Day: May 23, 2018

Rising up to today’s rising expectations

The expectations set by today’s technological developments are rising ever so much higher. The new age customer has become accustomed to the conveniences afforded by online connectivity, and the mobile phone has become a non-negotiable daily weapon. Because of this, businesses across the board are pressured to keep up. And the travel industry isn’t exempt from this race.  

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“Our guests are coming in with new expectations, because the technology has really arrived,” says Hilton Hotels executive Robert Machen.

In an age where there’s an “Uber for everything,” it has become apparent that the travel industry has been lagging for a while now. The commute—whether by car or by plane, remains a stressful part of the supposedly invigorating travel routine. The past few years have been especially rough, with big airline companies suffering one PR disaster after another.

But while flight delays, cancellations, and bump offs may be unavoidable, there are many aspects of the travel industry that can be controlled—and better managed. Obviously, guests are already very exhausted by the time they make it to the hotel door. By then, they would have already endured an endless series of queues at the airport, a couple more for getting cabs to get to and from there, and then they would have to sit and wait some more in traffic.

Having guests line up again at a hotel’s front desk just to check in piles on to this exhaustion. And at this point in time and technology, this is no longer acceptable. A hotel should never be associated with stress. After all, the main value proposition of hoteliers rely on the comfort and relaxation they supposedly offer their guests.

Skip the desk™

Having guests arrive at the same time and line up at the front desk is an additional source of stress to both guests and staff. Airstayz, a blockchain-based travel platform, has devised the perfect solution to this unnecessary chokepoint.

Airstayz employs the Skip the desk™ mechanism which allows hotels to fulfill their promise of relaxation. Travelers can unwind as soon as they step into the hotel—they no longer have to fall in line at the reception, giving them a better first impression of the business establishment, and a smoother, more pleasant experience overall.

With Airstayz, guests can use their mobile phone to do online booking, online check-in, and keyless entry to their rooms and guest facilities. The same thing goes for checking out—there’s no need for guests to cut out valuable time and energy from their already hectic schedules.

Minimizing the time guests spend waiting to check in and check out not only cuts down on hotel staff workload, it actually makes the experience better for clients. An automated system helps significantly minimize guest frustration and improve customer experience as well as long-term relations.

In fact, a study by Zebra Technologies attests to all Airstayz provides: 66% of guests have a better experience when associates use the latest technology, 68% of guests want to use their smartphone to speed up check in, and 70% of guests want to use technology to speed up getting what they want.

“They don’t want to stand in line; they don’t want to meet someone else. They just want to get in and out,” says Michael Levie, the COO of CitizenM, said at the HotelsWorld Australia New Zealand in 2014.

Going the distance: more than just hotels

Airstayz is securing a rapidly growing league of hoteliers and businesses, beginning in Australia and quickly expanding to the United States, Latin America, and Europe this year.

The company works continuously to become the go-to platform for the world’s travel needs. Travelers no longer have to search different platforms to find the best options based on their preferences and budget. This means that establishing a company’s reputation within the ecosystem can be a powerful tool in maintaining competitiveness and securing a piece of the global market.

A reputation system is in place to help build a strong community where peer reviews help travelers make informed choices, and incentivizes businesses to deliver high quality service. This benefits both businesses and their clientele. Additionally, the Airstayz economy—which runs on the STAY token—employs a reward system to help the ecosystem thrive.

The STAY token is an essential aspect to the Airstayz platform. It is the currency through which businesses and clients transact. Adding a cryptocurrency to the ecosystem provides a seamless way to pay and be paid for services. For travelers, cryptocurrency wallets have their advantages over physical credit cards and fiat in terms of security. It also instantly provides an automated bookkeeping of transactions that cannot be tampered with, and can easily be sent as proof of what had transpired. As the world transitions to an all-digital way of conducting trade, the STAY token aims to establish itself as the standard token for travelers and the businesses they interact with.

The Airstayz platform is building a fair economy where businesses can start to compete on equal grounds. Regardless of whether they are a budding business or an established empire, the decentralized, global platform Airstayz has built will ensure large-scale exposure.

Chinese prosecutors charge the last four suspects out of around 100 involved in the case against pyramid scheme OneCoin

Coinbase is currently looking into the processes involved in acquiring banking licenses. The Wall Street Journal reports that an undisclosed source revealed that the exchange engaged in conversations with members of the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in earlier this year:

“Coinbase Inc and another cryptocurrency firm talked to US regulators about the possibility of obtaining banking licenses, a move that would allow the startups to broaden the types of products they offer.”

