Day: July 17, 2018

Civic secures a high-quality URL from a longstanding internet company, raising the profile of the whole blockchain industry.

IBM is exploring the use of a ‘stablecoin’ to facilitate fast and secure payments within the financial services sector. The tech giant has teamed up with institutional asset management platform Stronghold, which is federally insured by the bank Prime Trust, to test a cryptocurrency that is pegged to the U.S. dollar.

IBM Announces the Use of Federally Backed ‘Stablecoin’ Stronghold USD

‘Stablecoins’ have been around for quite some time now, usually being backed by one U.S. dollar for each token issued.

Tether, which was originally named Realcoin in 2014 by co-founders Brock Pierce (block.one) and Stanley Hainsworth, is the most famous example of pegging a digital coin to a fiat currency and the largest one by market capitalization.

Tether, however, is covered in controversy as it is frequently accused of running an opaque operation, and the recent fallout with its auditor Friedman LLP didn’t improve its image. Some fear that the company behind the coin does not hold enough USD to make up for the circulating supply of nearly three billion USD Tether.

Stronghold USD, which was launched on Tuesday on the Stellar blockchain platform, is issued for every U.S. dollar deposited at the company’s partner bank, Nevada-based Prime Trust, on a 1-to-1 ratio. Jesse Lund, vice president of Global Blockchain at IBM, explained why the tech giant is backing the ‘stablecoin,’ reports Reuters.

“The engineering work has been done on this token and we have seen a little bit of the early release of it. IBM will explore use cases with business networks that we have developed, as a user of the token. We see this as a way of bringing financial settlement into the transactional business network that we have been building.”

IBM is building a new trade finance platform using it’s Big Blue’s Hyperledger Fabric, which instead of being public like Bitcoin’s blockchain it only allows participation of a certain number of trusted parties. Tammy Camp, founder and CEO of Stronghold, explained how the pegged cryptocurrency will be able to make an impact.

“The token allows folks to do payments, foreign exchange between companies in a very seamless and frictionless and more secure way. It enables people to be able to trade that token with other assets and other tokens as well.”

Stronghold USD is backed by Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation-insured U.S. dollars, which provides a safer approach to a ‘stablecoin’, from an institutional lens. Using Stronghold’s digital coin, which relies on the platform developed by Stellar, IBM will be able to reduce exposure to volatility within the cryptocurrency market, hence make its product more attractive to the financial services industry.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

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Two Congressional committee hearings will examine whether crypto is the future of money, as well as what sort of regulation the space may need.

What is Pink Taxi?

Pink Taxi is a blockchain-based platform that offers transportation services only to women, and it employs only female drivers. Its objective is to provide a safe and comfortable environment.

This women-only cab service does not only provide solo female travelers a secure transportation alternative, but it also makes available jobs for women drivers. The platform’s blockchain technology ensures that all of its employees receive a fair cut of their earnings and that the car data is transparent. Data transparency means that no information can be tampered with, ensuring the safety of both passengers and drivers and an effective way of settling potential disputes.

This working concept has attracted recognition from different social economic backgrounds on an international scale. As proof, the service currently operates in more than 18 countries.

Pink Taxi – Empowering Women

Pink Taxi was created to help bring forth female empowerment. The apparent lack of woman empowerment is clearly obvious in various economic, socio-cultural and political sectors, their male counterparts being clearly advantaged.

The project was also launched due to the increased harassment rates for women passengers during cab rides, a thing which is more prevalent in certain countries. This exclusive taxi service was designed to provide safety for both drivers and clients, seeing as drivers are also at risk of being attacked or mugged.

There are around 4 hundred million women in this world living today who have been sexually assaulted, one assault every second occurs around the globe.

Pink Taxi provides transportation services exclusively for women, using exclusively women drivers who are trained & specializing keeping women safe where to drop them off & how to provide security.

The platform also makes available opportunities through which they can make and control their earnings via its token system. By being able to manage her revenue, she will be able to have some impact on the economic and social scene, promoting an environment more geared towards equality and fairness.

Via their Initial Coin Offering, contributors and customers can purchase tokens that will not only grant them access to their specialized services and benefits, but also help the empowerment agenda.

