AGORACOM Small-cap Investor Relations Blog

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Major Improvements Are Coming To Blockchain In 2020

• Everyone in the enterprise world already has a blockchain strategy.
• If they don’t have one now, they risk the chance of staying behind or simply missing an opportunity.

Biser Dimitrov Contributor

Everyone in the enterprise world already has a blockchain strategy. If they don’t have one now, they risk the chance of staying behind or simply missing an opportunity. For the last few years, the benefits and correlated risks of fully adopting blockchain technology have been estimated, analyzed, and discussed at large. One thing is clear – despite the potential for a big upside, embracing a newly developed technology presents numerous risks that shouldn’t be underestimated. Blindly introducing new technology stack into an already working production environment means exposing that environment to potentially dangerous security breaches, hacks and data loss.

So, where we are now? Most blockchain protocols claim some level or maturity … but are they, in fact, sufficiently mature? Are they ready for full on-premise deployment in large-scale enterprises? Will CIOs and other business executives enjoy the same comfort as that of the tooling they already have? Let’s review what it takes to move a blockchain protocol from open source to enterprise.

It’s no surprise that the largest cloud providers are also the largest drivers of the Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) model. Let’s call them Tier 1 BaaS providers. They have already established themselves as market leaders with large customer bases. Offering various cloud services and expanding to blockchain seemed to be a logical and evolutional step. 

Microsoft Azure 

Microsoft is one of the largest players in the BaaS space. So far, it has focused primarily on Ethereum but also offers services for running R3’s Corda and Hyperledger Fabric networks. It has dedicated many resources to building the Azure Blockchain Workbench and Azure Blockchain Service. Microsoft’s team is also a key founder and an active participant in the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA) and Token Taxonomy Initiative (TTI). In addition, it has recently joined the Hyperledger family, for which it will contribute to the code and promise be an active member. 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) 

AWS and Microsoft Azure have almost equally split control of the managed blockchain space, though your niche will determine which of these services you use. If you are into financial services, you would probably use Azure, but if you are into healthcare, insurance, or other verticals, your choice is probably AWS. Recently, AWS has made publicly available its Managed Blockchain offering. It supports only Hyperledger Fabric for now but there are plans to integrate Ethereum too. AWS has also invested in the development of Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), which is an append-only database with a cryptographically verifiable transaction log. 

IBM Cloud 

IBM is one of the primary maintainers of Hyperledger Fabric’s source code and, thus, is heavily involved in providing cloud services and product updates for it. Lately, IBM has opened its IBM Blockchain 2.0 to be multi-cloud, which means you can run your Fabric network across various cloud providers. 

Oracle Blockchain 

The Oracle blockchain platform has based its solution only on Hyperledger Fabric, which is not ideal but offers some neat services like enhance node provisioning, blockchain explorer and improved security. 

VMWare 

VMWare clearly saw the issues that affect the current blockchain infrastructure. It is working to resolve these issues with Concord, a highly scalable and energy-efficient distributed trust infrastructure for consensus and smart contract execution. 

VMWare Blockchain VMWare

Apart from the major cloud providers, in 2018 we saw the birth of Blockchain as a Service companies that base their products on top of existing cloud computing platforms; let’s call them Tier 2 BaaS. They are usually smaller, more agile startups that can push new offerings almost every month. This makes them very good choices for a faster go-to-market strategy. Their solutions are wide and colorful, and they usually cover different blockchain protocols. They remain unable to address most enterprise needs yet, but they will stay on the right track and be an attractive option as long as the establishment doesn’t disrupt them. The names that stand out in this category are Kaleido and Blockdaemon.

What are the enterprise needs from a blockchain perspective? Where do we want to see improvements so that we can fully use the benefits of decentralized ledger technology? Let’s separate the main requirements into four categories: platform; interfaces; infrastructure and network; and security and analytics.

Platform

• Operational resilience – ability to maintain uptime and connectivity even when some components fail, including several layers of protection and failover strategy against data loss and corruption.
• Pluggable consensus – ability to switch the consensus mechanism depending on the requirements without rebuilding the whole network.
• Broader off-chain data storage capabilities – support for encrypted data storage.
• Adaptors to allow for SQL-based ledger queries, which will make the broader developer community more comfortable working with blockchain.