Additional Coinbase services

Coinbase has been expanding its services this year to become more than just an exchange. Its commerce API or its “PayPal-like service”, was released in February. Merchants could quickly implement cryptocurrencies as a payment method supporting Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, and Litecoin. The platform adds a “PayPal-like” button to e-commerce sites allowing streamlined payments straight to the vendor’s wallet.

Coinbase isn’t the only company to offer these types of services, with BitPay also letting customers pay in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. With the volatility within the cryptocurrency market this year it may take more to encourage merchants to adopt this additional payment method.

Coinbase announced this month that it would be releasing its Coinbase Custody platform. The new product could entice institutional investors, it went on to explain: “The cryptocurrency market is maturing rapidly as more sophisticated institutional participants enter the space. In fact, in the past few months over 100 hedge funds were created that exclusively invest in and trade cryptocurrency. Some of the world’s largest financial institutions have also recently announced their plans to begin trading cryptocurrency.”

Coinbase Custody is a storage service for a minimum of USD 10 million in crypto. Financial institutions will be expected to pay USD 100,000 as a set-up fee and an additional monthly premium dependant on holdings. Coinbase claimed: “We have leveraged our experience safely storing more than $20 billion of cryptocurrency to create Coinbase Custody, the most secure crypto storage solution available.”

Industry issues

Coinbase believes its recent progress will accelerate the world’s adoption of cryptocurrency by bringing new capital and greater awareness to the industry.

The volatility of Bitcoin still stands to be an issue and has led to merchants withdrawing the payment option. This was one of the main reasons for Steam halting Bitcoin payments at the end of 2017. The rise of crypto-related crime is enough to deter investors in the interim.

As much as 30,000 people who have fallen victim to Ethereum-related theft, suffering an average loss of USD 7,500 each, according to Chainalysis. Exchanges have been targeted in large-scale hacks with Coincheck losing USD 550 million worth of NEM cryptocurrency (XEM) in January and Coinsecure losing USD 3.5 million in Bitcoin (BTC). With legislation and regulation becoming a hot topic among unions and governments, 2018 is set to be an interesting year for cryptocurrencies.

Coinbases profitability values the company at around USD 8 billion. The growth and reinvestment into new ventures such as the banking industry shows Coinbase’s faith in the future of cryptocurrencies.

However, not everyone believes that the company is heading in the right direction. Reddit user Bitcoin Yoda explains how Coinbase Commerce is moving in a different direction to Satoshi’s vision: “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Any intermediary between your BTC payment and the merchant is violating the definition of Bitcoin and your privacy.”

Is Coinbase’s pursuit of becoming a bank turning its back on the ideologies behind crypto?

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Rural banks in the Philippines are looking to adopt ConsenSys’ Kaleido blockchain platform in bid to boost financial inclusion.

Lauded as the future of blockchain, business, and banking (among many other things), smart contracts are undeniably a game changer. They allow efficient supply chain management, financial transactions, and automated payments to take place without intermediaries. But smart contracts, contrary to popular opinion, are not infallible.

In fact, according to Amy Wan, the CEO and co-founder of Sagewise, smart contracts are not as smart as you think they are. While it’s true that such agreements provide a certain amount of security by virtue of existing on a blockchain network, Wan believes that “the term ‘smart contract’ may be a misnomer.”

Amy Wan

As a former securities attorney and general counsel of a crowdfunding startup who learned to code on Coursera, Wan straddles the legal and tech worlds with expertise and dexterity. She’s also a woman in a male-dominated industry, meaning she has to “work harder to be taken seriously” (and never has to wait in line for the restroom).

Here’s what she had to say.

Plenty Can (And Has) Gone Wrong With Smart Contracts

Wan is on a mission to provide transactional confidence and certainty, which she points out “are necessary for the long-term success of the blockchain industry.” As it happens, a lot can go wrong (and has gone wrong) due to smart contract errors.

“In 2016,” she says, “at least $60 million was lost in the blockchain space as the result of hacks. In 2017, that amount was estimated to be [anywhere from] $500 million to $1 billion. The DAO hack of 2016 alone resulted in the loss of $50 million. The Parity Wallet hacks of 2017 resulted in the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars of value. Both of these were based on coding errors and alterations of important code.”

Smart contracts, Wan believes, are “full of vulnerabilities.” While you can argue that the technology is new and still striving for perfection with the use of bug bounties, formal verification, and code audits, Wan poses the question – what happens when those measures fail, as in Parity’s case?

