2020: The Year Cypherium’s Dominance Over the Global Blockchain Landscape Became Undeniable
From a number of strategic collaborations with IBM, Google Cloud, Amazon, Microsoft, IC3, Randstad, Société Générale and OMFIF to working on China’s much-awaited ‘Digital Yuan’ project, Sky Guo and the rest of the Cypherium team have really positioned themselves at the forefront of the blockchain revolution during 2020.
It’s no secret that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has brought on an unprecedented amount of economic devastation around the globe, forcing many traditional financial institutions to rethink their operational strategies. One of the needs that has arisen among consumers is seamless access to online banking and payments. This has, for the lack of a better word, forced many central banks to embrace digital currencies and as a result we’ve seen many Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) pilot programs and initiatives being announced in 2020.
Cypherium has been at the cutting edge of this innovative technology, working with a number of central banks such as; the Bank of England, Bank of Thailand, People’s Bank of China, Banque de France, European Central Bank, and many others to discuss and facilitate their ongoing CBDC experiments. In fact, Cypherium’s Digital Currency Interoperability Framework (DCIF) stands to become a pivotal part of the global CBDC ecosystem — since it can enable these novel offerings to interact with a wide range of private sector industries, national economic systems, as well as various crypto platforms.
Furthermore, Cypherium is also a founding member of the OMFIF Digital Monetary Institute and the US Faster Payments Council — two think tanks that have taken up the mantle of educating governments, regulators, and investors about the massive potential of crypto and blockchain tech.
Lastly, to ensure Cypherium’s continued growth in 2021, the company delivered on its many roadmap promises, including the launch of the project’s mainnet, various exchange listings, successful completion of its public sale event, as well as partnerships with major industry players including Microsoft and Société Générale.
Here are some of the highlights from the past year that are worth bringing to your attention:
Cypherium Frees HR Giant Randstad from its Manual Verification Processes
In February, Dutch human resources consulting giant Randstad announced its decision to partner with Cypherium in order to authenticate and track sensitive data regarding its users without having to depend on the services of a centralized third-party security firm.
Randstad is the global leader in the HR services industry, currently boasting a massive client base of around 280,000 firms. In 2019 alone, the multinational helped more than 2 million candidates join the global workforce while training an additional 350,000 people.
As a result of the partnership, Randstad’s manual verification processes were successfully streamlined, making the firm’s authentication system more efficient and secure. What makes this development special is that it is the first project to successfully deliver on blockchain’s potential within the human resources industry.
Chainlink & Cypherium Partnership Announced
With the world of decentralized finance (DeFi) becoming an integral part of the crypto-ecosystem in 2020, many projects have gained a lot of attention, including Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network, which collects real-time price and events data from various on-chain and real-world sources. It has been one of the most popular projects in 2020 within this burgeoning space.
A strategic partnership in April saw Cypherium and Chainlink join forces, allowing the firm to gain access to the former’s oracle capabilities, thus optimizing its blockchain implementation and application procedures.
Not only that, in April Cypherium also forged a partnership with Bloxroute Labs, a blockchain scalability provider, delivering its client’s seamless access to a vast array of fully integrated smart contracts that are end-to-end secured.
Cypherium Joins Microsoft’s New Blockchain-as-a-Service Programme
Over the course of Q1 2020, Cypherium gained lots of mainstream traction resulting in the company coming together with Microsoft during May for a new startup program, effectively becoming part of the multinational’s blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS).
Sky believes that Cypherium’s unique features make it an attractive addition to Microsoft’s BaaS, adding that the platform’s next-generation Byzantine fault tolerant algorithm (CypherBFT), and instant finality module will make sure that “no matter how many nodes may be present in the network, the platform will run at its top speed”. He further highlighted: “While the classic BFT algorithms can only scale to about 20 nodes and with more nodes, it will crash because the communication is too complex.”
CypherBFT features instant transaction finality is capable of up to 10,000 transactions per second (faster than both Mastercard and Visa, without sacrificing the principle of decentralization and security), and addresses the scaling issue via linear scalability.
In the same month, Cypherium also partnered with a number of other prominent tech giants including Google, Amazon, and IBM.
Cypherium Approached to Become Founding Member of Think Tank, OMFIF
The Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) think tank approached Cypherium in May to become a founding member of the industry body bringing together central banks and economic policy makers to spearhead the global adoption of CBDCs. Officials from Cypherium have participated in a number of roundtable discussions that included senior representatives from the European Central Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, along with central banks from Europe, Japan, China, and Australia.
China’s DC-EP Trails Successfully Facilitated — Suzhou Sign MOU with Cypherium
In July, Cypherium signed a Memorandum-of-Understanding (MOU) with Suzhou, China, to facilitate the technical development of the country’s much-hyped CBDC — referred to as the Digital Yuan or ‘DC-EP’. As a pioneering city for China’s blockchain revolution, Suzhou is the perfect proving ground for Cypherium’s interoperability solution. By harnessing the Cypherium smart contract platform, Suzhou will be able to build forward-thinking blockchain products, avoid compatibility issues, and encourage innovation within the city — furthering its goal to become China’s foremost blockchain hub.
