payments.

Last year, a survey by the Foundation for Interwallet Operability (FIO) found that only 30% of cryptocurrency owners actually used the coins for payments. The vast majority held the coins as investments.

A more recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit and digital payments platform Crypto.com found just 34% of cryptocurrency users primarily used digital currencies for online payments.Crypto Radar recently claimed 6.2% of Americans owned bitcoin, and 7.3% planned to buy some in the future.

Yet the overwhelming majority (64.8%) didn't own any bitcoin and had no plans to buy any coins in the future. Another 21.8% hadn't even heard of bitcoin.

Those percentages indicate cryptocurrency payments don't appeal to mainstream shoppers yet. Nonetheless, many major companies -- including Microsoft, AT&T, and Expedia -- already accept bitcoin payments, though it's unclear how many customers actually choose those options.

Another part of its cryptocurrency expansion

Shopify also recently joined the Facebook (NASDAQ:FB)-led Libra Association, which wants to serve underbanked markets with its Libra cryptocurrency. That decision was surprising, since Libra had already lost many of its top members after regulators opposed its development.




IMAGE SOURCE: GETTY IMAGES.

However, Libra is being developed as a "stablecoin" which is pinned to fiat currencies instead of mining algorithms. That stability could make Libra a more viable payment option than bitcoin and other volatile cryptocurrencies, and tethering them to Facebook's Calibra digital wallet, Messenger, and WhatsApp could quickly expand its reach.

CoinPayments also processes payments in other top stablecoins like TrueUSD, USD Coin, and Gemini Dollar (GUSD). These currencies could be more appealing to merchants and shoppers, who can sleep easier knowing the value of their payments won't plummet or skyrocket overnight.

Shopify's partnerships with the Libra Association and CoinPayments could pivot its merchants from bitcoin toward less volatile cryptocurrencies. That process might be glacial and won't move the needle anytime soon, but it could enhance its broader platform -- which already serves over a million businesses in more than 175 countries.

Shopify's cryptocurrency partnerships should also widen its moat against Adobe's (NASDAQ:ADBE) Magento, which recently partnered with cryptocurrency payments platform Utrust to provide its crypto transactions to over 250,000 merchants.

Magento is arguably Shopify's toughest competitor since it's tightly integrated into Adobe's other cloud-based analytics, marketing, and advertising tools.

Gemini Trust Company, LLC (Gemini), a cryptocurrency exchange and custodian, announced on Thursday it is collaborating with Samsung Electronics to power the Samsung Blockchain Wallet and bring crypto to the fingertips of Samsung Blockchain Wallet users in the U.S. and Canada.

Gemini claims it is the first U.S. crypto exchange and custodian to partner with Samsung.

“Samsung is committed to establishing a simple and secure gateway for more individuals to enter the blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem. The Samsung Blockchain Wallet is a convenient and secure crypto-wallet that allows users to self custody their crypto directly on Samsung Galaxy Phones. By connecting their Samsung Blockchain Wallet to Gemini, users can buy and sell crypto, view their Gemini account balances, and also transfer their crypto into cold storage with Gemini Custody for the highest level of security.”

While sharing more details about the partnership, Tyler Winklevoss, CEO of Gemini, stated:

“Crypto is not just a technology, it is a movement. We are proud to be working with Samsung to bring crypto’s promise of greater choice, independence, and opportunity to more individuals around the world. Now, Samsung Blockchain Wallet customers can buy crypto in a simple, elegant and secure way on Gemini.”

The Samsung Blockchain Wallet and the Gemini Mobile App are available in the Samsung Galaxy Store for select Samsung Galaxy Phones.Founded in 2014, Gemini describes itself as a next-generation cryptocurrency and custodian that allows customers to buy, sell, and store digital assets such as bitcoin and ether. 

“Gemini is building a bridge to the future of money. We offer an industry-leading suite of crypto-native products and tools for individuals and institutions; enabling them to grow, manage, and use cryptocurrency holdings with world-class security, compliance, and customer experience.”

No doubt, the Blockchain technology, along with the adoption of cryptocurrencies, is getting bigger. The business end of the market is expected to reach $21 billion over the next five years.

Expectedly, professional services giants are now taking a larger role in tackling new challenges in the market, the Big Four firms and other leading brands are working with several crypto and blockchain firms on ways to combat interoperability, regulatory challenges and development of the technology.

Henri Arslanian, PwC’s global crypto leader, told Cointelegraph that the Big Four firms majorly have a vital role in the advancement of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, saying:“Although Bitcoin was designed with a trustless ideology, the reality is that the industry still requires trusted entities to catalyze the development of the ecosystem.

READ ALSO: Positive outlook as Africa FinTech attracts over $100 million in investments


Arslanian added that when he first joined PwC years back, few people took crypto seriously. However, he saw an increasing demand for crypto assets, with some businesses starting to accept Bitcoin payments from clients.

