Day: December 28, 2017

Organized by American and Chinese companies, including SV Insight, Draper Dragon and Consensys, the Blockchain Connect Conference will take place in January 2018, in San Francisco, CA. The international lineup of both the organizers and the speakers serves to underscore the idea behind the event – bridging the gap between Chinese and US Blockchain communities and allow for better cooperation between them.

Most people associate blockchain with cryptocurrencies – but its uses extend far beyond this. Blockchain is so much more than just Bitcoin.

The blockchain is being adopted by more and more businesses. In many cases, it is completely transforming old business models and pumping new life into companies. IBM is only one example of this. In as little as three to five years, the number of businesses using blockchain is expected to increase exponentially.

What Actually is Blockchain?

Essentially, blockchain is a huge decentralized ledger of transactions. It is maintained by many decentralized sources, meaning there is no centralized authority (such as a bank or government).

As a result, transactions that are recorded in the blockchain are secure and irreversible.

This transparent method of tracking transactions is quickly proving to be one of the most exciting revolutions of the century. There is no end to the list of applications it can be used for.

How Can Businesses Make Use of Blockchain?

There is a huge variety of applications for blockchain. Some examples of potential future blockchain applications include:

• Audits – Blockchain offers a permanent, immutable transaction record. It is guaranteed to be accurate, which makes it easy to create an easy-to-follow trail for audits.
• Voting – Using blockchain for voting allows votes to be moved along the blockchain in an accurate and secure way – much like how cryptocurrencies are transferred. Immutability and transparency are both a necessity for election results, and using blockchain could strengthen their validity.
• Smart Contracts – Using blockchain to implement smart contracts will enable organizations to handle large sums of money automatically, without divulging sensitive information.

Even a quick glance into the technicalities of these examples demonstrates how blockchain isn’t just a revolutionary advancement in technology – it’s a complete paradigm shift that changes who is in control.

How Can We Implement Blockchain in Businesses?
There are already several companies racing to be the first to bring blockchain to the business landscape. One of these companies is Jelurida.

Jelurida is the company behind the popular Nxt Blockchain Platform – an advanced open-source platform. It was one of the first blockchains on the market, meaning it offers many functionalities that newer companies are still yet to implement – such as a marketplace, a voting system, and a shuffling functionality for anonymity purposes.

Nxt was the first 100% Proof-of-Stake (PoS) that is completely scalable for businesses and requires no power consumption.

This is huge news – especially at a time when the Proof-of-Stake mechanism is becoming more and more popular. Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, recently released a rough implementation guide outlining the planned transition from Proof-of-Work to the Proof-of-Work/Proof-of-Stake hybrid.

There are many reasons why more and more blockchain startups are making the transition. The switch has only become more urgent following the China ICO Ban, amidst fears that the next ban will fall on crypto mining factories.

Following Jelurida’s success with Nxt, they are switching all their attention to the launch of Ardor – a scalable blockchain platform for businesses.

Jelurida’s platforms allow businesses to leverage the power of blockchain to build their own smart contracts. They are even more secure than Ethereum for this purpose, and they are also easier to adopt. This is because they are built in Java, and will not require business employees to learn new programming languages, such as Solidity or other blockchain languages.

This dramatically cuts the learning curve and saves time and money for companies who want to get started using blockchain technology.

Ardor’s platform design even allows businesses to make their own ICOs and collect their funds directly in whichever currency they require.

When Can Businesses Start to Implement Blockchain Technology?

Given how much blockchain technology is going to disrupt our conventional methods, it could be quite a while before we see mass adoption. However, many experts have agreed that the mass adoption of blockchain technology is becoming inevitable.

After 1 year of testing, Ardor will be released on January 1st. This will be a huge step forward in enabling businesses to adopt blockchain technology in an easy, scalable way.

It is very likely that 2018 will be the first year we start seeing successful blockchain-based businesses.

The post How Blockchain is Pumping Life into Stale Business Models appeared first on NEWSBTC.

The final week of December is always something of a strange period in the equities markets and, indeed, in many of the major financial asset markets across the globe. Most markets have reopened by now subsequent to the Christmas break but many are trading on relatively low volume and this can impact not only how much things move but also the way in which they move into the New Year.