“In the spring of 2017, I was watching the ICO industry very closely because it was taking off much more than the regulated crowdfunding industry. However, it seemed that every other day I would see a news story of an ICO being hacked for millions of dollars, and the founders often seemed powerless to do anything… As I looked into these hacks, I learned that smart contracts are only as good as the developer who coded it.”

Humans Can Fix Human Errors

Curiously, while the biggest flaw in smart contracts may be caused by human error or misintention, the best way to fix it may be to humanize the dispute resolution process. “At Sagewise,” Wan explains, “we are building a safety net for smart contracts. It is the toolbox that allows people to achieve their true transactional intent, and it includes a robust dispute resolution marketplace.”

But doesn’t adding another layer of humanity to a human-free technology seem counter-intuitive, to say the least? “We certainly are not proponents of unnecessary human intervention,” she explains. “However, there are certain instances in which code fails, whether that is because of a coding error, a securities vulnerability, [or] the failure of parties to truly put into code their intents. Code is static, but human situations are not.”

Bots Can Also Fix Human Errors

“In those (hopefully rare) instances where a smart contract fails to achieve the intent of the parties, we believe there needs to be some sort of infrastructure that attempts to ameliorate the situation,” Wan explains.

However, it may not always take the shape of a living being with a beating heart and blood coursing through its veins. A dispute could also be fixed without human intervention. “In certain instances, it might be best for the dispute to be resolved by a bot,” she confirms.

Essentially, the mission of Sagewise is to ensure that problems are resolved and that people and businesses can transact safely. “At the end of the day, there needs to be some sort of a safety net,” Wan concludes. And as more and more businesses get on board with blockchain technology, it will be comforting to know that in such situations, someone has their back.

Goldman Sachs-backed Circle’s new 7-coin investment feature targets crypto “newbies”

Circle is making a lot of inroads in the cryptocurrency industry. The company wants to make it easier for consumers to get involved in Bitcoin and similar currencies. After securing $110 million in funding, the firm is launching a new feature. Known as Buy The Market, it is another part of Circle Invest venture. This allows consumers and institutional investors to invest in cryptocurrencies with ease.

Another Powerful Venture by Circle

It is evident exposing more consumers to cryptocurrency is a top priority right now. This is especially true for companies attempting to introduce such changes on a large scale. For Circle Internet Financial,  the current focus lies on attracting regular consumers and institutional investors. The launch of its new investment feature can make that happen sooner rather than later.

Known as Buy the Market, it is another addition to the Circle Invest product line. This specific venture focuses on offering convenient investment opportunities related to cryptocurrencies. It includes options to buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Monero, and a few other currencies. This can all be achieved with the click of a button for ultimate convenience.

For people looking to experiment with cryptocurrency investing, Buy the Market is an interesting tool. It takes care of most of the research process associated with investing in this new form of money. Users can sign up for an account and get their cryptocurrency portfolio set up within minutes. All it takes is connecting a bank account with funds in it to be spent.

Low Minimum Investment Requirement

There is another interesting aspect about Buy the Market to take note of. Unlike similar investment tools, it has a minimum investment threshold of just $1. More traditional offerings aimed at institutional investors ask for $10,000 or more. This “mom-and-pop” solution can expose a lot of new users to cryptocurrencies in the future. Given the low prices of most top currencies, it is expected interest in these currencies will increase moving forward.

Additionally, there is a hard limit in place for consumers. It is impossible to spend more of $10,000 on cryptocurrency per week. For most users, this will not be a big problem. It also clearly defines the line between consumers and institutional investors. Additionally, this threshold ensures there is no requirement for KYC and AML regulation measures.

Whether or not this new venture by Circle will be successful, remains to be seen. Consumers have shown an increasing interest in cryptocurrencies as of late. Options like these will make it a lot easier to invest in such currencies moving forward. Especially with the lower investment threshold in place, an appealing solution has been created.

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The post Circle Lets Users Invest in Cryptocurrencies With Just a Dollar appeared first on NewsBTC.

Vitalik Buterin has suggested experimenting with quadratic voting, a governance model furthered by Dr. Glen Weyl, on the ethereum platform.

Blockchain has revolutionary potential to change not only person-to-person transactions but organizations, industries, and entire social structures. The concept of the immutable decentralized ledger is currently being used to alter sectors ranging from healthcare to Hollywood. Some web pundits have called blockchain the central technological platform for Web 3.0.