Interfaces

• Enterprise integrations – pre-built modules and onramps for existing enterprise systems.
• Robust Oracles – ability to get real-time external data into smart contracts.Watch out for Chainlink.
• Integration with GraphQL, a Facebook-developed language that provides a powerful API to get only the dataset you need in a single request, seamlessly combining data sources.
• Identity federation – ability to authenticate with existing identity providers, which will facilitate faster adoption on the consortium level.
• Built-in privacy and permissioning features – for transactions, accounts, wallets, smart contracts and network participants.

Infrastructure and Network

• Ability to maintain peak performance at the network level – managing and operating hundreds of thousands of nodes while maintaining low latency and facilitating hundreds of thousands of transactions with guaranteed finality.
• Ability to scale and reduce network size on demand – auto-scale a network by adding/removing more validators or orderers.
• DevOps tools to make integration with existing IT systems easier and to make CI/CD build processes faster and seamless.
• Support for cross-network interoperability and cross-blockchain atomic swaps.
• Governance framework with an established and pre-determined transparent structure, rules of participation, a funding model, and financial incentives.

Enhanced Security and Analytics

• Detailed privacy controls over data, smart contract execution, and transaction visibility.
• Improved network monitoring with enhanced contextual meaning of the transactions, ability to troubleshoot on-chain events.
• SLA monitoring with backward compatibility of upgrades.
• Warehousing transaction history data, combining them with other off-chain data sources and making them available for BI reporting tools and other interactive dashboards.

As discussed, the blockchain technology stack has a long way to go before it will be mature enough for mainstream enterprise adoption. This is a completely normal process, as software developers and business leaders transition their mindsets from the currently siloed and centralized infrastructure to the distributed ledger networks. Luckily, we are at the forefront of this technological revolution and have the chance to contribute to what, one day, will be the norm.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/biserdimitrov/2019/07/08/major-improvements-are-coming-to-blockchain-in-2020/#73633acc55b6

SPONSOR: ThreeD Capital Inc. (IDK:CSE) Led by legendary financier, Sheldon Inwentash, ThreeD is a Canadian-based venture capital firm that only invests in best of breed small-cap companies which are both defensible and mass scalable. More than just lip service, Inwentash has financed many of Canada’s biggest small-cap exits. Click Here For More Information.

After Experimenting With Bitcoin and Ethereum, DocuSign Is Accelerating its Blockchain Ambitions

Business team two executive shaking hands after a meeting and conference to sign agreement and become partner in the office, results of their successful teamwork, contract between their firms.

• Since its founding in 2003, firms of all sizes and industries have relied on the company to streamline the contract process through its best-in class security, identity authentication, user interface, and integration with leading business suites.
• Today DocuSign has 500 thousand paying customers, and it earned over $700 million in revenue last year.
• Company also joined the Accord Project, an open-source software initiative that was established to develop a technology stack for smart agreements.

By: Steven Ehrlich

Famed cryptographer Nick Szabo may have coined the term “smart contract” back in 1994, but DocuSign can make a compelling case for being its true inventor. Since its founding in 2003, firms of all sizes and industries have relied on the company to streamline the contract process through its best-in class security, identity authentication, user interface, and integration with leading business suites. Today DocuSign has 500 thousand paying customers, and it earned over $700 million in revenue last year.

However, the company is not resting on its laurels and instead is seeking ways to improve its service offerings, with much of this experimentation incorporating blockchain technology. Over the last few years this testing has included trials, demos, and partnerships on both Bitcoin and Ethereum. The company also joined the Accord Project, an open-source software initiative that was established to develop a technology stack for smart agreements. Furthermore, last week the company invested in a $5.5 million Series A round for smart contract provider Clause alongside Galaxy Digital with the goal of making contracts on their DocuSign Agreement Cloud “self-executing” and “self-aware” in an ongoing fashion, rather than just one moment in time.

