IBM trials blockchain platform aimed at banks

IBM trials blockchain platform aimed at banks

IBM has launched a blockchain platform aimed at the financial services industry. So far, nine financial services companies, including banks Barclays and Citi, are involved in the proof of concept. IBM has teamed up with CLS, a foreign exchange market infrastructure firm, to create the product, known as LedgerConnect.
IBM launched a blockchain platform for financial services on Monday as it continued to bolster its offerings of the much-hyped technology.
Blockchain is the technology that underpins the cryptocurrency bitcoin. It's a public ledger of activity on the bitcoin network that is tamper-proof. But banks and other institutions are now looking to apply blockchain to many of their processes, from issuing loans to settling trades.
The blockchain, or distributed ledger technology (DLT), being employed by large companies, however, differs from the bitcoin network. Whereas the bitcoin blockchain is public, the DLT being applied at large organizations is private.
IBM teamed up with CLS, a foreign exchange market infrastructure firm, to create LedgerConnect, a proof of concept DLT platform designed for financial services companies. It's aimed at applying blockchain technology to a number of areas, including know-your-customer processes, sanctions screening, collateral management, derivatives post-trade processing and reconciliation and market data.
There are a large number of companies offering different DLT products. For example, R3, which works with a consortium of banks has blockchain products aimed at the financial services industry.
       
July 30, 2018 by Arjun Kharpal

READ FULL ARTICLE
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/30/ibm-trials-blockchain-platform-aimed-at-banks.html
 

Thanks to BlockchainTechnology, the Entrepreneurial Spirit in France Has Never Been Stronger If you were to visit France just a few years ago to explore the startup environment, sadly, you would have been pretty disappointed. However, if you were to come back today, you would be filled with surprise to learn just how much the landscape has changed. Although France isn't currently considered the main hub for blockchain innovation in Europe, it is certainly one of the fastest growing, as I can personally attest. In the U.S., entrepreneurs who fail to build successful businesses are perceived as bold, knowledgeable and ambitious, just from having attempted the journey. They learn valuable lessons from their experiences, lessons that can be applied to future endeavors that can heighten their possibilities of success. Even the most successful entrepreneurs have failed several times before they got their first taste of success. In French culture, failure has historically been associated with shame, and entrepreneurs are often very reluctant, if not terrified, to take that pivotal leap of faith to initiate their journey. In their defense, startups have a very low success rate, which can lead to a decline in the emergence of new startups. French business owners believe that if they fail, that can potentially mean the end of their career, as no investor will trust this "failure of an entrepreneur" with his or her money ever again. The French government did not make the situation any easier either, because to bankruptcy usually meant that you would never be able to own anything of value ever again, or at least for a very long time. The perception of failure in French society has recently shifted and we are seeing a sharp spike in the amount of startups that are springing to life, especially those that are exploring blockchain technology innovations. This stems from some of the new French laws that President Macron has put in place to lift the French entrepreneurial spirit. This major change is due to the French government shifting its stance on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies to one of support and optimism. It envisions a future that inevitably involves blockchain technology handling various processes of our daily lives, and it wants to become one of the countries leading the charge. In fact, the French government is allegedly taking steps to work on a legislative framework for initial coin offerings, or ICOs (the first of its kind) and has even slashed the cryptocurrency tax rate. Earlier this month, Chain Accelerator -- the leading blockchain startup accelerator in the EU -- launched in Station F in Paris. Progress is happening right before our very eyes. August 2, 2018 by Anaji Ismail READ FULL ARTICLE https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/317322

Colorado Becoming Leader In Blockchain Technology The State of Colorado is hoping to become the nation’s leader in the emerging technology of Blockchain. “Colorado specifically has a ton of block chain companies and engineers here. If the state can make policy; there’s going to be a lot of block chain companies that move here,” said Paul Foley, an entrepreneur. Gov. John Hickenlooper set up the Council for the Advancement of Blockchain Technology last month. It’s a combination of legislators and industry leaders who are pushing Colorado to have the friendliest environment for Blockchain companies to operate. “It’s an exciting technology with a lot of potential applications. It’s also a disruptive technology,” said State Senator Jack Tate, a Republican from Centennial. “It’s a potentially new way of looking at the internet.” Blockchain technology is heralded as a new, safer platform for data. It’s the brains behind crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, but its use could be endless. “It’s called block chain because it’s just blocks of data being stacked and if you look at it over time you see a transaction history,” said Foley. “The idea is, nothing enters the block that is fraudulent.” The technology could change the way transactions and ownership take place, but could also protect online identities or even medical records. The Council for the state is looking at removing roadblocks and setting an environment for Blockchain companies to thrive. “Once the industry starts developing we’ll have a better handle on where things are going and what things need to happen,” said Tate. July 27,2018 by Jeff Todd READ FULL ARTICLE https://denver.cbslocal.com/2018/07/27/blockchain-technology-colorado-companies-governor-john-hickenlooper

Privacy Revolution: How Blockchain Is Reshaping Our Economy   The internet has provided an unparalleled means of communicating with people all over the world. There are more than 60 billion messages sent per day on WhatsApp and Facebook messenger combined as well as 269 billion emails sent on a daily basis. However, these platforms have slowly become centralized over time allowing them to become prime targets for hackers and other actors seeking to harvest our data. Both of them have continuously threatened users' rights to privacy. Blockchain technology’s disruptive force innovates the way our data are stored, allowing users to fully control personal details they would like to share in public. Leveraging the potential of blockchain technology and decentralization may well be the key to protecting our privacy. Facebook's recent Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal exhibited just how companies have harvested users’ private data for monetization purposes. An estimated 87 million users around the world have had their personal information used by analytical firms, making it one of the worst data breaches in social media history. While this isn’t new, it highlights the inadequate data protection that exists in our current platforms. Technological advancement has revealed another way to manage our data through blockchain technology. But this method isn’t something novel, in fact, it harkens back to some of the earliest ideas of the internet. Decentralization set the stage for the unparalleled World Wide Web we know today. It is also a central feature of blockchain technology. Blockchain provides an infrastructure that allows a secure platform that provides multiple innovative use cases. The immutability and transparency that blockchain provides can gain back users’ right to privacy. However, this technology is still in its infancy. Jul 31, 2018 by Sherman Lee READ FULL ARTICLE https://www.forbes.com/sites/shermanlee/2018/07/31/privacy-revolution-how-blockchain-is-reshaping-our-economy