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There’s lots of mainstream interest in blockchain right now, and lots of exuberance and innovation within the blockchain community. The current hubbub isn’t just over blockchain’s technological capabilities, but the amount of money flowing through blockchain entities. Telegram shattered previous ICO records in early 2018 by raising $1.7 billion in token sales. A casual crypto enthusiast who bought $100 in Bitcoin in 2011 would own almost $3 billion in Bitcoin if they held onto that original purchase.

And like virtually any other environment in human history that’s experienced a sudden influx of money and excitement, the cryptocurrency space has become a prime hunting ground for thieves and scammers.

Exit Scams and Phishing

The ICO world is rife with exit scams, in which individuals or groups go through the motions of running a real ICO–building a website, falsifying a staff roster, releasing a white paper, etc.–and then pocket the profits from their token sale and disappear. A recent report concluded that a shocking 80% of ICOs are scams. A company called Modern Tech recently pulled an exit scam and made off with $660 million.

Phishing, however, might be an even bigger problem in the cryptocurrency community. Phishers pose as legitimate crypto providers and services, such as wallets and promising new ICOs, and then harvest log-in credentials and crypto transactions. Phishing diverts about 10% of all funds investors give to ICOs. Phishers stole almost $1 million from Bee Token by acquiring investor emails and luring investors to a false token sale.

Phishers may pretend to be famous figures–one scammer masqueraded as Elon Musk on Twitter, tweeted a giveaway of Ethereum in return for a small deposit, and had a network of bots amplify the tweet, so it seemed popular and legitimate. Phishers took impersonation even further by hacking the actual official Twitter account of Vertcoin and offering a similar fake “giveaway,” using a wallet address unassociated with the company. Telegram raised massive funds through private sales to investors but has yet to announce a public ICO. Scammers took advantage of Telegram’s silence to the press and public over the token sale to launch websites claiming to offer Telegram tokens.

Phishing Limits Blockchain’s Potential

Scamming is such a threat to the blockchain world in part because it threatens the democratic underpinnings of cryptocurrency transactions. Many crypto enthusiasts turned to blockchain in the first place because it provided a revolutionary way to handle transactions without the oversight of a third-party overseer.

Because blockchain relied on a technological platform with no central ownership rather than a third party overseer such as a bank or a payment processor to verify transactions, it became an ideal technology for free thinkers and entrepreneurs who could build and thrive in the space without getting crowded out by Visa or Bank of America. The blockchain world doesn’t just boast a technology, but a community of entrepreneurs sharing ideas. It’s no coincidence that the two most prominent cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin and Ethereum), as well as many others, are open-source. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts are often pleased to collaborate with one another and willing to take a chance on supporting new ideas.

Blockchain is sometimes called a trustless technology, but the presence of phishing and other scams shows that there’s still plenty to distrust in the cryptocurrency world. Bad actors who create doubt and fear through scams and theft stifle the cryptocurrency world’s democratic spirit, discouraging collaboration between entrepreneurs and convincing hesitant newcomers of crypto to go back to centrally controlled fiat currency system. If someone at the other end of a cryptocurrency transaction could easily be a crook, then why participate in cryptocurrency at all?

There’s may be no way to banish scammers from the cryptocurrency world completely, but there are companies developing tools for detecting and eradicating them as they emerge, generating peace of mind for individual crypto traders and making the entire field harder for thieves to exploit. Predictive analytics is one such powerful toolset.

Predictive Analytics

Many crypto scams require sending cryptocurrency rather than fiat cash. It’s common practice in the ICO world to sell new tokens in return for Ethereum or another popular cryptocurrency. Giveaway scams such as the fake Elon Musk claim they need a small cryptocurrency transaction to establish addresses for distributing the giveaway.

Predictive analytics use wallets’ transaction history to assess whether they have a pattern of trustworthy behavior. Coral is using blockchain to provide predictive analytics scores to help protect crypto consumers continuously. Coral continuously builds a database of malicious or suspicious phishing scams and associated addresses. Whenever a crypto trader who uses Coral considers a transaction with a wallet, they can run through Coral’s decentralized blockchain crawler, called the Trawler. The Trawler assesses the wallet’s associations with fraudulent behavior and assigns an Anonymous Blockchain Trust Score (ABTS). A low ABTS indicates that the Trawler has detected a suspicious situation in the wallet, such as a transaction history that involves a large number of funds from the growing database of phishing scams.

Coral integrates into most wallet and exchange user interfaces, which means it could, for example, spring in to warn ICO investors before giving crypto to a facetious ICO website. Coral can also be used to enhance KYC/AML practices that fight money laundering and other illegal uses of funds; scoring identity-verified wallet owners and supporting challenge deposits ensure KYC-verified entities are in fact associated with wallets claiming to belong to them.