In all honesty, things don’t really get going again until January 2.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t any trades to be had, of course. It just means we’ve got to be a little bit more careful with our target and risk management placement so as to account for any unusual activity.

So, with this noted, get some levels in place that we can use to try and draw a profit from the session today. As ever, take a quick look at the chart below before we get started so as to get an idea where things stand and where we are looking to jump in and out of the markets as and when things move. The chart is a one-minute candlestick chart and it has our key range overlaid in green.

As the chart shows, then, the range that we are looking at for the session this morning comes in as defined by support to the downside at 13977 and resistance to the upside at 14194.

We’re going to lead the charge today with our breakout strategy, so the two trades we are looking at initially are as follows:

• A long entry on a break above resistance with an initial upside target of 14265. A stop loss on the trade at 14175 looks good.
• A short entry on a close below support targeting an immediate downside target of 13910, with a stop loss at 13995 defining risk on the position.

Let’s see how things play out.

Chart’s courtesy of Trading View

The post Bitcoin Price Watch; Low Volume Trading appeared first on NEWSBTC.

Vitalik Buterin, a young man from Russia who pledged to change the real economic system with blockchain, has his platform recognised by big names including IBM, Samsung, Barclay, Credit Suisse, etc. He received the Thiel Fellowship when he was 20, established Ethereum Foundation, unveiled his Ethereum Plan at the Miami Bitcoin conference and was later funded 31,000 bitcoins (valued at approximately $18.4 million at the time). The next year, he launched Frontier, Ethereum’s first live release, and had Ether (ETH) publicly traded on the exchanges in the world at large.

The Ethereum ICO was held from on July 20th at a BTC/ETH conversion rate of 1:2000. On the 17th of June this year, ETH’s market cap hit a new high: $1.57 billion with the interest rate up from less than $1 to nearly $20, a 20-fold performance. On the same day, however, the smart contract platform was hacked. A thief made off with 37 million ETH equivalent to $53 million by attacking DAO.

To recover the loss, Buterin and DAO’s member decided to replace the hacked blocks with new ones, which meant the principle of tamper-resistance was broken, caused disputes, and led to the split of Ethereum Classic (ETC) from ETH.

Buterin said, “Despite ETH seems to have attracted all the media, ETC is playing a dark-horse role.” In another word, he thought ETH stumbled against a bottleneck. As a retry of the Austrian School of Economics, the total supply of ETC will be reduced to 210 million. No scarcity, no difference between tokens and fiat; or only a position change from miners to the real world central banks whose QE craze are diluting the wealth of the general public. It is worse to find that no ETH supply plan will be released until POS conversion takes place. And the centralized Ethereum Foundation will still be the decision maker. For us supporters of digital currency, we need a clear estimate. The fixed supply of ETC obviously fits digital asset’s feature.

There are overseas blockchain experts argue that ETC is the original intention of Ether and less supply is the spirit of digital currencies which are simply numbers being trusted by people for its unchangeability.

The post Vitalik Buterin Support Ethereum Classic appeared first on NEWSBTC.

Thursday, 28 December 2017, Zug, Switzerland – trade.io, a next generation blockchain based financial exchange, continues to add to its impressive list of partnerships by announcing plans to integrate Bancor Protocol, a standard for autonomously convertible blockchain cryptocurrencies called Smart Tokens.

The integration allows the trade.io ERC20 token known as Trade Token or “TIO”, to be converted to and from Ethereum ERC20 tokens in the Bancor Network directly from a simple web application. The creation of a Bancor-compliant Token Relay will take place shortly after the conclusion of trade.io’s token sale and will allocate 2% – 5% of total market cap. You can join the trade.io community here.

On the relationship, trade.io’s CEO, Jim Preissler commented, “We continue to deliver to the trade.io community unique value added propositions, and see this relationship with Bancor as a further example. We already have generated a large demand for our community and it’s only logical to provide a simple way to convert tokens.”

trade.io is currently in the midst of its token generation event and has received nearly $20 million in contributions from over 10,000 participants. Earlier this year the Bancor Protocol attracted $153 million in contributions, making it one of the most successful token generation event launches to date.

