arafat

By Chris Baraniuk


THERE’S a new way to prove you are who you say you are – inspired by the tech underpinning bitcoin. Usually, when you need to verify your identity, the process is archaic, insecure and time-consuming. You get a copy of your birth certificate in the post, put it in an envelope and hope it gets to whoever is asking for it. In the digital era, this should take seconds.

But putting something as sensitive as a birth certificate online risks identity theft in the era of hacks and leaks. Now, the US state of Illinois is experimenting with a secure way of putting control of that data into its citizens’ hands, with the help of distributed ledgers, similar to the blockchain used by bitcoin.

Just last month, Illinois announced a pilot project to create “secure ‘self-sovereign’ identity” for Illinois citizens wishing to access their birth certificate.

The idea is to use a blockchain-like distributed ledger that allows online access only to the people owning the ID, and any third parties granted their permission.

Illinois is working with software firm Evernym of Herriman, Utah, to create a record of who should be able to access data from the state’s birth register. Once this is done, no central authority should be required, just your say-so.


They’re not the only ones. According to a report by Garrick Hileman and Michael Rauchs at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, UK, governments are increasingly experimenting with it, including the UK and Brazil.

Activists have long called for people to have greater control of their data. Hacks and leaks are making it too risky for authorities to be the central repository of citizens’ most vital information.

With distributed ledgers, all participants within a network can have their own identical copy of data like access permissions – so no one can view cryptographically sealed birth certificate data unless they’re meant to.

 Blockchains are a type of distributed ledger that gets the whole network to observe and verify transactions – such as when someone sends a bitcoin to their friend.Distributed ledgers could be a great way to store critical data. But “the devil is always in the details”, says Dave Birch at electronic transactions consultancy Consult Hyperion.

Done wrong, distributed ledgers could carve mistakes in stone. “If your midwife fat-fingers the weight of the child or the name then you’re going to have a typo in your name from birth forever,” he says. “Bullshit in, bullshit forever.”Nonetheless, some think these projects are a step towards a world where all data is managed by the individuals who own it.

It could backfire on governments, though. Citizens in Catalonia are gearing up for a referendum on independence from Spain, planned for 1 October. It has been termed “illegal” by authorities in Madrid.

But a start-up is studying the possibility of using blockchain technology to let citizens hold their own vote, with no government authority needed.This article appeared in print under the headline “Time to digitally prove who you are”

Discover even more stories like this on New Scientist here: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23531454-500-blockchaininspired-project-means-you-are-who-you...

Banking Everywhere

From our ancestors exchanging livestock tens of thousands of years ago to the brokers trading stocks on Wall Street today, bartering is a foundational aspect of human society.

Throughout history, we have traded what we have for what we need, and through these transactions, we have survived.As we made the transition from trading in cattle and grains to dollars and cents, we started relying more and more heavily on financial institutions such as banks, investment firms, and lenders to help us manage our assets.

As of 2015, 93 percentof U.S. households had at least one checking or savings account, and that’s not including the millions of people who also have mortgages, credit cards, or other ties to the finance industry.For decades, nearly every aspect of our lives has involved a third-party financial institution in some way, but despite their ubiquity, these institutions are fundamentally flawed.

Unexpected fees and slow transaction times can regularly leave users frustrated, but even those problems are relatively benign compared to other, more foundational issues.

Because they store data on centralized servers, banks and other traditional financial institutions are susceptible to security breaches. In some cases, those breaches can lead to the loss of huge sums of money, such as when hackers stole $80 million from Bangladesh’s central bank in 2016.

In other instances, identities are the target, like when a Brazilian bank’s website was hijacked for five hours in April, during which account holders willingly supplied the hackers with sensitive personal information.

These institutions also have barriers to entry that prevent some from participating in them. For example, a single past mistake like a bounced check can leave a person blacklisted from opening a bank account for several years, and in some nations, such as Saudi Arabia, women aren’t even allowed to open accounts without permission from their husbands.