Given the core facets of DocuSign’s business and its research into blockchain technology and smart contracts, the San Francisco-based company is in an unrivaled position to assess their utility and applicability to the needs of today’s businesses. Still, the road to blockchain adoption has not been a straight line, and the company’s plans face many of the same hurdles that other potential adopters are trying to clear. To better understand DocuSign’s future direction, I had an opportunity to speak with Ron Hirson, DocuSign Chief Product Officer, who shed additional light on these endeavors, provided context for the company’s investment in Clause, and offered expectations for how blockchain will impact the company moving forward.

DocuSign’s Blockchain Strategy Began in 2015

When individuals think of major enterprise users of blockchain, the first companies that come to mind often include blue-bloods such as Facebook, IBM, and JP Morgan. However, DocuSign has been experimenting with the technology since 2015, when it built a “smart-contract meets smart-asset meets smart-payment” demo with Visa on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. According to Ron, the collaboration aimed to determine whether they could utilize Bitcoin so that a user could “buy a car while sitting in the car”, and have it start provided that the buyer’s insurance was up to date.

Then in 2018, the company joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), a 250+ member global organization that builds open standards aimed at promoting the adoption of Ethereum-based blockchain applications. As part of this partnership, DocuSign created a pilot where clients could store a hash, or a cryptographic fingerprint, of a completed agreement on the public Ethereum blockchain as an independent system of record for interested parties.

Initial Forays Offered a Glimpse of Blockchain’s Potential, but Also Challenges

However, as exciting as these experiments were, neither went mainstream for reasons that will ring familiar to active followers of the enterprise blockchain space. According to Ron, the POC with Visa was primarily an opportunity to learn, and the Bitcoin blockchain was chosen because it was by far the most prominent platform in 2015 (remember Ethereum did not officially launch until July 30, 2015), even if it was not tailor-made for this use case. Even then Bitcoin’s limitations in functionality, data storage, and throughput were well known to industry observers.

It is perhaps for these reasons that the company joined the EEA in 2018 and built its second project on top of Ethereum. However, despite more functionality, the pilot did not gain widespread adoption because customers already felt comfortable with DocuSign serving as a store of record. Ron made it very clear in his conversations to me that most customers did not see a need for an independent audit trail. He also noted that education was not a problem, as he and the company “pitched this broadly, stood on stage, screamed from the mountaintops, about that we have this capability, and the uptake from customers who are interested in it is fairly low because they don’t see the need.”

Speaking more broadly about DocuSign’s global customer base and blockchain’s shortcomings to this point, Ron underscored the massive challenge facing technologists and blockchain enthusiasts. He provided a hypothetical about a client trying to meet its sales goal before the end of a quarter. Putting himself in the customer’s shoes he said “I can’t rely on an open source system that may or may be available, may or may not have the latency that I need, and oh my gosh it is way too expensive to store all these files. Plus, there is no compelling UI for me to engage in these kinds of systems.”

Undaunted and Moving Ahead With a Clearer Vision

In spite of this feedback, Ron and the rest of the company believe in the potential that blockchain technology has for its product lines, and it is continuing to drive forward. However, from these initial experiments, it became clear to the team at DocuSign that for blockchain technology to transform their business and deliver client value, the benefits from the technology must move far beyond “nice to have”. In a sense, the company would need to find a value proposition that was unavailable before the invention of blockchain technology.

Rationale for the Clause Investment

It is for this reason that as reported last week it invested in smart-contract technology provider Clause. The startup has built a promising business by leveraging its platform to enable users to add smart clauses to documents that automate business processes, workflows, and digital transactions. What this means in layman’s terms is that contacts that utilize Clause’s technology can run in the background until a specified date, time, or event and execute when a certain condition is met. In my conversations with Ron, he highlighted a demo that the company unveiled at its annual Momentum 2019 conference last month, whereby this new platform could be utilized to authenticate new drivers for a ride-sharing platform on an ongoing and persistent basis.

This speaks to the true potential of this collaboration. DocuSign is in many ways the epicenter of complex business processes that take place behind the scenes when a contract is signed. By incorporating these “smart clauses” into future contracts a lot of this work can become automated, removing middlemen such as title or escrow agents, offering a more streamlined and efficient process for all involve parties to an agreement all the way through to payment.