Visit https://trade.io/bancor for further information and to read the trade.io White Paper.

About trade.io:

trade.io democratizes the financial markets and saves money for investors and companies through reducing and eliminating fees and inefficiencies by utilizing its innovative Blockchain trading platform. Disrupting a whole ecosystem of banks, advisors, markets, and record keepers which are extracting fees and can be disintermediated and commoditised by more efficient peer-to-peer Blockchain platforms. The trade.io exchange not only supports trading of assets, but supports a more efficient listing of assets in the crypto economy under the indelible and trusted history that Blockchain provides. The company couples these operational assets with investment banking experience, senior advisory expertise, as well as operating their system in a regulated and compliant environment.

About Bancor:

Bancor Protocol™ is a standard for the creation of Smart Tokens™, cryptocurrencies with built-in convertibility directly through their smart contracts. Bancor utilizes an innovative token “Connector” method to enable formulaic price calculation and continuous liquidity for all compliant tokens, without needing to match two parties in an exchange. Smart Tokens interconnect to form token liquidity networks, allowing user-generated cryptocurrencies to thrive. For more information, visit the website and read the Bancor Protocol™ White paper.

The post trade.io Partners with Bancor Protocol to Provide Continuous Liquidity to Token Holders appeared first on NEWSBTC.

Native Video Box is on its way to change the way people host and share videos. The platfrom, referred to as NVB in short is leveraging the blockchain technology to create a holistic monetary ecosystem for video content industry. In order to gain a better understanding of the platform we spoke to Alexander Shishow, the CEO of NVB.

NewsBTC: NVB, sounds like a great concept. Can you please let us know how it is different from the already existing video sharing platforms?

Alexander: If we look at YouTube or its competitors like Vimeo or DailyMotion for instance, we will find out that any particular video, most of them, can be embedded to third party webpage. Of course, they run ads before content, but usually that ‘third-party web page’ does not get any advertising revenue. NVB aims at changing every element in this game. We choose relevant videos automatically and share advertising revenues between ‘third-party webpage’ and video content creators.

NewsBTC: Can you explain what exactly do you mean when you say NVB is a decentralized platform?

Alexander: We deliver videos on the web pages, so there was a moment when we considered using third-party video content delivery networks. But it’s really expensive. So, we decided to create decentralised content delivery network, maintained by the community. Being the part of our video cloud storage, publishers can host videos and earn some extra money from it.

NewsBTC: How does NVB plan to build its community?

Alexander: With NVB any video creator, even inexperienced, can instantly gain traffic for the video and get paid for it. It’s a unique opportunity on the market right now.

NewsBTC: Would you like to give a brief overview of the platform to our readers?

Alexander: Sure. From publisher’s perspective NVB is a widget that can be easily installed on a website. It’s a widget that shows videos to the audience and provides bundled monetization solution.

From advertisers’ perspective, it’s a video content discovery platform that provides unique and high-quality instream video inventory with the transparent tokenized economy.

NewsBTC: Are you planning for any tie-ups or partnerships? Anything in place already?

Alexander: Yes, first of all we have already gathered some advertising demand providers (BetweenX, Dynovid and Vispot). We also have commitments with startups (Adhive, for instance) and some video content aggregators and video bloggers. Publishers and networks are also welcome. Unfortunately, I can’t disclose more for now – stay tuned for updates on our website!

NewsBTC: How much are you planning to raise during the ICO? What will the funds be used for?

Alexander: We are planning to raise 15M USD during our ICO, but we also will be content with a smaller sum (e.g. 3M USD). This will mean a slower pace of development for us, but still it won’t prevent us from reaching our goals!

NewsBTC: Tell us about your team

Alexander: Native Video Box brings together a dream-team of experienced professionals from AdTech, community management, and blockchain.