Digital Asset Helps Drive Google Cloud’s Belated Blockchain Foray Understanding the value of blockchain-based software is easy. But creating software that interacts with the blockchain is typically pretty hard because, in contrast to the world of traditional programming, the blockchain developer ecosystem offers few ready-made tools to help programmers write blockchain-based applications. Digital Asset, a financial technology company focused on distributed ledger advancement, hopes to change that through a new partnership with Google Cloud. The two organizations have announced a collaboration that will make blockchain software development tools available in Google Cloud, with the goal of reducing the technical barriers standing between the idea for the next great blockchain-based application and its implementation. Blockchain Programming as a Service. Digital Asset’s specialty is providing a platform that financial institutions can use to interact and share data via a blockchain. The company runs its own distributed ledger and it also provides a special programming language, DAML, which is designed for writing agreements that can be verified on that blockchain. Digital Asset pitches DAML as an easier, more secure way for writing smart contracts than creating them from scratch using conventional programming languages. On July 23, Digital Asset announced that it had made DAML available in Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) form on Google Cloud. In other words, developers will now be able to access DAML directly from Google Cloud and use it to write applications that run in the same cloud. “The DAML PaaS is a fully-managed solution that developers can use to test and deploy DLT applications, accessible through Google Cloud’s Orbitera application marketplace technologies,” Digital Asset said in the statement. “Combined with the DAML SDK [software development kit], developers now have an end-to-end toolkit to build and deploy sophisticated distributed applications.” Google Cloud Plays Blockchain Catch-Up. Digital Asset’s press release about the Google Cloud partnership included only a somewhat generic statement from Leonard Law, Google Cloud’s head of financial services, about blockchain technology having “great potential to benefit customers not just in the financial services industry, but across many industries.” That leaves some questions about whether the collaboration with Digital Asset is really significant from Google Cloud’s perspective. here are signs, however, that for Google, adding the DAML PaaS to its cloud is part of a bigger move toward making Google Cloud a friendlier place for blockchain developers. The same day that Digital Asset announced its Google Cloud partnership, two Google Cloud executives published a blog post drawing attention to, among other things, Google Cloud’s collaboration with Digital Asset and BlockApps, another blockchain-app development platform. Aug 02, 2018 by Christopher Tozzi READ FULL ARTICLE https://distributed.com/news/digital-asset-helps-drive-google-clouds-belated-blockchain-foray

About STARBIT

Starbit aims at spreading theoretical - practical knowledge among ordinary people, without being an expert or willing to become an expert. Starbit is aware of the impact that blockchain and crypto currencies will have on people's lives: for this reason it promotes a mass literacy.
Starbit selects everything needed for a person to be informed and about blockchain technologies and various applications, making it easier, in a progressive manner, accessible to all, thus saving time and resources to anyone interested in this area. The goal is to offer various degrees of knowledge (first level is free as Club Member, or included in Blockchain Information Packages for customers) to those who are interested in playing an acting rule. Starbit also offers an opportunity to those who want to transform all this in a work from home opportunity.

DISCLAIMER: Registration to the Club is totally free and gives access to the basic information on Blockchain and its applications on the market, the most important of which is constituted by the so-called crypto currencies. At the Club members who are interested in having a more complete knowledge and information is also offered the possibility (it is an option, not an obligation) to buy an Information Pack of 2 or 12 months (The acquisition of knowledge is a fact known to be progressive over time). The information pack includes in addition to a continuous theoretical section, a practice section with the use of an authomatic software (artificial intelligence) also designed to generate itself specific information that the customer can see, compare, analyze (the extent, with the frequency and with the intensity that will choose autonomously). For this section is included in the cost of the package also making available remotely, for the entire period, specific robot software. Any coins (among those chosen for the practical exercise) that may result gradually, will of course be the exclusive property of the customer and should not be considered in any relationship with the information package purchased. For maximum clarity applies the following example: if a person acquires an organic farming course that includes in addition to the theory, also a practical detection of cultivation of an organic garden (like Michelle Obama at the White House), any products (carrots, tomatoes, peas, etc.) that will enrich his table, will obviously be of full ownership of those who have grown the organic garden and will not of course no relation to the person who sold the course, even if he has supplied the equipment for the practical test, such as seeds, tools, pots, fertilizers, various preparations, etc. Subscribers to the Club have the power to start the business, if authorized and in acceptance of all the terms and conditions for the Promoter, explained in the Promoter Agreement and in the Policies and Procedures. They should not incur any fees and never any obligation to buy anything. If as a result of the promotion done, some new Club member, decide to buy a package Information, the Promoter will receive a commercial fee as provided by the terms and conditions above mentioned. It is not authorized anyone to provide news other than those listed here and on the official website, to promise false gains and / or try to push the purchase of the Information Package, which must instead be the result of personal conviction. In particular, it must never be made no reference to any kind of investment if not purely cultural nature. This Club is fully committed to compliance with the laws of the countries in which it operates. It's also open to collaboration with those who help him to improve.For each queries or suggestions please contact via the official website. For questions please contact support@starbit.com.