For these reasons and others, a whopping 38 percent of the adult population worldwide doesn’t have a bank account. That’s roughly 2 billion people who are largely unable to participate in the world economy as it currently operates.Thankfully, an alternative to traditional finance has emerged in the form of the blockchain.

Enter: The Blockchain

A blockchain is a distributed digital ledger, which means it doesn’t have one centralized authority verifying and recording transactions (like a bank or a brokerage does). Instead, when two parties want to trade blockchain assets (better known as cryptocurrencies), the request is sent out to a network of computers.

These “nodes” individually verify and record the transaction on their identical copy of the ledger, and a group of these transactions will become one timestamped block on the blockchain.This process can be completed within seconds, and because it is distributed (and not confined to one central server), a blockchain is protected against the security issues that plague traditional finance institutions.

Anyone can participate in the blockchain economy, and transactions can be completed anonymously, further protecting individuals’ identities.Over the last year, these various benefits have caused interest in cryptocurrencies to skyrocket. From a relatively paltry $17 billion in January, the global cryptocurrency market cap has grown to $126 billion. 

Wall Street traders are turning their attention to cryptocurrency exchanges, and instead of debit cards, customers are now using their crypto wallets to buy everything from coffee to video games.

Despite this growth, however, the blockchain economy is still in its nascent stages, and all of the kinks haven’t been worked out yet.One of the biggest issues involves how cryptocurrencies are traded. While the blockchain itself is decentralized, the major exchanges used for the buying and selling of assets are not.

That means that, just like banks, these exchanges are susceptible to security breaches, so when traders entrust them with their funds, they are leaving themselves vulnerable. In fact, just a few months ago, one of the largest bitcoin exchanges was hacked, compromising the data of 30,000 customers and leading to the loss of an estimated $870,000.

Because trading is spread out over dozens of exchanges, individual exchanges can also have problems meeting volume demands as interest in crypto grows. This lack of liquidity can force traders to pay higher fees, as well as lead to “flash crashes” that can send the value of a cryptocurrency plummeting from hundreds of dollars (or more) down to mere cents in just a single second.

Of course, there have been attempts to make decentralized exchanges, but these, too, are problematic. For example, they have inherently higher latency, higher fees, less fluidity, and an increased potential for unfairness than centralized exchanges.

But new, alternative ways to exchange cryptocurrencies are emerging, and they could help solve many of the ongoing issues. One of these newest contenders is AirSwap, which is a platform that is built off of a truly peer-to-peer model.

Peer-To-Peer Trading

AirSwap is a new way to trade Ethereum tokens. Unlike bitcoin, which is essentially a form of digital money, a token offers its holder some utility within a system, such as voting power, access to special features, or an amount of a virtual currency.

Because Ethereum’s decentralized platform was designed specifically to support token networks, it has become the go-to blockchain for anyone looking to launch a new token.

When ready to trade these tokens, members of the AirSwap community can announce that they are interested in trading and connect directly with other members — no third party required. To ensure they’re getting a fair deal, AirSwap provides real-time price suggestions before committing to a transaction, both for sellers and buyers.

AirSwap members can even build their own storefronts, creating new ERC20 tokens from the ground up and seamlessly bringing them to market.Because tokens are in the possession of either the buyer (the “maker” of the order) or the seller (the “taker” of the order) right up until a smart contract is executed on the Ethereum blockchain, the AirSwap protocol eliminates the opportunity for theft provided by centralized exchanges.

Liquidity is no longer a problem either, as sellers aren’t beholden to the asset price set by the exchange. Because each deal is negotiated directly between the two parties and not set up through the blockchain, the problems of decentralized exchanges are also eliminated.

AirSwap takes everything that makes the blockchain itself revolutionary — its high level of security, lack of a centralized authority, and low barrier to entry — and applies it to the trading of blockchain assets. 