The Team Behind Pink Taxi

Pink Taxi Group is backed up by a team of professionals that are experienced in a range of business areas who have blend together for this greater cause & make it a huge success.

Acting as advisor and supporter to this project is the security expert Sir John McAfee. He is the God Father of Anti-Virus Software, Founder of McAfee Anti-Virus and also the “Creator of Declaration of Currency Independence”. McAfee has given his expertize and endorsement to Pink Taxi as well as many other projects from various industries. He is a fiery supporter of the blockchain and always promotes the benefits and prospective startups that use the technology like Pink Taxi.

The PTT Token

The PTT token is the platform’s ERC20 token, which is used as payment for its employees and unlocks select features of Pink Taxi’s service. The platform’s underlying blockchain technology will provide security, transparency, and decentralization. Decentralization will ensure that all its employees are paid fairly, unlike its centralized counterparts.

The service’s clients and drivers benefit from loyalty programs where they are rewarded with tokens that can then further spent on free rides or exchanged for other cryptocurrencies.

The women that use the tokens can get involved in the cryptocurrency world through the platform. Thus, Pink Taxi can help get women interested in a field which was up until then unknown to them.

Through this project, Pink Taxi wants to help drive female empowerment upwards, in addition to developing a harassment-free environment for its drivers and customers.

Pink Taxi Telegram Channel #1

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This is a sponsored press release and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or views held by any employees of NullTX. This is not investment, trading, or gambling advice. Always conduct your own independent research.

Touchhour Inc has announced their adoption of Enjin Coin (ENJ)’s blockchain development platform, which enables them to mint next-generation ERC-1155 tokens, for their upcoming PvP RPG, ‘9Lives Arena’. Designed for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, the game’s integration of the ERC-1155 token standard will set precedence in the usability of Ethereum’s blockchain and enable players to store in-game characters as cryptocurrencies within their secure blockchain addresses.

ERC-1155’s inbuilt design around efficiency and flexibility has grabbed the attention of blockchain evangelists, many of whom praise ERC-1155 as a crucial upgrade to the ERC-20 and ERC-721 token standards. ERC-1155 allows users to send up to 200 tokens at a time and perform complex, bundled operations which save on gas fees. It also enables adopters to mint fungible, semi-fungible, and non-fungible tokens using a single suite of smart contracts.

“9Lives Arena will be nothing short of epic,” said Enjin CEO Maxim Blagov. “The way they utilize Enjin Coin’s ecosystem will create a gaming experience that no one has ever seen. It’s incredible to see blockchain being adopted by Triple-A quality games.”

“Touchhour is ecstatic to announce 9Lives Arena. This is our passion project, and it’s truly one of a kind,” said Touchhour CEO Ralph Laemmche. “Enjin Coin’s platform is exactly what we needed to create a unique blockchain based experience that helps us innovate and push the competitive experience of 9Lives Arena to a whole new level.”

In 9Lives Arena, each hero gets only nine lives and upon losing his or her ninth life, the character will be removed from the blockchain and replaced by a trophy bearing the hero’s history, achievements, and ashes. This uniquely-designed mechanic of permadeath offers players a high-stakes experience with real consequences, in which every moment of battle matters.

Players will begin with basic characters and build them into unique combinations of hero archetypes stored securely in each player’s blockchain address as ERC-1155 tokens. Players can gather resources, craft items, and hone their characters’ abilities which will make the characters more unique, powerful, and valuable over time. In addition, there will be in-game companion/sidekicks ‘Ooogies’ which players can own, customize, and upgrade. Players will be able to control their companions remotely by setting tasks and assigning duties through an Android or iOS app. They will also be stored within a secure blockchain address.

These ERC-1155 characters can be traded peer-to-peer in third-party marketplaces and Touchhour will implement a blockchain-managed trading system using Enjin’s smart contracts. By doing so, the blockchain will allocate a small portion of each seller’s trading revenue to Touchhour, creating a balanced and fair system of economics for all.

This will create a community-oriented form of economic gameplay that is unique to blockchain games like CryptoKitties, which cleverly utilized peer-to-peer blockchain-based markets to generate over $20 million in transactions in less than six months based on trading cute images of cats.

