Day: March 16, 2018

The digital health revolution was still in its infancy prior to blockchain’s rise. Now, there is an opportunity to use it effectively, transforming patient care and population health data through a decentralized health ecosystem. Built upon the successful legacy of its flagship platform Trustedoctor, TrustedHealth is launching to increase patients’ global access to doctor specialists using blockchain technology.

TrustedHealth is a patient and doctor-centric health network focused on specialized medicine. The platform connects patients, hospitals, doctors, labs, clinics, pharmacies, research institutions, patient organizations and more, with an overarching goal of improving patient outcomes and sharing research on life-threatening and rare diseases. The March token sale enters its presale stage on March 20 at 12.00 CET with a 30 percent bonus.

The Story

Greg Jarząbek was working in finance and banking when he found out his mother had pancreatic cancer. Unsure of next steps and the accuracy of her diagnosis, he spent months traveling the world in hopes of finding the most effective treatment plan for her specific condition. After her passing seven months later, he realized the scattered state of the world’s medical expertise and how inaccessible many specialists are to the people who need them most.

Modern disease diagnosis and treatment is highly specialized: patients no longer receive a diagnosis of general brain cancer, for example, but for a specific type of brain cancer with a specific type of treatment. Many conditions like these have a specialist associated with them, but the most capable practitioners could be located across the globe from prospective patients.

In addition, many current healthcare systems are not acting in the best interest of the patients, beyond the lack of transparency around the right specialists. Around 20 percent of patients worldwide receive a misdiagnosis, with about 45 percent of those relating to cancer. There are also challenges around a lack of technology, or a lack of access to technology, poor communication, lack of standardization and case-relevant information exchange

Jarząbek realized the solution lies in securely digitizing the holistic healthcare process, from diagnosis to treatment and therapy, and fostering a network of collaboration and knowledge-sharing between the world’s top doctors.

The Working MVP

Before there was TrustedHealth, there was Trustedoctor, which Jarząbek created to give cancer patients the opportunity to get second opinions from experts around the world via virtual consultations. The network has enlisted 80 doctors from 40 hospitals across the globe, establishing a network of collaborating specialists as a resource for its more than 250 patients.

This model and network have proven to be successful in bringing specialists together and giving patients with life-threatening diseases a chance to receive previously inaccessible expert opinions. The next step is utilizing blockchain technology to provide heightened security, offer homogenous digital processes through a single platform, and give doctors access to big data to help further future research for specific conditions.

TrustedHealth

Following the success of Trustedoctor, TrustedHealth is poised to make a large-scale global impact on a short timeline. The new network is spanning beyond virtual consultations and second opinions and merging into a complete ecosystem. Through TrustedHealth, patients and doctors have a non-bureaucratic way of moving through the healthcare process, including initial consultation, medical records and insurance, lab orders, treatment assignments, travel options and payment.

For doctors, it grants them a method of knowledge sharing amongst other medical practitioners, crowd-researching the specific conditions coming through the platform. This is impacting medical research outcomes because there is currently very limited access to population data, inconsistent rules and permissions for accessing patient data, privacy and security issues, and fraud and abuse. When it comes to digitizing and securing the entire healthcare process, blockchain technology is the only logical way to accomplish it.

The TrustedHealth team recently presented Trustedoctor to the World Health Organization (WHO) at its Geneva headquarters and are in discussions about how it could be useful in furthering the WHO’s mission. Trustedoctor and TrustedHealth want to engage other providers to use the platform to become one standardized virtual platform in specialized medicine.

TrustedHealth’s ICO presale begins on March 20 at 12.00 CET (6 a.m. EST), and its crowdsale begins on March 27 (if the hard cap is not reached in the presale). Its private sale sold out – without any advertising. Whitelisting is now open. Please visit https://trustedhealth.io/white-list to sign up.

The post March ICO: TrustedHealth Unites World’s Leading Medical Specialists to Treat Life-Threatening Diseases appeared first on NewsBTC.

A U.S. district court has issued a restraining order against four individuals accused of operating a string of cryptocurrency investment schemes.

Kodak licensed its brand out to WENN Digital for the KODAKCoin token, which could net the onetime photography giant between $2 and $5 million.

SportyCo, the world’s first blockchain based platform for the promotion of athletes and sports investors, has recently announced the inclusion of Kevin Harrington, a globally-recognized venture capitalist and entrepreneur, as one of its advisors. The company is pleased to have a treasure of knowledge and experience of Kevin Harrington and believes that his advisor-ship will accelerate the platform’s development.

Kevin Harrington as the Advisor of SportyCo

Kevin Harrington is known as the pioneer of infomercial. He is the co-founding board member of the Entrepreneur’s Organization. Apart from his professional success, he is also well-known for being a “Shark” in one of the most popular TV shows “Shark Tank”.

Being keen to be a part of the innovative and spectacular projects, Kevin has joined the SportyCo team as the business advisor. Business ventures backed by the impressive leadership of Kevin Harrington have been estimated to generate more than $5 billion in global sales. SportyCo believes that Kevin’s intellectual leadership would be a matchless contribution to the development of SportyCo, the world’s first premiere sports investment platform. Apart from joining SportyCo as a full-time consultant, Kevin will also be a part of SportyFi, a company behind the SportyCo ecosystem, as its co-owner.