All that token traders need to do to take advantage of this new decentralized exchange is purchase the AirSwap Token (AST), which will launch on October 10. After that, they’ll be free to use AirSwap to frictionlessly manage their tokenized assets in this new era of finance.

Follow more reports about the blockchain on Futurism here: https://futurism.com/blockchain-is-radically-transforming-societys-oldest-institutions/

Strict editorial control may have its benefits, but it is rarely unbiased. Audiences that face a flow of slanted information from a centralized outlet are not likely to get a full picture of a story.

This state of affairs is widely criticized as a threat to true freedom of speech, especially in authoritarian nations where media are commonly used to implement propagandist agenda.

Extensive usage of social networks by media and public figures effectively follows the same pattern.An alternative decentralized environment might become the way to obtain more impartial information based on a manifold of independent opinions.

For numerous up-and-coming companies, Blockchain offers a chance to implement an independent and decentralized media outlet while providing the means for distributed data storage, transparent incentive models, and community moderation.

Decentralized Social Networks

Currently there are only a handful of viable products in this area, though there have been numerous attempts to build such a platform. For instance, sharing and tipping platform CoinAwesome went silent after two failed crowdsale attempts.

Blockchain-based social network Minds.com that sought to “take on Facebook” didn’t get much attention either; a Q&A reputation-driven system Reveal has gained initial traction, but withered away as well in the wake of unpleasant issues with users’ cryptocurrency accounts.

In most cases, when it comes to creating a decentralized Blockchain-powered media, it results in creation of a social network of some sort.There are some notable examples of projects that seek to build a working decentralized social environment using Blockchain-powered solution.

Some of them are already operational, while others are still under development or seeking funding through ICO’s and token sales.

One of the most remarkable examples in this area is Steemit, which has been operational for more than a year. It is a system built around community-driven posting, evaluation, and curation of content, based on the Steem Blockchain.

While the “traditional” social media outlets extract value from their audience for their own benefit, Steemit distributes the benefits of so-called “attention economy” among its participants.The system rewards users for posts and content curation: users upvote posts they like, upvoted posts get popular, authors of the popular posts and users who upvoted them get STEEM token rewards.

Steemit also employs a logarithmic reputation system, in which every member has a score that represents their individual contribution to the platform and its community.Japan boasts its own local initiative called Alis, which is somewhat similar to Steemit.

The service enables users to consume reliable information from experts, post articles and receive rewards in ALIS tokens for trustworthy and valuable content.

All submissions are evaluated by the community; members click the like button to upvote the articles they enjoy and find credible. Authors of highly rated materials gain token rewards, recognition and trust from community members.

The project is currently raising funds for further development and is focused mostly on the Japanese community.

Content distribution platforms

Another effort in decentralization of media is the DECENT Network. Unlike Alis and Steemit, which are essentially social networks, DECENT is a Blockchain-based content distribution platform that ensures invariant storage of published materials and eliminates any intermediaries along with their potential influence and distribution fees.

The network can be used to publish any sort of media: music, programming code, video, images, books, etc. DECENT’s native DCT token is used to facilitate media assets trading. DCT token awards also incentivize network nodes to store content and verify new blocks with metadata and transactions.

The network provides its members with a transparent, trustless and decentralized environment to store, consume and monetize original media content.One more notable specimen is the Synereo project, a middle ground between DECENT and social media platforms like Steemit.

It is a decentralized social network aiming to provide its users with the tools to monetize their original content or good taste in content curation.The system is built on a Blockchain 2.0 employing Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm.

The native AMP token serves as a measurement of users’ interest in the particular submission and as an incentive to exchange information.An interesting post may be sponsored by its author or grateful readers who leave AMP tokens as tips.

Authors of popular posts get a share of the tokens invested into their posts as a reward. For advertisers who use Synereo platform to promote their product, AMP tokens provide both the leverage to reach wider audiences and a reliable performance indicator.