“Over the last couple of months, we’ve expanded our work. We recently closed the first-ever crypto fundraising deal at PwC, in which we led a $14 million Series A round for a Swiss-based crypto firm with Asian family offices. We are also the auditor for BC Group, a publicly listed crypto company in Hong Kong.”

BC Group CEO, Hugh Madden, also said that BC’s vision was to make use of crypto assets in Asia’s financial market. In turn, BC Group must set standards for compliance, security, and performance. Madden buttressed on the role of audits play by saying:

“Auditing, like regulatory clarity, provides confidence to all stakeholders that companies are operating transparently and adhering to expected industry standards. As the business of digital assets continues to grow and mature, and compliance and regulatory standards become more robust, auditors will continue to play a pivotal role.

”READ MORE: Blockchain technology expected to tackle Africa’s challenges across industries


KPMG United States blockchain audit leader, Erich Braun, further contributed by saying that a business’s blockchain system should be developed with the intent to meet both accounting and operational needs to meet with accounting standards:

“SEC issuers will want to design blockchain technologies to support the entity’s internal control over financial reporting. Being able to prove how these technologies achieve their aims in a well-controlled environment is critical to a successful blockchain strategy.

If the technology is not auditable, the immense benefits it brings, such as increasing efficiencies and cutting costs, may not be realized.”Henri Arslanian, added in his closing remarks that the Big Four firms are indeed the most important players for the crypto asset space.

He said:

“I believe the Big Four firms will serve as the bridge between the crypto ecosystem and the institutional world. It is good for both the crypto ecosystem and for professional services firms like ours as a new source of clients that we can help.”

University of Vaasa (Finland) researchers propose a model that is capable of explaining 87 percent of cryptocurrency bankruptcies after only one month of trading.

It could potentially serve as a screening tool for investors keen to boost overall performance of cryptocurrency investment portfolios by avoiding investing in unreliable cryptocurrencies.

Nowadays there are thousands of cryptocurrencies available. Interestingly, only a small percentage are actively traded, whereas the vast majority appears to be either inactive or have already failed. Default risk is one of the risks associated with investing in digital assets like cryptocurrencies.

The question arises which factors help to predict whether a cryptocurrency will eventually go bust.A recently published research article from Klaus Grobys and Niranjan Sapkota from the University of Vaasa in the well-known journal Applied Economics addresses this question.

In their study, the researchers examined all available 146 Proof-of-Work-based cryptocurrencies that started trading prior to the end of 2014 and tracked their performance until December 2018.

They found that about 60 percent of those cryptocurrencies were eventually in default. The model of their study reveals four interesting factors that could be precursors to whether or not a coin will succeed.The first factor is a coin's first-day performance.

Specifically, how an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) performs on the first day coins are made public appears to be an indicator of long-term success. The study finds some evidence that those coins achieving the most long-term success also had the best first-day performances.




Klaus Grobys, University of Vaasa Credit: Foto Airaksinen

The second factor is a coin's pre-mining activity which takes place prior to the ICO launch. The study's findings indicate that a high level of activity raises a red flag.

Even if excessive pre-mining doesn't necessarily guarantee failure, it raises suspicions of a potential bait-and-switch—often referred to as 'pump and dump'.

The third factor that might play an important role is developer anonymity. The study provides evidence for that 79 percent of all defaulted cryptocurrencies are developed by anonymous developers. Interestingly, a correlating statistic indicates that 58 percent of new coin developers choose to remain anonymous.

Finally, the study also shows that rewards and supply matter as there appears to be a correlation between longevity and two other factors: lower minimum rewards and coin supply. This result is rather puzzling when considering how critical coin mining is to the sustainability of any cryptocurrency.

Specifically, without mining, a cryptocurrency network could not be maintained."Our study is a first attempt to reveal potential links between factors that could relate to coin success or failure.

The links that we established in our study are not necessarily causal and much more research needs to be done on this issue," says Dr. Klaus Grobys from the University of Vaasa.

China has been well aware that to become and remain a technology powerhouse, it needs to remain at the forefront of new technologies.

Blockchain, as one of the promising possibilities, dovetails with Beijing's current strategy of encouraging Chinese companies to seize the opportunity offered by digital technology.

Understandably, Beijing is creating its own world-leading and government-regulated digital currency.

People's Bank of China Governor Yi Gang told reporters in Beijing on Tuesday that internal pilot tests of the country's central bank digital currency-DC/EP, or digital currency and electronic payment-have been conducted in several locations, including Shenzhen, Guangdong province; Suzhou, Jiangsu province; the Xiongan New Area in Hebei province; and Chengdu, Sichuan province.After years of preparation, the tests were launched in April when the COVID-19 crisis stimulated digital economic operations.