If Touchhour were to achieve a similar level of popularity and implement a 10% trading fee, it would equate to an extra $2 million in revenue for the game studio. Enjin Coin is the first platform in the history of gaming to enable developers to use smart contracts to profit from peer-to-peer trades made on unpartnered third-party sites.

9 Lives Arena is currently in the later stages of production. The internal alpha is live and being iterated upon by Touchhour’s dedicated team of international developers. To find out more about this unique, blockchain-based PvP RPG, visit www.9livesarena.com or join their Telegram channel: https://t.me/NineLivesArena.

 About Touchhour Inc: Ralph Laemmche, a games industry veteran of 20 years, created Touchhour alongside singer/composer Cindy Gomez, who is most famous for singing on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Touchhour’s lead artist Darry Chen, who left EA to join Touchhour, is responsible for 9Lives Arena’s Triple-A quality graphics. All animations were performed by Maciej Kwiatkowski, who also performed the motion capture acting for all three Witcher games.

 About Enjin Coin (ENJ): Enjin.com is a social gaming community with over 20 million users. Enjin created Enjin Coin, a cryptocurrency that gives developers access to Enjin’s blockchain development platform, which they can use to mint powerful ERC-1155 tokens that represent tangible and intangible assets. All tokens created using Enjin Coin’s platform are more advanced as a technology than any existing ERC-20 token, including Enjin Coin itself. Acting as a digital gold standard, Enjin Coin is placed inside of ERC-1155 tokens to certify that they were created using Enjin’s platform and can therefore plug into Enjin’s ecosystem of smart contracts, SDKs, APIs, wallet, blockchain explorer, and scaling solution. For more information, visit enjincoin.io.

This is a sponsored press release and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or views held by any employees of NullTX. This is not investment, trading, or gambling advice. Always conduct your own independent research.

Islamic scholars have given blockchain platform Stellar, and its native cryptocurrency Lumens, Islamic certification. The California-based startup was also given guidelines on the specific assets that can be traded using its blockchain by the Shariyah Review Bureau.

Stellar’s Certification Opens Doors in the Huge Middle Eastern Remittances Market

The Shariyah Review Bureau’s certification is part of a wider strategy by Stellar to enter the remittances market.

They’ve spent the previous twelve months looking for partnerships around the Gulf region. Lisa Nestor, the startup’s director of partnership, spoke to Reuters saying:

“We have been looking to work with companies that facilitate remittances, including in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. It’s a huge market.”

Both Stellar’s blockchain itself and its native cryptocurrency, Lumens, is covered by the certification. With a total market capitalisation of $4.38 billion, Lumens is the seventh largest digital asset at present.

The Shariyah Review Bureau is licensed by the central bank of Bahrain. The Islamic advisory firm’s assistant general manager, Mansoor Ahmed, told Reuter’s about the decision to extend the certification to Stellar:

“For the blockchain technology there was no issue, the main thing we needed to consider was the use of the underlying cryptocurrency.”

Previously, there have been somewhat mixed messages about cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology coming from Islamic thinkers. This is because Islam has a clear set of rules about what is to be permitted in finance. Speculation and interested payments are largely shunned in the religion.

Earlier this year, NewsBTC reported on Egypt’s Dar Al Iftaa issuing an Islamic ruling (Fatwa) against Bitcoin. The Counsellor of the Republican’s Mufti, Dr. Magdy Ashour, stated:

“This currency is used directly to fund terrorists.”

Meanwhile in a completely contradictory move, a London mosque also became the first in the U.K. to accept Bitcoin and Ether as a means of donating earlier this year. The chairman of the Shacklewell Lane Mosque, also referred to as Masjid Ramadan, took an entirely different position to the Egyptian government body:

“It’s new money. It’s moving with the times. It’s no different from transferring money from the bank.”

However, the Shariyah Review Bureau’s certification could help close the debate on whether digital currencies and assets are to be permitted in Islam. The advisory firm stated that the transfer of Lumens was similar to transferring rights. This form of economic activity is deemed acceptable in Islam. This clearly bodes well for other digital assets being seen in the same light by the religion.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

The post Stellar Receives Certification from Islamic Scholars, Religious Validity of Crypto in Question? appeared first on NewsBTC.

VCTRADE, the world’s first bank-backed cryptocurrency exchange, is now open for trading in Japan after its launch last month, reports Coindesk..