Finally, there is Snip, a project which deviates from the obvious social media-focused trend and builds a decentralized news outlet. It provides a decentralized environment for user-generated news, free of any censorship and editorial control over the published material.

Every user of the platform is able to write and post concise stories on any desired topic and access a personalized newsfeed tailored to their individual preferences. The system employs so-called SnipCoin as an incentive for authors to submit relevant content, while giving readers the means to express their gratitude to contributors of interesting stories.

Since community feedback directly influences the popularity of the story in question and its author’s welfare, users are encouraged to submit only interesting and unbiased news.

Conclusion

Media today is headed towards decentralization. This trend manifests itself in the growing number of new companies that employ Blockchain technology, and may result in tokenization of existing media businesses. Even though most attempts at a  decentralized media outlet are not fully developed yet, this trend seems to be positive.

It’s likely that at least one decentralized media platform will gain significant traction, so old-school centralized outlets and clickbait media may eventually be forced to adapt to the changing landscape. Otherwise they risk becoming obsolete in the decentralized society of tomorrow.

Continue reading to discover even more blockchain stories on Coin Telegraph here: https://cointelegraph.com/news/blockchain-powers-shift-to-decentralization-in-media

Airbnb is constantly cited as one of the leading disruptors in hospitality, going from startup to a $30bn market valuation in a few years. Companies such as Airbnb, Uber and Lyft, together with newly emerging technologies like AI and blockchain, and established ones such as AR/VR and mobile, continue to re-shape our industry.

The lesson here is stark: traditional hotel operators need to be learning, educating their teams, working with vendors and forming plans to get ahead of something that could disrupt their business. It's time to prepare, disrupt or be disrupted!


SIMILAR STORIES

• Blockchain: Beyond the Hype | By Tim Haynes
• Will Blockchain Technology put Airbnb, Expedia, and Priceline out of business? | By Frank Wolfe
• The Definitive Guide to Hotel Blockchain Technology
• Guest Engagement and the Customer's Digital Journey | By Andrew Sanders

Many readers will have heard of blockchain, or most certainly the reason it came into being in the first instance: bitcoin. But as with any new technology, there's a great deal of misinformation circulating. Blockchain is here to stay, and will likely become a significant disruptor in travel and hospitality. But what is it, and what should you be doing about it?

What is blockchain?

Put simply, blockchain is a distributed digital ledger, meaning that data relating to transactions is stored using a particular methodology that guarantees a transaction cannot be amended. Therefore, and by definition, a trusted chronology of transactions is created. Further, these transactions are stored on multiple servers, and any member of a particular blockchain has visibility into the data stored.

This is necessary to ensure integrity, but also means sensitive information, like personally identifiable information (PII) and payment details should still be stored in databases and systems outside a blockchain.Regardless of the variety of blockchain flavors, these primary characteristics are constant:

• The data is immutable, meaning that records can only be added and never deleted or changed
• It is distributed among many computers that each store full or partial copies of the ledger
• It creates a guaranteed 'trusted' environment between two parties

"Trusted environment between two parties" is akin to a middleman where 'trust' would otherwise have to be artificially manufactured somehow. It facilitates the direct transfer of value between two parties who don't have to trust each other.

The unit of currency, or the 'value', can be any digital asset, e.g. property deed, money, loyalty points, identity, music, votes and much more. Since the process of creating trust in a traditional sense can take time, blockchain has the potential to settle that aspect of a transaction much more rapidly than at present.

Therefore, any entity that currently exists as a middleman and trades transactions between two parties stands to be disrupted by blockchain. In the hospitality world, the transactions most widely thought to be impacted by blockchain include loyalty points, travel insurance, mobile key and any authentication of assets including payments/settlements, procurement and possibly booking transactions and history.

As of August 2017, as many as 80% of banking institutions worldwide are already investing in blockchain technology. Some governments are mandating that imported goods must (within a few years) be processed on technology based on blockchain, and it is already having a big impact on supply chain logistics and traceability.