The development of DC/EP was aided by the country's biggest State-run banks, including Agricultural Bank of China, which made the digital wallet app.

After top-level design and standard-setting, the DC/EP trials can check it for theoretical reliability, system stability, convenience, applicability and risk control. However, Yi said there is no timetable yet for the launch of a digital currency.

The digital yuan is structured on a two-tier monetary system-a central bank-issued digital currency for commercial banks and a commercial bank-issued digital currency focused on the public-and is intended to replace some of China's monetary base, or cash in circulation.

For those who might have reservations about this, it is important to point out that even US franchises that are established in China, such as McDonald's, Starbucks and Subway, are among the first to accept the DC/EP, and some government employees will be paid in digital currency in the four cities participating in the pilot program.

This State-regulated digital currency will have two main advantages. First, it will allow China to create an important soft-power tool; second, it will help China to control or minimize its shadow banking system. Shadow banking refers to financial activities outside the formal banking sector that are subject to lower levels of regulatory oversight and higher risks.

An additional benefit for the government is that a digital yuan would reduce its money printing costs. For commercial banks, DC/EP could facilitate more money transactions with lower costs. For the public, the digital currency would save on indirect transaction fees for interbank transfers.

The introduction of DC/EP shows that the country's plan to "seize the opportunity" of blockchain technology is not just talk but an actual plan in progress.

Even though it is too early to know whether the tests will be successful, the digital currency will be viewed as a breakthrough that will quite likely be imitated by many other governments.

 fact that the country is promoting blockchain technologies will present golden opportunities to many companies in its Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. As an international banking and financial hub, Hong Kong is ready to embrace blockchain technology and become a leader in financial technology.

Hong Kong is developing itself into a leading fintech hub in this regard. In March, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority announced the issuance of the first virtual-banking licenses.

Hong Kong's fintech industry has the potential to develop much faster now if it can leverage its involvement with the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area development plan.

When it specifically comes to DC/EP, Hong Kong can exploit its many advantages to create a regional digital currency. Former Hong Kong Monetary Authority chief executive Norman Chan Taklam proposed in mid-April a new regional digital currency based on a basket consisting of the Hong Kong dollar, the yuan, Japan's yen and South Korea's won.

China, Japan and South Korea are pushing for a trilateral free-trade agreement this year, and that, according to Chan, would lay the foundation for a regional digital currency.

This new currency would be different from bitcoin because it would be fully backed by the underlying fiat currencies. Specifically, the digital currency would be issued and redeemed against the four currencies according to a predetermined formula of calculating respective weights.

Blockchain offers many opportunities to both the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong. If DC/EP proves to be viable, China will become the first country to introduce a state-run digital currency, bringing about a more digital and convenient future.

The author has been a business analyst for a Hong Kong publicly listed company and holds a doctorate in Hong Kong real estate law and economics. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

According to an announcement on Tuesday, Facebook subsidiary and Libra wallet provider Calibra has now been rebranded to Novi – a portmanteau of the Latin root words, “novus” meaning new and “via” meaning way.

The first wallet product from the firm is intended to hold Libra’s various digital currencies, once the Facebook-led initiative goes live.

Novi also comes with a design revamp that is said to represent “the fluid movement of digital currencies,” but maintains an element of the Libra icon in its logo.



The Novi logo (Credit: Novi/Libra)


“While we’ve changed our name from Calibra,” Novi said in a statement, “we haven’t changed our long-term commitment to helping people around the world access affordable financial services.” Just in case you were worried about that.

See also: Libra’s Long Road From a Facebook Lab to the Global Stage: A Timeline

Novi also provided a little insight into how the product will work. The digital wallet will operate as a standalone app, as well as providing interoperability with Facebook’s social messaging apps Messenger and WhatsApp.

Aimed to make sending funds to friends or family as “easy as sending a message,” transactions with Novi will arrive instantly, according to the announcement, and will contain no “hidden charges.” Novi didn’t offer any detail on what any standard transaction fees might be.

All Novi customers will need to be verified using government-issued ID, while “fraud protections” will come baked in. The wallet will initially be rolled out to a limited number of countries.

The release date still remains unclear, but the project hopes to introduce “an early version of Novi when the Libra network is available.”

The wallet and future financial services for the project will now be operated by a new entity, Novi Financial – a Facebook subsidiary that, it said, will operate independently from the social media giant at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters.

The Libra project has suffered a series of setbacks as regulators and governments set off alarm bells over the perceived risks of the project in terms of financial crimes, some even calling it a threat to monetary sovereignty.

In 2019, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg said his company, which leads the Libra Association, would quit if the project were released prematurely.

In the face of all the pushback, the Libra Association’s original model for its digital currency – a stablecoin pegged to a basket of fiat currencies and government bonds – was restructured in mid-April. The project will now issue a number of stablecoins based on individual national currencies in different markets.

