Alpine Private Key #2 — Luxury Goods, Japanese Demand and the SWIFT Comeback
Your key to the latest in Private chains.
Welcome to Alpine Private Key — our monthly aggregation of what we think are the top enterprise/private chain project updates with a quick tl;dr for you. If you think we missed an important news update please let us know and we’ll make sure to add that into next month’s considerations.
United Parcel Service (UPS) — Opening up the B2B sales ecosystem
United Parcel Service (UPS) have announced they’re developing a new B2B sales platform which will feature core blockchain integrations. Partnering with e-Commerce player Inxception, the ‘Zippy’ platform aims to help onboard traditional B2B merchants into the digital age, helping to facilitate sales by acting as an online catalogue for businesses. Blockchain technology will specifically be targeted towards services helping to monitor and track shipments as well and processing purchase orders and improving auditability. With the global B2B e-Commerce market projected to hit $1.8 trillion by 2023, B2B participants are expecting the same quality and efficiency of service offered to regular consumers.
SIX Group — R3 beats out competitors
SIX group, Switzerland’s financial infrastructure provider, has chosen R3’s Enterprise Corda system to facilitate the digital asset trading, settlement and custody platform they’re building. Enterprise Corda beat out numerous competitor solutions, including Hyperledger Fabric, by offering some standout features including and architecture carefully designed for a highly-regulated space, as well as its ability to encapsulate sectors beyond capital markets such as identity and insurance. This announcement builds on recent good news for R3 where financial technology provider MonetaGo ported its whole fraud mitigation network onto Corda Enterprise.
SWIFT — Blockchain-based e-voting
The financial messaging network, SWIFT, is building a blockchain-based e-voting PoC in conjunction with the Singapore Exchange and four banks (Deutsche Bank, DBS, Standard Chartered and HSBC). The effort was spun out of a common goal towards finding a better solution to shareholder voting, a process notorious for its time-consuming and paper-based process, rendering it prone to numerous transaction errors. Aside from robust auditability and transparency, the participants want to steer DLT towards facilitating a more efficient proxy-voting process which is presently complex. The trial will use a permissioned blockchain and will involve issuers and a central securities depository (yet to be confirmed). SWIFT is providing the testing environment and is focused on examining whether its existing software interfaces can be reused, tweaked to allow for a smoother process.
Nomura — Committing to Smart-Contract auditing
Y-combinator backed smart contract auditing startup, Quantstamp, announced a significant investment from Japanese financial holding giant Nomura. The US head-quartered company are setting up a subsidiary in Japan as a result. Nomura’s senior managing director of innovations, Chuzaburo Yagi, explained that as the blockchain industry matures, there will be an undeniable demand for security assurance around smart contract architecture, a demand Quantstamp has been positioning itself to address over the last two years. To-date, Quantstamp’s automated tool for developers has been used to secure more than $500 million worth of transactions. Their CEO Richard Ma has continually expressed a bullish outlook on smart-contract development in Japan, with expectations for major expansion.
SBI Holdings — Jumping into the mining game
Japanese financial services giant, SBI Holdings, has established the ‘SBI Mining Chip Co.’, a subsidiary dedicated to manufacturing crypto asset mining chips and supporting systems. The move is part of their strategy on addressing the digital assets market which they have beared interest on since 2017 where they started collecting cryptocurrencies for research purposes. Adam Traidman, who has extensive experience in the semiconductor market, will be leading the new venture. This isn’t SBI’s first foray into blockchain, the company has been focussed on building out the ecosystem in Japan to ensure sustainable adoption in the years to come. Most notable developments include MoneyTap, a blockchain-based money transfer app powered by Ripple.
IBM — Crypto-custody
IBM is going after the crypto-custody market. Shuttle Holdings, a New York investment firm will launch a custody solution (beta) using IBM’s cloud and encryption tools. The company is going after users such as banks, family offices, funds and other entities who are looking to self-store digital assets. Important to note here that neither IBM or Shuttle Holdings will hold any digital assets on the client’s behalf, they merely provide the tools to enable users to do so. The service announced during IBM’s THINK 2019 conference, will not offer cold storage options but rather what they refer to an equally secure solution using hardware security model which helps users store their digital keys in a secure environment. The reasoning behind this move is the expectancy for entities to want to allow their customers ease of access to their assets as and when they want to versus the comparatively longer extraction process from cold-storage.
Citibank — Abandons blockchain initiatives
Citibank has announced they are abandoning all cryptocurrency experiments in favour of pursuing developments on existing payment messaging network SWIFT, a move that goes against the trend seen in major banks such as JP Morgan and their newly announced JPM Coin. Ken Moore, Head of Innovation at Citibank, explained how they grew more concerned with how adoption would be met whereas SWIFT currently boasts over 10,000 financial institutions which offer instant traction and brand equity. Citibank has been exploring blockchain-based solutions for a number of years now but has failed to see much traction, a prime example being Citicoin, their digital currency initiative that barely made it past the proof-of-concept page.
Deutsche Borse Group — Creating a digital assets platform
Deutsche Borse Group, owners of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, is building what’s being referred to as a ‘trusted digital assets platform’. They have partnered with fintech firm Sygnum as well as major telecoms player Swisscom. Together they’re hoping to target a number of solutions focused around issuance, liquidity, custody etc. A notable feature of this deal is that Deutsche Borse and Sygnum will both be shareholders of Daura AG, the company providing the underlying platform offering these solutions for Swiss SMEs. This allows these non-listed firms access to capital markets. Sygnum is also in the process of obtaining a banking and securities dealer license from FINMA which will enable the ecosystem to execute on solutions such as lending and capital issuance.
3a0362af484796d7e9273bf11e7 — This is the first half!
Find the other half of the private key somewhere in a previous Alpine article!
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