This means that blockchain is here to stay, and is the reason that everyone involved in hospitality technology, from hotel chain CTOs to software developers and vendors, need to ensure they're both educated and have a plan in place on the subject.

What you should be planning/doing if you're not already

1. Educate yourself and your teams.Make sure you know what blockchain is, how it works, and what your peer group and people in other industries are doing.

This information is widely available via Tnooz, Forbes, HospitalityNet and DataArt.

2. Develop a short- and medium-term strategy (pilot and vision).Blockchain has some significant benefits but will demand some business process re-engineering and, with it, changes to your software systems and likely infrastructure.

Quite how it will impact you is unknown, so for now it's worth exploring what the impact could be and what your vision is. Start building the skills needed to support a blockchain environment with some small pilot projects.

3. Influence the industry on strategy and priorities.In the spirit of being the influencer rather than the influenced, those who have an interest should be active in HFTP's task force on blockchain when it convenes, and follow HTNG's work group on the topic.

4. Find suitable talent internally.You may find that your company has people who know something about blockchain already. Understand what talent you have and can access internally and what else you need.

5. Source expertise externally. Experts and consultants exist and can help not only with strategy, education and policies but also with hands-on development in a blockchain world.

DataArt is one of ... continue reading: https://www.hospitalitynet.org/opinion/4084769.html

Mike Novogratz is reinventing himself as the king of bitcoin.The swaggering macro manager who flamed out at Fortress Investment Group LLC is starting a $500 million hedge fund to invest in cryptocurrencies, initial coin offerings and related companies.

Novogratz will put up $150 million of his own money and plans to raise $350 million more by January, mainly from family offices, wealthy individuals and fellow hedge fund managers, said a person familiar with his plans.

At that size, the Galaxy Digital Assets Fund would be the biggest of its kind and signal a growing acceptance of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether as legitimate investments.

For Novogratz, 52, the fund marks a comeback to professional money management after humbling losses at Fortress and almost two years of self-imposed exile from Wall Street.

Novogratz, in an interview with Bloomberg Television, declined to confirm or deny that he’s raising a fund, citing regulatory constraints. He did talk at length about his recent experience with digital assets and why he’s eager to trade them.

“This is going to be the largest bubble of our lifetimes,” Novogratz said. “Prices are going to get way ahead of where they should be. You can make a whole lot of money on the way up, and we plan on it.”

‘Trading Junkie’

Just this month, bitcoin hit a record of almost $5,000 then plunged 30 percent in two weeks as buyers weighed the impact of a Chinese ban on initial coin offerings and domestic trading in virtual currencies.“I sold at $5,000 or $4,980,” he said.

“Then three weeks later I’m trying to buy it in the low $3,000s. If you’re good at that and you’re a trading junkie, it’s a lot of fun.”



The fortunes being made and lost are just one reason Novogratz likens the cryptocurrency market to the Wild West. Digital assets like bitcoin need more regulation, and in the meantime some initial coin offerings, or ICOs, will prove to be fraudulent “get-rich-quick schemes,” he said.

While the technology community has embraced the libertarian ideal of a decentralized, open-source payment system in which a fixed money supply is determined by computer code, financiers are taking a more cautious approach.

Only two other hedge funds have raised tens of millions of dollars to invest in digital assets, Polychain Capital and MetaStable Capital.

Read about cyberattacks and digital currencyNovogratz’s fund will have a broader mandate, including market-making, arbitrage, stakes in internet coin offerings and venture capital-style investments in digital-asset development, said the person familiar with his plans, who asked not to be named because they’re still private.

He also brought on as partners two traders with years of experience in hedge fund investing and compliance: Richard Tavoso, the former head of global arbitrage at RBC Capital Markets; and David Namdar, who worked at Millennium Partners, Marto Capital and UBS AG, the person said.