Phishing is a big problem in the crypto community, but predictive analytics will prove a powerful tool for detecting and eliminating scammers. Coral and its partner companies are making this toolset available for everyday crypto traders.

Crypto exchange Huobi Pro has launched a new market index that tracks the ten top-traded digital assets on its platform in real time

Banco Masventas, a bank based in Argentina, has launched a new service as of 22 May 2018 which will utilize Bitcoin to facilitate international money transfers. This is a major milestone for Bitcoin, since it is likely the first time it has been used by a financial institution as an international payments standard.

The bank is partnering with Bitex, a Latin America-based Bitcoin exchange, to facilitate the international payments. In an interview with Coindesk, Bitex chief marketing officer Manuel Beaudroit said that customers won’t actually be touching any Bitcoin when using this new international payment service offered by Banco Masventas. The customer simply asks the bank to send an international payment from their account, and the bank in coordination with Bitex will handle converting their fiat funds to Bitcoin and back again when it reaches its international destination.

This service offered through Bitex will allow Banco Masventas customers to significantly reduce costs associated with international transfers since there will be no international banks as intermediaries. Also, international transfers will be faster than other systems, occurring in less than 24 hours. It only takes 10 minutes for a Bitcoin transaction to confirm on average, but it will take some time to convert fiat to Bitcoin and back to fiat.

International transfers will be available to over 50 countries, and Banco Masventas will be charging a 3% commission.

Of course, Bitex’s process of converting fiat to Bitcoin and back to fiat when the money reaches its international destination is inherently centralized and possibly not entirely cryptographically secure. Customers will have to trust Banco Masventas and Bitex when using this new international transfer service.

Sending Bitcoin by itself with no other service involved actually makes more sense if control of your money and security is the priority. Of course, using purely Bitcoin is less convenient since ultimately it usually needs to be converted into fiat before it can be used to buy goods and services. Bitex streamlines the process of converting Bitcoin payments to fiat, which can be quite an arduous process if someone had to do it themselves. Also, using the service offered through Bitex removes the risk of market volatility.

It is a big deal that any bank is using Bitcoin to transfer money across international borders, and this may be the beginning of banks recognizing and utilizing Bitcoin as a trustworthy payment method in the future. Bitcoin’s ability to transfer money anywhere in the world instantly and securely is gaining recognition.

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Today has been a rather interesting day for the Zencash altcoin. Although its use cases are still somewhat limited in nature these days, the ZenCash price got a nice pump – and subsequent dump – over the past few hours. The delayed listing on Binance quickly made people turn sour on this altcoin, even though it is still up by 8.7%.

The ZenCash Pump Failed

It is evident there is no real reason why one ZenCash should be worth $40, let alone $50 like it was earlier today. News regarding Binance listing ZEN effectively pushed the ZenCash price from $32 all the way to just over $50 in a matter of three hours. Such a massive pump is usually followed by a steady decline, which is exactly what happened in the past few hours.

To put this into perspective, the current ZenCash price sits at $36.84. That is still an 8.7% increase compared to 24 hours ago, which is impressive in its own regarding .Especially with Bitcoin and all other main currencies losing so much value this week, there is little room for high expectations. Even so, the ZenCash price momentum ran out of steam pretty quickly.

This is mainly because Binance has confirmed they are delaying the launch of this altcoin. Mainly because of the speculative nature and sudden pump, the exchange is waiting until things quiet down once again. It quickly made the ZenCash value drop from $50 to $36.84, and that may not be the bottom for today.

With just $41.116m in 24-hour trading volume, the interest in ZenCash is not all that spectacular by any means. That is not entirely surprising either, as ZenCash has no specific use cases that make it unique compared to other prominent altcoins. Even so, there’s still a market for this currency, but it seems the majority of trading volume is due to the pump which took place earlier today.

As of right now, Bittrex is the main exchange for ZEN trading volume. Upbit is in second place – although not with a fiat currency pair – and OKEx closes out the top three. With no other exchange generating over $1m in 24-hour trading volume, it remains a bit unclear why Binance would list ZenCash over some of the other alternative currencies with a higher trading volume.

For the time being, the ZenCash price is still in a good place, although people hoping for more will be sorely disappointed with how things are going right now. Even so, there’s a good chance the ZenCash price will remain above $30 all day, which wouldn’t be a bad thing either. Whether or not things will improve from here on out, is everybody’s guess right now.