Libra still has plans for a multi-currency stablecoin but it will be backed by the new stablecoins and not directly by fiat currencies.

There have been other issues too. In June 2019, major firms including Uber, PayPal, Visa, Stripe, MercadoLibre, Bookings.com and Mastercard were all reported to be backing Facebook’s new crypto project.

See also: Facebook Affirms Libra Commitment With 50 New Job Openings in Ireland

However, pressure from U.S. regulators and lawmakers in October prompted Visa, Mastercard and Stripe to withdraw their affiliations with Libra. It’s been adding more new members since then, though, including its first state-owned entity, Temasek.

Checkout.com also joined the project last month.

Libra has notably been on a hiring spree of ex-U.S. government officials – presumably to help smooth its regulatory path to launch – having signed up two former staffers at FinCEN in recent weeks

Around the world, central banks are flirting with digital currency. With plans for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) underway in 46 countries including Sweden, France, Turkey, Uruguay, and China, the idea of “digital fiat currency” has rapidly escalated from a research project into something with very tangible implications.

CBDC is going to be a trending topic for years to come, and understanding what it is, how it compares with cryptocurrencies, and what threats and opportunities it presents for Bitcoin is crucial for anyone in crypto to understand. In this post, we set the stage for this developing story and explore some of the key concepts and questions forming around this narrative.

What are central bank digital currencies?

Put simply, a central bank digital currency is fiat money — or money issued and controlled by a government through its central bank — in digital form. While no nation has formally launched a CBDC to date, a number of global jurisdictions are actively building and rolling out pilot projects.

In April, China’s central bank issued a notice stating they will “undoubtedly further research and development of the national digital currency with enhanced top-down design,” a strong signal of their commitment to creating a digital version of the yuan.

China is already piloting a digital currency system in four large cities to replace some of its cash supply. Separately, central banks in Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, the U.K., the European Central Bank, and the Bank of International Settlements have joined forces this year to share knowledge and research on the potential adoption of CBDCs.

In theory, each CBDC unit will act like a secure digital equivalent of a paper bill, and can be used for payments, as a store of value and a unit of account. Much like a traditional currency bill that carries a unique serial number, each CBDC unit will be distinguishable to prevent imitation.

As a part of the money supply controlled by the central bank, it will work alongside other forms of regulated money, like coins, bills, and bonds.

On opposite end of the spectrum

CBDCs might look and smell like crypto (both leverage a digital ledger that allows transactions to be recorded and viewed in real time by multiple parties), but they will be the furthest thing from decentralized currencies. 

Central banks will have fully transparent access to the ledger and will not be capping the supply of digital currency.

The advantages and disadvantages are clear:

On one hand, CBDCs could help spread digital cash to the unbanked and help make traditional payment systems more efficient by reducing transfer and settlement time. In cases like China, a digital payment system coupled with identity tracking would also help in implementing monetary and fiscal policies more effectively.

On the flipside, CBDCs are highly centralized for maximum control by design and are in complete contrast to the permissionless and decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, thus raising privacy and surveillance concerns for its users.

This invited significant criticism from organizations like the Human Rights Foundation, that see CBDC’s as potential economic tools for political oppression and social engineering.

How Covid-19 accelerated the debate

The CBDC discussion took center stage across the world this year as a potentially more effective way to deliver direct stimulus funds to people as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Proponents believe that digital currency would solve the logistical question of how to quickly disperse large sums of money to many individuals and businesses with varying access to banking services.

In the US, millions of Americans are still waiting for the promised stimulus checks to arrive as either direct deposits or physical checks from the U.S. Treasury Department.


The proposals made before Congress this March would have charged the Fed with issuing both digital currency and digital wallets to give Americans direct access to funds. While these proposals did not quite make it to the final stimulus act, the conversation has indeed been started.

Source: 
https://financialservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/waters_146_xml_03.23.2020.pdf

Are CBDCs good for Bitcoin?

While the jury is still out on this one, a case could be made that CBDCs may pave the way for continued retail and institutional interest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. 

If billions of people will have digital wallets and possess a new understanding and familiarity with digital money, the onramp from there to a non-sovereign, global currency like Bitcoin becomes much shorter and faster. If every financial institution has to build out the tools and infrastructure to safely store and transact CBDC, that same infrastructure could potentially be used for Bitcoin.

More importantly, however, is the fact that CBDC is still government-controlled fiat currency and fundamentally similar to the fiat currency we have today. As such, it is still prone to selective money printing and inflation. To hedge against monetary inflation and the decreasing purchasing power of fiat, you may consider doing what Paul Tudor Jones and David Swensen did: buy BTC.

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A headline in MIT Technology Review caught my attention this week: “The pandemic is emptying call centers. AI chatbots are swooping in.”