Suzhou’s GDP currently exceeds 1.85 trillion Yuan, making it an optimal destination for testing out Cypherium’s cross-chain interoperability solution that seeks to enable efficient and secure digital payments — both on a local as well as cross-border level.
Cypherium Draws The Attention of Société Générale
Société Générale, one of France’s largest banks, and a leader among European banks in its willingness to experiment with CBDC trials. In August they listed Cypherium within the Société Générale Startup-Flow, inviting Cypherium to submit a proof-of-concept bringing innovative, disruptive technology to CDBCs.
Cypherium’s Community Management Program Announced
In order to better serve Cypherium’s global client base, the company launched its Community Management Program in October, primarily as an effort to provide its international supporters with highly curated information relevant to their respective geographical locations in a timely manner.
Sky Guo, Cypherium CEO Addresses United Nations
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world have been forced to focus on integrating blockchain technology into their financial services. At the 75th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly, Sky Guo, a founding member of OMFIF and co-founder of Cypherium — discussed how the next generation of foreign policy leaders can leverage emerging digital technologies to solve the world’s most pressing challenges, given that 80% of world central banks are evaluating adopting CBDCs.
Being the only delegate from the blockchain sector, Sky pushed the conversation towards digital assets and their potential role in the future of finance. He further spoke about how CBDCs can help governments achieve their goal of digitization and how his team has been pushing the envelope in regard to the development/testing of various CBDC projects across the globe. With over 80% of the world’s central banks actively devising their very own CBDC solutions, Cypherium’s push for discussions around cross-chain compatibility of digital assets (including CBDCs) has been able to garner the attention of regulators all over the world.
CypherSwap: Cypherium powered DEX
Addressing the key shortcomings of existing public blockchain infrastructures and enabling interoperability in every corner of the ecosystem, in October, Cypherium launched their decentralized exchange ‘CypherSwap’, which harnesses the power of cross-chain compatibility and provides clients with near-endless liquidity. The platform seeks to mitigate many of the limitations currently present in other popular DEXs such as Uniswap.
Unlike a whole host of other DeFi platforms that are tethered solely to Ethereum tokens, thanks to Cypherium’s expertise in blockchain interoperability, CypherSwap is able to offer its users a litany of digital assets from virtually any blockchain ecosystem, including Bitcoin, ETH, EOS, and XRP.
Cypherium Mainnet Launch Following $32m Capital Raise
Following a successful fundraise totalling $32 million — coming from various established players such as Pantera Capital, Blockfolio, and Qtum, as well as a public sale in October 2020 that secured an additional $4 million in funding — the Cypherium main network launch took place in November. The capital raise is an important validation for the technology, team, and vision behind Cypherium, and the latest of many milestones for the project. The team look forward to welcoming the next generation of supporters and users into the Cypherium community,”
Paul Veradittakit, Partner at Pantera Capital, told reporters that as an early supporter of the Cypherium project, his team is delighted with the success of Cypherium, especially as it continues to have a direct impact on both central banks, as well as many enterprises across the globe.
Sky Guo Outlines Crypto Governance Framework at OMFIF
As well as extensively contributing to OMFIF Digital Monetary Institute’s December report on the Future of Digital Payments, Cypherium CEO Sky Guo put forth a number of suggestions pertaining to the development of national and cross-border governance frameworks. Detailing the different types of payment innovations that are necessary, as well as the role of blockchain technology, and the challenges that lie ahead for public-private partnerships. The event was attended by a number of C-Suite Executives from financial giants such as Novi (Facebook’s digital wallet project), Mastercard, Citi Bank, Bank for International Settlements, and Algorand.
Looking Ahead to 2021
China will roll out its CBDC for national use
Over the course of the last 16 months, China has been able to successfully launch one of the largest real-world trials of its sovereign digital currency program — dubbed Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) — across multiple cities. Thus it would not be surprising to see the Digital Yuan being rolled out for public use sometime next year.
Furthermore, earlier in December, China’s central bank and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) announced that they are currently in the preliminary stages of piloting a program that will see the Digital Yuan being used for cross-border payments — an advanced milestone which suggests that the project is right on schedule.
UK and EU members will announce pilot CBDC projects
It’s likely that in 2021, an increasing number of financial institutions across Europe, the United States, and the UK will explore the potential of CBDCs. The central banks of France and the UK have already made their intentions quite clear in this regard, with the Banque de France issuing a call for applications to experiment with a CBDC for interbank settlements, while the Bank of England (BoE) has published a discussion paper assessing the risks and benefits of CBDCs.
Also, earlier in 2020, The Bank of Canada, the Swiss National Bank, and the Sveriges Riksbank — Sweden’s central bank — teamed up with the European Central Bank and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in order to review the potential of launching their very own CBDCs.
Many major banks will follow in the footsteps of PayPal and Square
In October, American payments provider PayPal announced its decision to enter the crypto fray by offering users the option to not only make transfers using digital currencies, but also to buy/store many prominent assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash on its platform. Similar announcements were also made by other payment firms like Square and Revolut.
This entry of mainstream players into the digital asset space suggests that by the end of next year, a number of major banks may begin to emulate PayPal and offer their customers the option to buy, transfer, convert various cryptocurrencies.