For instance, Petr Kozyakov, NVB IR Director is a Strategic Partnerships professional with 10+ years of experience in banking and finances. Andrey Smirnov is a machine learning and artificial intelligence pro with 10+ years of experience. Among our advisers is Julian Zegelman, serial entrepreneur and angel investor, whose previous successful ICOs include Starta ICO, Suretly, Goldmint.io, Blackmoon Crypto, Cindicator, and ParagonCoin.

NewsBTC: Anything else you would like our readers to know about NVB?

Alexander: Our mission is to bring value to all ecosystem participants, from user to advertiser. We have reinvented content discovery: we deliver people videos they will love, but never knew existed.

Native Video Box aims at changing the game for all market players. While offering transparent revenue share, we will fight fraud with help of multi-tier blockchain. We invite everyone to join us in creating the future of advertising, which you can do by purchasing NVB tokens, placing your video content on our network or installing our widget on your websites.

The post An Interview with Alexander Shishow, CEO of NVB (Native Video Box) appeared first on NEWSBTC.

In her op-ed article that was published on Yahoo Finance in late December 2017, Sheila Bair said that governments should ensure that policies covering digital currencies shouldn’t feed the frenzy and should not make their own value judgments about Bitcoin. #NEWS

December 28, 2017 – Open Trading Network Foundation, a non-profit organization based out of Zug, Switzerland, is all set to revolutionize the rapidly expanding global crypto economy by developing a secure system combining numerous isolated blockchain networks into a unified open network. World’s first 100% collateralized decentralized exchange, OTN will allow instant transactions between a wide myriad of blockchain networks. Open Trading Network Foundation claims that this innovation will make lives easier for businesses, individuals, traders, and regulator, while addressing the need for speed and liquidity.

The global market for cryptocurrency has developed at a breakneck speed in the recent years with an exponential growth in the number of cryptocurrencies. The objective of OTN is to make the benefits of this growing crypto economy available to common users and all market participants. They want to accomplish this by creating a set of mass market applications for efficient management of crypto assets, performing cross-market transactions, secure storage of savings, accessing the global marketplace, working with tokenized loyalty systems, and making purchases from a crypto wallet.

The maiden product from the network, OTN.Wallet is in the final stages of development, and expected to be launched very soon.  This multi-currency wallet will serve as a universal tool to store and exchange all types of cryptocurrencies or digital assets.  Users will also enjoy several other important features such as fast and safe transactions, a balanced portfolio, direct exchange, P2P transfers, analytical tools, profitability reports, asset tokenization and detokenization, and much more.

Following the launch of OTN.Wallet, the network’s next two products OTN.Business and OTN.Exchange are expected to arrive shortly. OTN Business is a business application supporting several widely-used operations, including issuing tokens and listing them on exchanges, issuing tokenized loyalty cards, crowdfunding, tokenization of services, integrating payment schemes that use a large number of tokens and cryptocurrencies, integrating custom centralized matching engines, etc.  Whereas, the OTN Exchange will enable superfast placement or orders, maintaining complete transparency of all orders.

Instead of following the common path of collecting funds via an ICO, Open Trading Network has been created in partnership with the distinguished trading business IQ Option. In addition to financing the creation of the network, IQ Option is also providing the platform for its first commercial use.

Staring from October 7, 2017, Open Trading Network Foundation has initiated the process of issuing a total of 100 million OTN tokens every Monday and over the following 104 weeks. The exact distribution plan for the tokens is as follows.

• 42 million to the holders, traders and wallet users on the OTN platform
• 28 million to the shareholders and IQ Option team members
• 30 million will remain with the OTN foundation for the purpose of future distribution and attract strategic partners.

To find out more about Open Trading Network and their unique venture, please visit https://otn.org/

About Open Trading Network: Open Trading Network is the first 100% collateralized decentralized exchange which will allow fully secure exchange between the blockchain networks. OTN foundation is committing itself to develop the network described in the white paper and also several applications to help the different stakeholders to benefit from the network.

The post Open Trading Network Leverages Cross-chain Technology to become the First Ever Platform to Unite all Blockchain Networks appeared first on NEWSBTC.

Cointelegraph sat down with Jordan Earls, co-founder of Qtum, to understand more about how Qtum plans to solve the main problems that are currently faced by DApp platforms.