An Auspicious Start, but Many Challenges Ahead

It is clear that DocuSign is setting its sights much higher this time. However, much still needs to be developed regarding this partnership, including which platforms it will run on, the first use cases, and an initial set of customers. Within this context it is important to note that Clause’s code can run on top of any blockchain or non-blockchain platform. Additionally, the collaborators will still need to find solutions for the scalability, accessibility, and security problems noted above, not to mention solving these challenges with the elegant user interfaces that its customers have come to expect. Being able to work on top of multiple blockchains should help.

Additionally, the partners will need to find and utilize oracles that never go down and cannot be hacked or manipulated. For readers unfamiliar with the term, oracles are data feeds that smart contracts rely on to determine when a condition is met that would cause the contract to self-execute. Today, there is no foolproof way to prove the fidelity of an oracle, and it is a long-standing problem that blockchains cannot differentiate between good and bad data being fed into the system. For a partnership like this to truly succeed they will need to find a solution, which is something that the partners dutifully acknowledge.

Solving these challenges will require heavy lifting, and in recognition of the size of this undertaking DocuSign has a product manager and entire engineering team focused on the technology. Therefore, it seems unlikely that lack of resources will be an issue, boding well for the future. After all, the prize is big enough to justify the cost, because if the collaborators succeed, this partnership has the potential to impact every industry under the sun.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenehrlich/2019/07/01/after-experimenting-with-bitcoin-and-ethereum-docusign-is-accelerating-its-blockchain-ambitions/#6395c3a55a32

SPONSOR: ThreeD Capital Inc. (IDK:CSE) Led by legendary financier, Sheldon Inwentash, ThreeD is a Canadian-based venture capital firm that only invests in best of breed small-cap companies which are both defensible and mass scalable. More than just lip service, Inwentash has financed many of Canada’s biggest small-cap exits. Click Here For More Information.

The radical idea hiding inside Facebook’s digital currency proposal

• A major goal of the Libra Association, the nonprofit Facebook has created to manage the project’s development, is to use Libra to revolutionize the concept of digital identity.
• Relevant passage lives near the bottom of a document meant to explain the role of the Libra Association:
• “An additional goal of the association is to develop and promote an open identity standard.

by Mike Orcutt

Last week, after months of hype and speculation, Facebook finally revealed its plan to launch a blockchain system, called Libra. Since the launch, most of the attention has focused on Libra coin, the cryptocurrency that will run on the new blockchain.

But tucked away in one of the documents Facebook published is something that may turn out to be just as important as the coin—if not more so. A major goal of the Libra Association, the nonprofit Facebook has created to manage the project’s development, is to use Libra to revolutionize the concept of digital identity.

The relevant passage lives near the bottom of a document meant to explain the role of the Libra Association: “An additional goal of the association is to develop and promote an open identity standard. We believe that decentralized and portable digital identity is a prerequisite to financial inclusion and competition.”

But what is a “decentralized and portable digital identity”? In theory, it provides a way to avoid having to trust a single, centralized authority to verify and take care of our identifying credentials. For internet users, it would mean that instead of relying on Facebook or Google’s own log-in tool to provide our credentials to other websites, we could own and control them ourselves. In theory, this could better protect that information from hackers and identity thieves, since it wouldn’t live on company servers.

The concept (sometimes called “self-sovereign identity”) is something of a holy grail in the world of internet technology, and developers have been pursuing it for years. Big companies including Microsoft and IBM have been working on decentralized identity applications for a while now, and so have a number of startups.

But it’s more than just an internet thing. For the roughly one billion people around the world without any kind of identifying credentials at all, such technology could make it possible to access financial services that they cannot today, starting with things like bank accounts and loans.

Helping some of those people must be part of what Facebook meant when it said in the Libra white paper that the new system is intended to “serve as an efficient medium of exchange for billions of people around the world” and “improve access to financial services.” In some cases the currency itself might be able to do that, but in others it’s likely that users will need some form of identification to access a particular service. That’s probably why Libra’s developers call an open, portable identity standard a “prerequisite to financial inclusion.”

