Newsletter: 3
In the news
Jack Dorsey, Square (and Twitter’s) CEO, had recently hired former Google director Steve Lee to lead Square’s bitcoin and crypto project. The plan is to hire about 5 engineers and a designer and the whole team will work on a single project “to make some step changes to various aspects of the ecosystem, versus an iteration”. More info.
Facebook has signed up about a dozen company to backup it’s Globalcoin crypto project (Libra). Backers of the consortium include Visa, Master Card, Uber, PayPal, Stripe, Booking.com and MercadoLibre and Facebook is planning to raise as much as $1 billion to help start the crypto based payments system and a white paper is expected to be released on June 18th. More info.
Google is partnering with Chainlink to build cloud based Ethereum application. It aims to place it’s Data warehousing (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI) solution, BigQuery, on blockchain using a Chainlink Oracle smart contract and it’s immediate focus seems to be around prediction marketplaces, futures contracts and transaction privacy. More info.
In Iceland, Electronic money has been approved to use over a blockchain for the first time. Monerium backed by ConsenSys will initially operate using Ethereum but it is prepared to operate across public and private hyperledgers, allowing transfers to be made without an intermediary. More info.
Crypto startups are raising money again, not for ICOs but for IEOs as cryptocurrency prices rebounds. With ICOs, startups creates a virtual currency and offers for public sale. With IEOs, the tokens are sold through cryptocurrency exchanges who acts as a middleman and does the research around their worthiness of being listed. So far, about $518M has been raised with 63 IEOs this year through May. More info.
Shopping on Amazon using ethereum is going to be possible with a browser extension that these two companies are partnering up to launch — CLIC Technology and Opporty. Traditionally, ethereum platforms handle about 20 transactions / second whereas, Amazon processes upwards of 300 transactions / second. This incompatibility with the digital currency is where Opporty’s Plasma Cash and CLIC technology are teaming up to accelerate the transaction speed while reducing loads on the system. More info.
Ripple is expanding into South America by launching its operations in Brazil. It plans to reduce the cost and complexity of moving money internationally with its (a) use of modern messaging system in comparison to SWIFT (b) XRP tokens to enable instant transfers. It already seems to have over a dozen customers in Brazil and they have seen a drop in clearing times from days to seconds and reduction in payment fees. More info.
Stablecoins standout in the crypto world due to the fact they aren’t as wildly volatile as other crypto assets like bitcoin. Because of it’s design to maintain a steady price, they are often at 1:1 ratio with USD and are used to buy other cryptocurrencies on exchanges that don’t accept fiat currencies. While there are a number of stablecoins out there, the most popular one by thus far is Tether, which seems to account for 94% of total stablecoin transaction volume. More info.
Reading
Gartner reveals 7 mistakes to avoid in blockchain project. More info.
How does Cosmos work and compare to Bitcoin and Ethereum? More info.
Nevada passed flurry of blockchain bills. More info.
Disclaimer: My posts, articles and opinions expressed here are strictly my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer or others.