Sharing his views on joining the SportyCo team, Kevin says,

“I believe in empowering entrepreneurs to succeed, to fulfill their vision in building better products, platforms and services for consumers. SportyCo is an idea with immense potential, leveraging the power of the blockchain with the passion of sports, and I am proud to be a part of this story.”

The Highlights of Kevin Harrington’s Successful Journey

Kevin Harrington always had a passion for the business, with his first business started at the age of 15. By the time he passed the first year of his college, he was already into building a million-dollar enterprise. Turning the underutilized assets into marvelous growth opportunities is the strength of Kevin. He founded infomercial, making phrases such as “As seen on TV” and “Wait, there’s more!” part of the cultural landscape. He also participated as “Shark” in one of the most popular TV shows “Shark Tank” and kept empowering the entrepreneurs. Kevin strongly believes that we all have a creative entrepreneur inside us who must have an opportunity to turn the dreams into a reality.

Kevin Harrington- Another Great Name Associated with SportyCo

SportyCo prides in itself to welcome Kevin Harrington, as another great name associated with their platform. SportyCo has already won the support from global sports champions such as football superstars Ronaldinho and Roberto Carlos, former NBA center and Cleveland Cavaliers scout Primož Brezec, and ski jumper Noriaki Kasai. In addition, SportyCo is also backed by renowned names of the cryptocurrency industry as its advisors, including Charlie Shrem, Phillip Nunn, and Robby Schwertner, among others.

Going Forward

With industry expert team and world’s some of the best advisors and sports personalities on-board, SportyCo is all set to establish the $1.3 trillion sports industry for the investors, by democratizing the sports investment and bringing a novel, blockchain-based crowdfunding platform, serving athletes, clubs, and other sports organizations in raising the funds required to achieve athletic success. The SportyCo platform, currently in beta, is on its way to Q1- 2018 launch, letting small sports investors invest in prospective athletes via long-term smart contracts.

To know more about the platform, please visit https://sportyco.io/

Get connected to the team on Telegram for the latest updates.

The post SportyCo – a Blockchain-Based Crowdfunding Platform, Welcomes Kevin Harrington as Its Advisor appeared first on NewsBTC.

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

Over the past few months, several countries including Iran, Venezuela, and China have either announced their plans to launch national cryptocurrencies or already conducted initial coin offerings (ICOs) to introduce a state-backed digital currency.

In late February, Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro claimed that Petro, the oil-backed cryptocurrency operated by the country’s government, raised $735 million from investors. A few weeks later, in an interview with a local mainstream media outlet Telesur, President Maduro stated that Petro generated $5 billion from 186,000 certified purchases.

Inspired by the success of Venezuela’s Petro ICO, the Iranian government, which is currently dealing with heavy international sanctions, revealed that it has begun the development of a cloud-backed cryptocurrency. Iranian Information and Communications Technology Minister MJ Azari Jahromi said that the country will “implement the country’s first cloud-based digital currency using the capacity of the country’s elite.”

However, all national cryptocurrencies including Petro and the digital currency of Iran, are not decentralized by nature unlike public blockchains and cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, previously expressed his concerns in regards to the centralization in ICOs, which are launched on top of a decentralized blockchain in Ethereum.

“I think many of these flaws arise from the fact that even though the ICOs are happening on a decentralized platform, the ICOs themselves are hardly centralized; they inherently involve many people trusting a single development team with potentially over $200 million of funding,” Buterin said in an interview with South Korean mainstream media outlet JoongAng.

Hence, even the Venezuelan Petro, which is supposedly an ERC 20 token launched on top of the Ethereum protocol, is centralized to a certain extent.

At the Genesis London conference held in the UK, bitcoin developer and applied cryptography consultant Peter Todd stated:

“Basically all currencies are digital currencies — the ultimate ledger of truth in currency systems is nearly always digital. Maybe some terrible backwards country like North Korea might be keeping it all on paper but if you go to most places in the world, it’s going to be digital records. So most places have digital currencies already. Equally, most places you can transfer money digitally. Cryptocurrency is not about being able to move money digitally, it’s about auditing. In the case of decentralised cryptocurrency, it’s about the ability to move money and audit it without permission. But when you’re talking about a government currency, obviously there’s permission, a central authority and control — end of story.”

Public blockchains or cryptocurrencies can be easily audited, primarily because transaction data and financial information are stored on a public ledger that can be accessed transparently by anyone within the network.

As such, while national digital currencies are branded as cryptocurrencies and decentralized networks, structurally and fundamentally, they do not have any significant difference with existing systems based on fiat currency.

“So the cryptocurrency part of it is about giving people better ability to audit what happened, audit what the supply is and audit what the transactions are. I think, in reality, a lot places don’t really care about that. Does even the government of Canada care about giving people the ability to audit the money supply? Probably not as much as you’d think,” Todd explained.

The post National Digital Currencies Are Not Cryptocurrencies: Peter Todd at Genesis London appeared first on NewsBTC.

A structured note is being issued on the ethereum blockchain, with an identical one settled on a traditional clearing house to test the cost savings.

The Bank of Lithuania has called for developer proposals to kick off its service-based blockchain platform called LBChain.