Bitcoin ‘Fraud’

Most large institutions have steered clear of the cryptocurrency market out of skepticism about its legitimacy or concerns that the mostly unregulated instruments are too volatile. JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon captured the prevailing view on Wall Street when earlier this month he called bitcoin a “fraud” and said he would fire anyone at his bank for trading it.

Where others see volatility and liability, Novogratz, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner, smells opportunity.“In a lot of ways, this is a market like any other market,” Novogratz said. “You see the psychology of fear and greed in the charts the same way you’d see it in charts of the Indonesian rupiah or dollar-yen or Treasuries.

They’re exaggerated because of less liquidity and because you can’t get short.”Novogratz developed his taste for risk as a varsity wrestler at Princeton University and later as a National Guard helicopter pilot. He dabbled in bitcoin while still managing billions of dollars in a macro fund at Fortress, but didn’t score his first big win until after leaving the New York-based firm two years ago.


How Macro Trader Novogratz Became a Bitcoin ConvertWatch more: How macro trader Novogratz became a bitcoin convert

It started with a late-2015 visit to a friend’s startup in Brooklyn.“I expected to see Joe, a dog and one assistant. Instead I saw 30 dynamic young people crammed in a Bushwick warehouse, coding, talking on the phone, making plans for this revolution,” Novogratz said. “Macro guys are instinctive. My instinct was, ‘I want to buy a chunk of this company.”’

$250 Million Haul

He decided instead to invest in ether, the cryptocurrency token used on the Ethereum network. Novogratz bought about $500,000 at less than a dollar per ether and left on a vacation to India. By the time he returned a few weeks later, the price had risen more than fivefold. He bought more.

Over the course of 2016 and into 2017, as ether surged to almost $400 and bitcoin topped $2,500, Novogratz sold enough to make about $250 million, the biggest haul of any single trade in his career. He said he paid tax on the profits, bought a Gulfstream G550 jet and donated an equal amount to a philanthropic project for criminal justice reform.

Novogratz was hooked. Today, he hosts a weekly “crypto meet-up” for as many as 90 people over drinks at his office in Manhattan’s SoHo district and waxes effusive about his adopted industry.

“Remember, bubbles happen around things that fundamentally change the way we live,” he said. “The railroad bubble. Railroads really fundamentally changed the way we lived. The internet bubble changed the way we live. When I look forward five, 10 years, the possibilities really get your animal spirits going.

”Novogratz, known to his friends as “Novo,” estimates that he now has about 20 percent of his net worth in digital assets. In addition to cryptocurrencies, his family office has invested in bitcoin mining, trading platforms, initial coin offerings, pre-ICO sales and blockchain technology.

He said Gemini, the exchange run by Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss, is “one of our go-to places” in part because it has a New York State license to trade bitcoin and ether.

With a $500 million hedge fund, Novogratz will be able to capture trading opportunities that require more scale, as well as wield influence with developers, entrepreneurs and regulators. Of course, he’ll also make money on other people’s money:

The person familiar with his fund, who has seen early versions of marketing documents, said it will charge investors a 2 percent management fee and 20 percent of profits, with a two-year lockup.Plus, he doesn’t like the idea of fading away.

“Everyone would love to leave Wall Street gracefully and very few do,” Novogratz said. “You get kicked in the knees or kicked in the midsection, you learn from your mistakes, you kind of rebuild and you start your new adventure.

”One thing hasn’t changed: Novo’s love of the risky bet.

Discover even more stories on Bloomberg here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-26/mike-novogratz-is-set-for-comeback-with-crytocurr...

Carbon credits trading (also known as "cap and trade") as a means to help mitigate the effects of global climate change has long been advocated by environmentalists fighting one of the most intransigent environmental challenges of the 21st century. 