COVID-19’s perfect storm – a global public health crisis, an economic meltdown and a surge in online connectivity – could accelerate what World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

In creating imperatives for both cost-cutting and software-dependent innovation, the pandemic is bringing us closer to an economy dominated by integrated networks of digital devices.


This raises all sorts of vital questions. But here we’ll just drill down into one: what kind of money will this new society need? 

It’s likely that long-term unemployment will be a defining condition of this emerging machine-dominant economy. We’re not just talking about cyclical, recessionary layoffs but net job losses that are structural and permanent. 

You’re reading Money Reimagined, a weekly look at the technological, economic and social events and trends that are redefining our relationship with money and transforming the global financial system. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here.

If so, the situation could confirm the so-called “end of work” thesis, which foresees new technologies leaving employers with an ever-declining need for human labor. It proved largely unfounded during the 20th century, as each fresh technological wave created new jobs that offset the old ones.

But the thesis is gaining weight again in response to a new, self-advancing phase in computer technology. Machine-learning algorithms mean our periodic competitions with new technologies are no longer one-off events.

Humans are now engaged in an endless battle with computers that are constantly getting smarter. As machines acquire the very cognitive and creative skills that previously allowed us to reinvent our employment opportunities, the battle may be unwinnable. 

UBI’s moment

If we are indeed approaching the end of work, expect a surge of interest in universal basic income. 

UBI is the idea that the government should pay a basic living wage to all citizens. It has been thrust into public consciousness by COVID-19 and the sudden, massive expansion in unemployment that came with it – 36 million alone in the U.S.

On Thursday, its advocates got a boost when Twitter founder Jack Dorsey announced a $5 million donation to former Presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s Humanity Forward nonprofit, which is using $250 microgrants to make the case for UBI. 

We don’t have space here for a deep debate about UBI. Just please don’t narrow-mindedly reject it as “socialism.

” UBI backers range from liberals who want to expand public safety nets to conservatives who see potential to reform inefficient and highly politicized welfare distribution.

Others see UBI as correcting for the power of big tech by redistributing revenue gained through personal data mining. The system should compensate them for those vital resources.



Andrew Yang (Credit: CoinDesk archives)

If UBI is to be part of our new digital economy, it would seem logical to make it digital too. 

We’ve already seen U.S. lawmakers propose that, rather than mailing out checks for COVID-19 relief, funds should be sent directly as digital dollars via special Federal Reserve wallets. 

The proposal didn’t pass, but having central banks establish a digital currency for social distribution payments is, remarkably, now a mainstream topic.

There are clear benefits to digitizing UBI: Direct-to-consumer payments could improve efficiency, prevent confiscation by middlemen, create parity for the “unbanked,” and, provided the rollout goes smoothly, legitimize the direct connection between a government and its people.

Programmability could also allow authorities to constrain how the funds are used. Software designs could, say, allow supermarkets or landlords to accept the funds, but not barmen. (To be sure, this is inconsistent with the spirit of pure UBI, but it would likely to resonate with some politicians.)

On the other hand, as European Central Bank executive board member Yves Mersch noted in a presentation to Consensus Distributed last week, citizens could see their civil rights undermined if central banks don’t build privacy protections into direct-to-consumer digital currency accounts. 

With this infrastructure, central banks could directly manipulate the value of people’s personal money, creating a more powerful mechanism for managing consumer spending and inflation than the current solution, which relies on banks and financial markets as indirect conduits for monetary policy.

Whether you think that’s a good thing depends on how you feel about central banks’ being empowered to manipulate the value of money to manage economic conditions.

Another challenging issue is that involving central banks in governments’ fiscal distributions may make their economic policymaking dependent on political interests.

That would be a radical departure from the independence principles upon which central banking has been founded for the past four decades. It might make central bankers more accountable to the public interest, as their actions would directly impact voters’ pocketbooks. But they could also be forced to pursue the self interests of politicians.

You get the idea: Inevitable or not, digital currency-based UBI brings many complications. 

Machine money

I hate to say this, but we humans aren’t the only constituents in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We must also consider the interests of the digital machines.

As social distancing becomes normalized, expect cities to ease ordinances on things like delivery robots, self-driving taxis and other autonomous devices.

Next, expect urban planners to draw up sweeping blueprints for smart cities that combine the data generated by such devices with network-driven dynamic pricing so that everything from traffic flows to renewable energy sharing can be managed in a self-correcting system. 

To optimize such systems, devices owned by different individuals and companies would be given autonomy to interact and exchange data, goods and valuable services, and to receive, hold and send digital, programmable money as standalone entities.

For this to happen, the system’s unit of value, its currency, must function as a digital token exchanged peer-to-peer – in this case, machine-to-machine – without the interference of a banking intermediary.

Whether such a system would use central bank digital currencies, stablecoins, native blockchain tokens like bitcoin, or all three is yet to be determined.



