August 4, 2017
Market Activity and Trends
Fujitsu Unveils New Hyperledger Fabric Technology
Coin Desk |July 31, 2017 |https://goo.gl/38ohaB
New technology for IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric blockchain project was debuted by Fujitsu at the P2P Financial Systems 2017 conference in London. Fujitsu created and tested new tools to increase transactions speeds with Fabric. The company elaborated on this development stating, “whereas the previous method could handle 500 transactions per second, Fujitsu Laboratories achieved 1,350 transactions per second using this newly developed technology, an improvement of approximately 2.7 times.”
This achievement enables the application of blockchain technology to online transaction systems, which require high performance. The next step is to adapt the new technology to the latest Fabric version 1.0, as it was implemented to the previous Fabric. By March 2018, it is expected that Fujitsu will commercialize the software.
Hong Kong Stock Exchange Launches Blockchain Initiative
Coin Desk | August 1, 2017 | https://goo.gl/pYoZKS
In 2018, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX) will kick off a blockchain-powered private market dubbed HKEX Private Market. The goal of this new blockchain initiative is to assist in helping smaller firms obtain financing, and will act as a nursery before these smaller firms are ready to enter public markets. HKEX chief executive, Charles Li, explained, “They can conduct pre-IPO financing and other activities on an off-exchange venue not under the regulatory remit of the Securities and Futures Ordinance.”
Along with the proposed Private Market, HKEX is considering other blockchain initiatives to improve the exchange functionality. Li disclosed that blockchain would be preferable to upscale HKEX operations, and uncovered a three-to-four-year plan that involves integrating the technology into its post-trade systems to reduce costs.
MultiChain 1.0: Bitcoin-Compatible Private Blockchain Opens for Enterprise
Coin Desk | August 2, 2017 | https://goo.gl/KgnP94
MultiChain is claimed to enable private networks of enterprise users to conduct 1,000 transactions per second — a volume the Coin Sciences startup argues is required by prospective clients. As part of the 1.0 launch, Coin Sciences has also unveiled 14 new members of its partner program, including multinational consulting firm Cognizant and Medici Ventures, the Overstock.com subsidiary behind the tØ blockchain stock exchange.
Crucial among a series of upgrades in this version of MultiChain is a new feature called “Streams” that is aimed to make it easier for developers to store and retrieve information about when data was written to the blockchain, who wrote the data, and more. Other features include a simplified process for spinning up a new blockchain and nodes; permissioned credentials for using addresses on the blockchain to represent identities; support for assets being issued, transferred and traded; and, perhaps most importantly, bitcoin compatibility with protocol transaction APIs.
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