The exchange, owned by Japanese banking giant SBI Holdings, has now opened trading to users aged between 20 and 70 years, after only servicing limited pre-registered users, providing that they are resident in Japan. Corporate entities are still unable to use the exchange at this time.

At the original launch last month, SBI announced that the VCTRADE platform would facilitate the trading of the Japanese yen against Ripple’s XRP. The company’s Chairman and CEO Yoshitaka Kitao recently said that he saw Ripple as becoming a universal digital currency to compete with Bitcoin in the future, due to the digital currency’s payment platform for international money transfer and remittance services.

The delay in VCTRADE’s opening for business was due to the need to upgrade the platform following a USD 533 million hack against another Japanese exchange, Coincheck, earlier this year. These moves illustrate SBI’s continued investment across the region investing USD 460 million in its AI and blockchain fund. Kitao commented:

“There’s a lot of speculative demand around cryptocurrencies, which is why the price is going up so quickly, but people need to think about how these technologies are being used in real life and how they can improve people’s businesses.”

Earlier this year, it was revealed that SBI had planned to launch a new cryptocurrency exchange and was also investing in renewable energy wind farm cryptocurrency mining cryptocurrency and was working on improved 5G mobile connectivity and AI.

In other news from Japan, South Korean exchange giant, Bithumb, is hoping to get a licence to operate in the country, although with tougher cryptocurrency rules following the Coincheck and Monocoin attacks, it may have to jump through some hoops. Its own exchange suffered a hack of USD 31.5 million recently.

If Bithumb is successful, it would open a new office in February of 2019. The company is reportedly planning to extend its reach overseas launching new faster and efficient platforms for worldwide traders.

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The post World’s First Bank-Backed Crypto Exchange Opens For Trading appeared first on BitcoinNews.com.

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

At press time, the father of cryptocurrency has jumped to $7,327. This is a massive increase from yesterday’s price, and a clear sign that bitcoin is strong enough to handle present resistance, which is set at roughly $6,800. Granted the currency can step beyond that level, we are likely to witness $7,600 next, according to most analysts.

One of the big things potentially contributing to the current price is the community support for a new bitcoin ETF. A few weeks ago, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) opened the ETF up to public comment to get an idea of its popularity and promise. Will institutional investors and normal, everyday traders take an interest in such an opportunity?

So far, the response has been overwhelming, with more than 90 individuals submitting their comments and ideas on the situation. This is about ten times more commentary than the last time (April 2018) the SEC opened an ETF up to the public, suggesting that cryptocurrencies might be heading deeper into mainstream territory.

Bitcoin support sits in the $6,400 range, while resistance at $6,800 has already been surpassed. $7,600 is next, which in turn could lead to $8,000. In addition, trading volumes are nearing $5 billion per day, the highest they’ve been since July 6, and the cryptocurrency market cap has shot up by roughly $20 billion.

Several good things are happening in the bitcoin and cryptocurrency communities, one being IBM’s new stable coin, which can potentially help banks streamline international payments. Furthermore, bitcoin mining giant Bitmain – headquartered in China – recently announced a stake in Block.one, the parent company of EOS. It has also built a 20,000-square foot facility in California’s Silicon Valley ahead of its initial coin offering (ICO) set to occur later this year.

Unfortunately, not everything’s coming up roses in the crypto space, which is still marred by scams and failed projects that deter it from its mainstream goals. Camera king Kodak has employed a mining scheme known as Spotlite USA, which collapsed last night due to being labeled a “scam” by critics. The project was also blocked by the SEC. Spotlite has since confirmed it will not be moving forward on any additional mining operations.

One of the issues with the project is that mining costs tend to change every month, and Spotlite made it sound like miners would be able to extract the same number of coins throughout every mining session.

“There is no way your magical Kodak miner will make the same $375 each month,” writes economist Saifedean Ammous, who says that anyone who got involved would have incurred serious losses.

Luckily, the project is being closed before a single coin could be extracted, which means nobody is at risk.

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has announced it will award 95 grants for a total of $95 million to 80 businesses in 26 states. One beneficiary is blockchain business Grid7, which is set to receive almost $1 million as a government grant.