Credit: Shutterstock/Flystock

China is surging ahead with such a model, incorporating its Digital Currency Electronic Payment system, or DCEP, into a network of smart cities that deploy tools provided by the national Blockchain Services Network. In due time, the efficiencies China extracts from that will put competitive pressure on Western countries to follow suit. 

When that happens, we must ensure that optimizing such systems doesn’t compromise the interests of those they are supposed to serve. The money of the future can serve the interests of machines, but only if they align with the interests of us humans.

How to scale blockchains? Ask the internet

You know how it is: life in lockdown has you staring constantly at a screen. Not just 9-to-5, but always.

Almost every single human interaction outside of your immediate family and almost every commercial transaction you make is done online. And how many more hours of streaming videos are watching? So, how much more busy is the internet these days? 



Graph courtesy of Cloudflare


John Graham-Cumming, the Chief Technology Officer of Cloudflare, answered that question by treating the traffic flowing through his network security company’s systems as a proxy for overall usage.

Sure enough, global traffic is up 40% on the year, as per the chart above that Cloudfare provided us. In a blog post addressing earlier data last month, Graham-Cumming highlighted what this says about the resilience of the internet, which has had no real interruptions despite the surging usage.

“Overall the Internet has shown that it was built for this: designed to handle huge changes in traffic, outages, and a changing mix of use,” he wrote.

There are lessons here for blockchains. To scale them, look to the layered design of the internet.

The base layer protocol, known as TCP/IP, is sometimes described as a one trick pony. It only does data switching, but it does it really well. The single task design means it can deal with the challenges of heavy traffic.

All the other functionality of the internet – email, web sites, file transfer, etc. – isn’t forced on that main load-bearing system but enabled by higher level open protocols such as SMTP and HTTP, and then by proprietary applications even further “up the stack.

” It’s relevant to the bitcoin versus ethereum debate, with the latter more sophisticated, multifaceted and powerful for running things like smart contracts but, according to its critics, entailing a complexity that makes it more prone to breakdowns and security breaches. 

The global town hall

$91 million. That’s the current value of the 10,000 bitcoin Laszlo Hanyecz gave up to purchase two pizzas on this day 10 years ago. It was the first time bitcoin was spent on a good or service, giving the event canonical relevance in the cryptocurrency’s history. Ever since, it has been memorialized on this date as “Bitcoin Pizza Day.

” The outside world tends to focus on the massive fortune Hanyecz left on the table by not “HODLing” his bitcoin, which after exchanging them for $25 worth of pizza were valued at a mere quarter of a cent at the time. He tends to respond with a shrug, arguing that he did something to help legitimize bitcoin.

And, indeed, his act helped set off a price rally that has continued to today.

But Hanyecz’s pizza order is also important for the value it ascribed to bitcoin for its utility as a payment vehicle. Hanyecz has continued to take an interest in initiatives to help make bitcoin more usable for payments, even as the narrative has shifted toward its value proposition as “digital gold.

” Two years ago on this day he made a point by using the Lightning Network, which seeks to make bitcoin transactions more efficient and viable for low-value transactions, to make a certain, iconic purchase: a pizza.

Bitcoin Pizza Day 2020

We mark the 10th anniversary of Bitcoin Pizza Day on May 22, 2020, by chatting with Laszlo Hanyecz about his infamous 10,000 BTC transaction.Volume 90%

 The Fed is “not out of ammunition by a long shot.” So said the man in charge of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, in a gloomy interview on CBS 60 Minutes last Sunday. Markets rallied in response, which should have left heads scratching.

I mean, of course, the Fed has loads more ammunition left – it has unlimited printing power. The question is whether that ammunition is effective. Is it firing blanks?

The bigger risk is that the real limit to its effective power won’t reveal itself until some indeterminate time in the future, when it’s too late. But at some point – after the Fed has flooded trillions of dollars into markets, after it has acquired huge swaths of corporate debt to find itself politically compromised, after it has restored the wealth of hedge funds but has left ordinary Americans living hand to mouth – confidence in the dollar will disappear.

At that moment, everyone will finally realize that the ammunition was useless all along. 

Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, is one of the most influential financial journalists of all time. So when an article of his comes out with the title “Why inflation might follow the pandemic” it’s time to sit up and take notice.

The headline suggested a countervailing view to that of the economic mainstream, with its persistent argument that the demand contraction from the COVID-19 crisis will produce long-lasting deflation.

But if you’re expecting this to align with the forecasts of those in the crypto community who believe the central banks’ aggressive stimulus will result in debased money and hyperinflation, think again.

Wolf puts all the variables on the table – huge government debt ratios, rapidly expanding broad money supply measures potentially offset by a slowing money velocity, and the end of the disinflationary effect of globalization – to argue, that inflation might finally return, but also might not.

Bottom line: we live in chartered territory. No one really knows. Not even someone who earned himself a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for his services to financial journalism.

