ChainRift Research Newsletter: Monday March 11
Recent news and views from ChainRift Research and the web.
These stories were published last week in ChainRift Research:
Blockchain phones enable simple, decentralized Web 3.0 apps
It seems likely that simple phone-based, blockchain-powered decentralized applications could open the Web 3.0 to the masses.
The problem is not Facebook, it is you
The latest Facebook scandal is that the social network is giving out the phone numbers of its users.
SingularityNET interview: Ben Goertzel
SingularityNET recently announced the launch of its beta platform. I interviewed SingularityNET CEO Ben Goertzel to find out more.
Here’s a selection of other interesting recent news from the crypto-space.
Binance coin, the digital token from the world’s largest bitcoin exchange, is up “120% since the beginning of the year, according to CoinMarketCap, which tracks most major cryptocurrency prices,” Forbes reported last week. A senior market analyst at eToro said:
“Binance coin has been able to buck the crypto correlations principally because people buy it as a way of speculating on industry growth. If the markets are moving it means people are trading, and Binance has a big share of those volumes.”
Opera will extend its Crypto Wallet and Dapp explorer Opera for Android to Opera Touch for iOS. Opera is taking this step in response to popular demand from the Ethereum community:
“Many of you asked us to provide the same seamless Web 3 browsing experience we introduced to Android on iOS. iOS users around the globe will soon gain access to a beautifully-designed, full-featured browser with an integrated native Crypto Wallet and Web 3 browsing functionalities.”
Enjin is announcing that the testnet version its blockchain SDK for the Unity game engine will be launched in time to demo it at the GDC game industry event on March 14. The announcement claims:
“The world’s most powerful blockchain game development platform will soon be live on the world’s largest game engine.”
Dukascopy Bank, a Swiss online bank specialized in online and mobile trading, banking and financial services, is launching a cryptocurrency named Dukascoin.
Dukascoin is “the first payment coin issued for public use by a licensed and regulated bank, a Swiss bank at the least,” said Andre Duka, CEO-CTO of Dukascopy Bank, as reported by Finextra. “I take this big event as a historic milestone for both the blockchain industry and the traditional banking sector.”
According to Forbes, Bitcoin is likely to soon get a major competitor: Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking giant Facebook. This is a possible interpretation of a recent post where Zuckerberg says:
“As I think about the future of the internet, I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms… We plan to build this the way we’ve developed WhatsApp: focus on the most fundamental and private use case — messaging — make it as secure as possible, and then build more ways for people to interact on top of that, including calls, video chats, groups, stories, businesses, payments, commerce and, ultimately, a platform for many other kinds of private services.”
Financial Times suggests that Facebook’s move toward private networks like WeChat in China is likely part of “a shrewd strategy to explore new revenue streams and resist regulatory scrutiny.”
Social trading and multi asset brokerage company eToro is announcing the launch of its platform and cryptoasset wallet in the U.S. Guy Hirsch, eToro U.S. Managing Director, said:
“eToro will play a lead role in transforming the financial services industry. We’re doing that successfully on a global scale and we are thrilled to finally be able to bring our offering to the U.S. audience.”
Picture from Pixabay.
