Issue 3: Coming to Consensus at Consensus
DCG Connect — Week of May 29, 2017
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There were a lot of enterprise announcements! We’ve put the big ones below.
Digital Currency Group launched its fourth subsidiary, DCG Connect | We launched at Consensus with a group of founding corporate members including IBM, Amazon Web Services, CME Group, Foxconn, Mastercard, New York Life, Prudential, Transamerica, and Western Union. The most important thing we do is facilitate meaningful partnerships between our corporate and vetted startup members to create enterprise-ready solutions for deployment. There’s a lot of hype around this technology — DCG Connect can help you identity realistic use cases for your organization and the best startups in the space that are ready to collaborate. Join us here.
Toyota is partnering with startups to explore blockchain use cases in auto | The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) has partnered with startups BigchainDB, Oaken, Commuterz, and Gem to explore three areas of a new mobility ecosystem Toyota wants to build: (1) driving/testing data sharing (2) car/ride share transactions and (3) usage based-insurance. One of the interesting questions is how much driving data autonomous cars will need to “learn” from before they are ready for mass adoption and how long this learning process will take. Getting companies to share data is hard but this might be a scenario where the incentives make sense because of the opportunity to quicken the pace of development with pooled resources.
Wyre built a payments bot for WeChat and Facebook that generates, authenticates, and stores invoices | Wyre uses the ethereum blockchain to verify invoices sent to recipients. In April we learned that Facebook and Google had been scammed out of $100M by a guy who tricked the two companies into paying for computer supplies by forging, among other things, invoices. Doing this sort of simple authentication over a blockchain is like the low hanging fruit of enterprise blockchain use cases.
JPMorgan will add technology from Zcash to its own blockchain platform, Quorum | JPM develops its own blockchain, Quorum, which sits on the Ethereum blockchain, and leaves R3. Now JPM will add technology (an additional security layer) from Zcash to Quorum to allow anonymity when conducting transactions on its network, which was a concern for R3’s bank members.
Nasdaq and Citi partnered together with Chain on a payments solution| Chain deploys blockchain networks for enterprises, and Nasdaq and Citi are using its tech for direct payment processing and automatic reconciliation. There weren’t many details provided but some transactions have already occurred including “Citi’s automated processing of cross-border payments via a link between the CitiConnect® for Blockchain connectivity platform and the Linq Platform powered by the Nasdaq Financial Framework.”
Bitt working with Netki on creating a Caribbean-wide settlement network | Bitt will use Netki’s identity solution for customer on-boarding to the network. This follows the prior announcement by Bitt in 2016 that they were developing a digital Barbadian dollar with Colu.
Banking consortium, R3, closed a $107M funding round with participation from over 40 financial institutions | R3 introduced its product, Corda, in 2016. It is not a blockchain. R3 members did not want a blockchain in part because banks don’t want to share data/transactions or broadcast information to other participants in the network (even if encrypted), a key feature that makes a blockchain useful for others, like participants in a supply chain. Or, as R3 said in its white paper, “It is heavily inspired by blockchain systems, but without the design choices that make traditional blockchains inappropriate for many financial scenarios.”
Further Reading
Fidelity is mining bitcoin // The global digital asset infrastructure is bad // Will blockchain disrupt venture capital? // Change Healthcare joins Hyperledger // Chat platform Kik launching digital currency // Cross blockchain trades? // DCG CEO Barry Silbert’s bitcoin scaling compromise
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