GBBC Open Source Ideas:


The Future of Urban Living
Part I:

The Rise of “Smart Cities”

17 March 2020

Washington DC,
United States

IntroductionUrban populations around the world are growing, putting new and unexpected strains on urban environments and governments. The United Nations estimates that 55 percent of the world’s population lives in urban areas; this is projected to increase to 68 percent by 2050, adding about 2.5 billion people to urban areas.


i.


In the face of this growth and pressing issues surrounding transportation, water management, energy, waste management, government service delivery, and much more, some cities are turning to technology with the goal of becoming “smart cities.” According to McKinsey, the smart city industry will be a $400 billion market in 2020.

ii.


If you ask people to define a “smart city,” you will likely receive a range of answers: from “I don’t know” to “cities where streets expand and contract based on traffic patterns,” or “cities where noise and light pollution iseliminated to improve the psychological wellbeing of inhabitants.” While there is no set definition of a “smart city,” this term generally refers to urban environments in which technologies, especially Internet of Things (IoT) and broadband, are used to improve the lives of citizens.

While splashier and more visible smart city innovations, such as applications that identify and alert users to open parking spaces, receive the bulk of media attention, there are many other “background ” innovations that can lead to significant quality of life improvements for citizens; this is where blockchain technology fits in. It should be noted that blockchain and IoT are an effective and popular technology pairing.

A recent Gartner survey found that 75 percent of IoT adopters “in the U.S. have already adopted blockchain or are planning to adopt it by the end of 2020. Among the blockchain adopters, 86 percent are implementing the two technologies together in various projects.”

iii.


Blockchain technology is distributed, transparent, and highly secure, three traits that can prove invaluable for certain smart city innovations. With blockchain’s massive potential in this area in mind, the Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC) and respective collaborators conducted a survey of individuals in New York City, Los Angeles, Nur-Sultan (formerly Astana), and the United Kingdom regarding opportunities and roadblocks for blockchain implementation.

For this survey, questions were written by the GBBC team with the aim of understanding how individuals in the blockchain space view the implementation of blockchain technology for smart cities.

To disseminate the survey, the GBBC partnered with trusted local groups and institutions focused on blockchain technology in each of the target cities. Partner organizations, including NYC Blockchain Center, Los Angeles Blockchain Lab, Citigate Dewe Rogerson, and Astana International Financial Centre (AIFC), then agreed to share the survey with their respective....



Download the full report here: https://gbbcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Future-of-Urban-Living_Part-I_Smart-Cities-.pdfhttps://gbbcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Future-of-Urban-Living_Part-I_Smart-Cities-.pdfth their respective....

Download the full report here: 

https://gbbcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Future-of-Urban-Living_Part-I_Smart-Cities-.pdf

Special Report

Published 14 May 2020

GBBC Open-Source Ideas:

Special Report
Utility Tokens and ERC-20 ICOs:

Where are we now?

in research collaboration
with select GBBC members

*
14 May 2020
Geneva, Switzerland


Utility Tokens: Do they have any utility? 


A utility token gives the owner cryptographically secured rights to use a particular software, network, or platform and the ability to redeem the token for a currency or good. Utility tokens can also be used as an escrow bond to encourage certain behavior. 


While terminology and distinctions are not widely agreed upon in the blockchain and crypto community, tokens are generally said to fall into three groups: native tokens (used to secure the protocol), utility tokens, and tokenized securities/equity tokens. 


The most common utility tokens are those built upon the ERC-20 Ethereum standard, which was first used to develop smart contract functionality and inspired the proliferation of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs).  


i. 


Utility tokens have a wide variety of applications. One example of a utility token’s functionality is similar to that of a tradable gift card or pre-sold software license. 


Notably, while utility tokens can be used on an application to engage in transactions and earn rewards, they are not fundamentally intended to be relied on as a passive investment vehicle. Since 2017, there have been more than 5,500 ICOs. 


ii.


 These projects have come under intense scrutiny, with some estimating that up to 80 percent of ICOs were scams.


iii.


More recently, research published in the Journal of the British Blockchain Association (JBBA), examined this assertion and discovered that the magnitude of ICO scams was dramatically lower than initially reported, and instead estimated the figure to be 2.2 percent. 


iv.


 Rather than fraud, the high failure rate for these firms was attributable to their early stage, the speculative nature of new technologies, v as well as the cryptocurrency crash of 2018, in which tokens lost 80 percent of their value.


vi.


Appendix 1 of this report profiles seventeen token projects to illustrate the numerous functional examples of firms and projects that are building and making significant progress....


Download the full report here: 


Download the Full Report Here: 
https://gbbcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/GBBC-Open-Source-Ideas-Special-Report-Utility-Tokens-and-ERC-20-ICOS.pdf

Overstock CEO Jonathan Johnson has claimed that private, consumer-controlled immunity passports may be the killer-app that propels blockchain technology into the mainstream.