DoE Backs Blockchain Energy Project

Grid7 is being awarded $999,363 by the DoE and previously received around $150,000 in 2017 through an earlier phase of the same program. The Colorado-based project aims to provide a “scalable platform for secure energy transactions and control.”

According to the database: “The project will develop a novel software platform to address critical cybersecurity threats for power plant control systems, industrial control systems, and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) by leveraging blockchain and other patent pending cybersecurity technologies developed in this project. Other applications will enable secure energy transactions to increase grid reliability and integrate a more decentralized energy infrastructure.”

Grid7 claim that the electric grid is transforming from a centralized system, via a decentralized system, to a distributed system. At this point, Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) come together in the form of Nanogrids and Microgrids. These include distributed solar, energy storage, and electric vehicles.

Fed Gets Licence to Use Blockchain Product

The funding, which was awarded in the second phase, went to startups that had shown “technical feasibility for innovations” during the initial funding round. This means the blockchain project had convinced the DoE that their product was feasible and worthy of development.  If the project meets the third phase of funding, it would receive federal or private funds which would have no dollar or time limits.

The DoE recognised that small businesses play a large role in pushing innovation and creating jobs in the U.S. economy. It also highlighted that the programs were created to advance innovation in federal agencies leading to the possibility of a government agency adopting the blockchain model. For projects that receive this funding, they give the government a royalty-free licence for Federal Government use.

Managing Partner of Grid7, David Cohen, was previously an executive board member of the IOTA Foundation, which is focused on the sharing economy and the Internet of Things (IoT). Cohen was a founding Emeritus Member of the GridWise Architecture Council (GWAC), which helped create the vision for the SmartGrid industry and contributed to drafting the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.

Grid7 used rule 506(b) as an exception to its token being classified as a security even though its claimed type of offering was the simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT). This model was said to be a securities offering, “at least initially,” by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) when it announced that Ethereum was not a security. The filing also showed that nearly a quarter of a million pounds has so far been raised in the token sale, which has no hard cap.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

The post DoE Backs Blockchain Energy Platform with $1 Million US Grant appeared first on NewsBTC.

Charlie Lee took to reddit Tuesday to clarify his and the Litecoin Foundation’s roles in the new acquisition of nearly 10 percent of a German bank. 

The next economic battleground is surely cryptocurrency; it is the first new asset class to have emerged in decades, and everyone wants a piece of the action.

The Bitcoin price is rocketing as BlackRock, the world’s biggest investment fund manager, has announced its intention to explore and likely enter the crypto market with its $6.3 trillion in AUM.

This is hugely bullish news and indicative of the growing trend of institutional adoption.

If Bitcoin breaks above the $6,820 level, it looks good for a potential run to $7,700 in our view.

The sentiment is slowly beginning to change, and last month, Fidelity announced that they were building a crypto exchange. Furthermore, it was just a few days ago that the ‘Hedge Fund King’ Steven Cohen announced he was getting into crypto through Autonomous Partners, a hedge fund which has more than $3 billion in AUM.

Countries are getting in on the action as well. For those who haven’t already heard, the tiny European nation of Malta is making strides to become the world’s leader in cryptocurrency adoption; it has been dubbed the Blockchain Island.

Despite the market downturn, the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry is booming, and the Maltese are welcoming companies like Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, with open arms.

Binance turned over more money in the first quarter of 2018 than 148-year-old Deutsche Bank did – roughly US$200 million.

Through taxation, the Maltese government will now get a slice of these global inflows which now make their way to the shores of Malta through the Binance exchange.

The Maltese have realized that crypto and blockchain adoption is good for the economy. Binance has already begun investing in Malta, creating jobs and helping launch Founder’s Bank, the world’s first decentralized bank.

Malta is upping the ante, but other countries that are keen to get a piece of the cryptocurrency action are stepping up too.

Switzerland is home to Crypto Valley, a vibrant crypto hub and the birthplace of Ethereum. There are now 500+ blockchain organizations including the Ethereum Foundation which operate and continue to thrive there.

As certain countries and companies shun crypto, others are seizing the opportunity to out-maneuver the competition.

With Cboe applying for a Bitcoin ETF license and with the USA facing increased global competition in the crypto space, we wouldn’t be surprised to hear a yes from the SEC – a move which would flood the market with new money.