Now ConsenSys and CarbonX Personal Carbon Trading Inc. have stepped up to enable the first-ever peer-to-peer carbon credit trading platform, built on the Ethereum blockchain. CarbonX Personal Carbon Trading Inc. is principally a Tapscott family enterprise, with CEO and founder William (Bill) Tapscott, co-founder and CMO Jane Ricciardelli, chair of the board of directors Don Tapscott, and director and board member Alex Tapscott.

Bill Tapscott is a software engineer who has founded and co-founded a number of tech startups including IntelliOne, a cell phone geo-location and traffic data processing company; Maptuit, a navigation and optimization software company in transportation logistics; and Mountain Lake Software, a custom software development company with a strong financial services practice.

Tapscott told Bitcoin Magazine :"My interest in carbon trading and clean technologies was piqued by being on the Investment Committee of the Toronto Atmospheric Fund , a City of Toronto venture fund with a mandate to develop greenhouse gas reduction projects and companies.

"CarbonX will engage millions of people in fighting climate change by materially rewarding responsible behaviors toward the personal consumption of carbon.

CarbonX will achieve this by investing in carbon reduction projects and re-casting generated offsets as ERC20 tokens on an Ethereum Blockchain."CarbonX's ultimate goal is to become the global exchange for peer-to-peer personal carbon trading."Don Tapscott, chair of the CarbonX board of directors said in a post :"... climate change is arguably the world's most daunting challenge.

Virtually every scientist now agrees that the debate is over. Rising average surface temperatures combined with rapidly expanding deserts, melting Arctic sea ice caps and ocean acidification now provide unequivocal evidence that human activities are fundamentally altering the Earth's climate.

"ConsenSys was one of the first startups to build practical applications for the Ethereum blockchain.

Their mission is to create simplified and automated decentralized applications (dApps) to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions and exchanges, principally on the Ethereum blockchain.In a statement , ConsenSys founder and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin said:

"As one of the fastest growing companies working on Ethereum, a platform that is poised to reformat how the world organizes itself, ConsenSys is committed to enabling technologies to be built that will facilitate attention to externalities like pollution and critical new foundations like sustainability.

"CarbonX has the potential to incentivize behavior that contributes to environmental sustainability, and is an excellent example of Ethereum-based technologies poised to make positive change," added Lubin.

The CarbonX Token CxT

The CarbonX initiative will buy carbon credits from environmentally sustainable practices like ridesharing and will invest in carbon reduction projects like tree planting and convert this value to Ethereum ERC20 tokens known as CxT tokens.CarbonX will be announcing a formal token launch in the near future.

CxT tokens will be distributed through an open-loop-style loyalty rewards program. The CxTs will then be tradeable on the CarbonX platform and be able to be exchanged for carbon-friendly goods and services, other reward program points or other digital currencies.

For verification, CarbonX will use industry-standard carbon offsets like the REDD and VCS offsets (for example, to apply to ridesharing) and will convert these into CxT tokens.Investments in carbon reduction projects that will generate offsets will use government protocols, such as those developed by the Ontario provincial government, for example.

"The CxTs will be awarded by enterprises who encourage ridesharing, and brands/retailers who wish to feature products that are carbon-friendly. We will provide guidelines, and consumers/users will be able to track overall performance. In the example of rideshare, we plan to work with companies like Luum and their clients to incent carbon-friendly behaviors.

There are many ways we can boost awareness and responsibility for personal action in the fight," explained Tapscott.Well-known environmentalist Richard Sandor, chair and CEO of Environmental Financial Products and founder of the Chicago Climate Exchange, has endorsed the CarbonX initiative, saying:

"Blockchain technology has the potential to further expand the applications of market-based mechanisms to help solve environmental concerns. I am pleased to support CarbonX as another positive step towards transparency, accountability and lower transaction costs."

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

Discover even more stories like this on NASDAQ here: http://www.nasdaq.com/article/carbonx-and-consensys-put-p2p-carbon-credit-trading-on-the-blockchain-...