In an interview with PYMNTS, he said that the company’s investment arm has turned to two startups creating blockchain-based apps allowing consumers to download and control their health records.

Making people feel safe again...

Johnson suggests that we must consider what will make an average consumer feel safe to use air travel, restaurants or even stores again after the coronavirus pandemic subsides. Ultimately, he believes this hinges on the knowledge that everyone around them is uninfected with virus:

"An immunity passport is what that is going to look like for a lot of industries. If I can prove that I’ve got the antibodies or have steered clear of infection entirely, and I can show that on an immunity passport, that’s pretty powerful."

… while maintaining privacy

A major hurdle with such an app is how to encourage adoption. Potential users may be put off amid concerns about data privacy or illicit usage. And stories about totalitarian regimes like China enforcing such a scheme on its citizens do nothing to calm fears.


The key difference between the blockchain-based apps in which Overstock is investing, and a state-enforced scheme, says Johnson, is that of choice.

Consumers must choose to access their health data through the app, and can then choose who to share the information with.

Johnson also thinks that adoption will improve when certain businesses start to require such an immunity passport, for example to watch a sports match, enter a plane, or dine at a restaurant.T

his will force consumers who want to participate in such events to sign up.

Bringing blockchain out of Bitcoin’s shadow

Overstock has been a long-time advocate of cryptocurrency and blockchain, but Johnson feels that the technology has so far been overshadowed by its first use case of digital payments.

He says that a solution which enables consumers and businesses to regain confidence in transacting face-to-face, utilizing the secure and immutable transfer of data by blockchain, could bring the technology out of that shadow and into the mainstream consciousness — even if many don’t understand the technology behind it.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrency investors have been nervously eyeing the bitcoin price since its highly-anticipated supply squeeze earlier this month.

The bitcoin price took a big step down this week, dropping 10% to under $9,000 per bitcoin after failing to pass the psychological $10,000 level.

Now, with investors desperately seeking reliable returns amid the coronavirus crisis, one top wealth advisor has said it's the wrong time to bet on bitcoin.

MORE FROM FORBES

As Bitcoin Struggles, This Tiny Cryptocurrency Has Soared A Massive 230%By Billy Bambrough

Bitcoin has so far weathered the coronavirus crisis well though some fear the bitcoin price could be ... [+] NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES

"Every bear market presents opportunities and it's tempting, particularly for younger generations, to look for speculative assets," Peter Mallouk, chief investment officer at wealth management firm Creative Planning, told CNBC, pointing to bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, gold and cannabis stocks.

"There is no need to go over into the speculative world," Mallouk said, warning speculative assets like bitcoin have "a lot more booms and busts.""It's a lot sexier to buy things like cryptocurrencies, gold and silver but ... they don't bring any income to the investor."


Bitcoin is famously volatile, gaining worldwide recognition in late 2017 after the price soared from under $1,000 per bitcoin at the beginning of the year to around $20,000 by December.Since then bitcoin has crashed to lows of $3,000 before bouncing back up to around $14,000 last year.

Mallouk, who defines "speculative" as "anything that doesn’t produce income and bring it to you as an investor," thinks bonds and certain company stocks are a lot more attractive than the likes of bitcoin in current market conditions, naming entertainment giant Disney, fast food chain McDonald's and consultancy Accenture as better bets.

"A bear market puts everything on sale. You have incredible companies that we know are not going anywhere, selling for half off," said Mallouk, who has previously warned bitcoin is a "dead man walking" and in a "death spiral.

"The coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdowns put in place to contain it sparked a massive stock market rout in March before central banks around the world, led by the U.S. Federal Reserve, promised to back the vast majority of markets.



The bitcoin price has climbed over the last 12 months but has swung wildly, soaring to over $13,000 ... [+] COINBASEThe Fed has pumped trillions of dollars into the U.S. economy over recent months in a desperate bid to prop up the market though some have warned the unprecedented action has artificially inflated stocks.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq is now in positive territory for the year, boosted by the likes of Google and Amazon, while the S&P 500 has almost recovered all of its March corona-crash losses.

However, bitcoin, as well as some smaller cryptocurrencies, have outperformed most other assets so far this year.Bitcoin is currently on course to be one of the year's best performing assets, though many bitcoin and crypto analysts have warned a planned bitcoin supply cut earlier this month could mean it's hurtling toward a sudden crash.

The bitcoin price had been holding up since its third supply cut, known as a halving, on May 11—although cracks began to appear this week when the price moved sharply lower, losing around $500 in a matter of minutes.Follow me on Twitter. 




Billy Bambrough

I am a journalist with significant experience covering technology, finance, economics, and business around the world. As the founding editor of Verdict.co.uk I reported… Read More