But such a digital identity could go beyond finance, too. Sharing many kinds of sensitive data using a blockchain—for instance, health information—might require some form of automated ID check. 

Facebook itself already has experience with digital identities. Facebook Connect lets users log in to third party sites using their Facebook-verified credentials (you might be using it to access technologyreview.com right now). But Facebook Connect is risky because it relies on a central authority, argues Christopher Allen, cochair of the credentials community group of the World Wide Web Consortium, the most important international standards body for the web. Trusting one entity with this responsibility is dangerous because the site could go down or the business could fail. And Facebook can revoke accounts at will.

But it’s hard to say how decentralized Libra’s new identity system would be, because Facebook hasn’t revealed anything about what it’s planning.

For example, there’s the possibility that the digital identity will only work inside the Libra network, which requires permission to participate in. Unlike systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum, for which anyone with the right hardware and an internet connection can join and help validate transactions, Libra requires its validators to be identified and approved. Nearly 30 companies have already signed up to run network “nodes,” and Libra’s developers want to up that to 100 by the time the platform is supposed to launch for real next year.

Facebook’s main message with the launch of Libra and the Libra Association appears to be a response to past criticisms of how it handled personal data. The company appears to be saying “Hey, look, we’re trying to be more open. We don’t want to be this honey pot of everyone’s information,” says Wayne Vaughan, co-founder of the Decentralized Identity Foundation, a consortium of companies all working on aspects of blockchain-based identity. But if whatever identity standard they might come up with only works for 100 companies, says Vaughan, “that’s not decentralized”—it’s just a standard for 100 companies. Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

Either way, it’s not clear how Facebook and the Libra Association would overcome some big technical challenges that have held back blockchain-based identity systems. For one, blockchains are still hard to use for many people. A problem that is particularly difficult for identity applications is that if you lose or forget your private keys, which aren’t easy to manage in the first place, it’s hard to restore them, says Allen.

Another technical challenge pertains to privacy. How will the personal identification data be kept separate from financial transactions? This piece is particularly concerning for privacy advocates in the context of Libra, given Facebook’s less-than-stellar track record. And an aversion to financial surveillance fuels much of the cryptocurrency movement.

“Where you spend your money and who you spend it with and how much you spend is some of the most private information for people,” says Vaughan.

On the whole, says Allen, though the technology of decentralized identity has advanced to the point of several serious pilot tests, it’s “not anywhere near ready” for adoption by billions of people around the world. And given what the company has revealed so far, “I don’t see how Facebook can do it,” he says.

Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613877/how-facebooks-new-blockchain-might-revolutionize-our-digital-identities/

SPONSOR: ThreeD Capital Inc. (IDK:CSE) Led by legendary financier, Sheldon Inwentash, ThreeD is a Canadian-based venture capital firm that only invests in best of breed small-cap companies which are both defensible and mass scalable. More than just lip service, Inwentash has financed many of Canada’s biggest small-cap exits. Click Here For More Information.

Apple Publishes Bitcoin Icons & ‘CryptoKit’; iPhone Crypto Wallet Coming?

• The new Mac Pro is grabbing the headlines while a ‘CryptoKit’ for developers is getting crypto adopters excited. | Source: Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small

By CCN: Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) is underway, and while most of the focus is on iOS3, Apple quietly revealed a new upgrade for developers called CryptoKit.

Apple also released its new icon set for designers which feature four bitcoin logo

It begs the question, what are Apple’s plans for cryptocurrency integration?

Apple’s Frederic Jacobs announced new CryptoKit for developers

Apple CryptoKit: a path to a hardware wallet?

CryptoKit provides developers with a new toolkit for cryptographic functionality. It means app developers can integrate operations like hashing, key generation, and encryption. In particular, CryptoKit will facilitate the use of public and private key management.

“Use public-key cryptography to create and evaluate digital signatures, and to perform key exchange. In addition to working with keys stored in memory, you can also use private keys stored in and managed by the Secure Enclave.”

Viktor Radchenko, founder of TrustWallet, said CryptoKit brings Apple one step closer to full hardware wallet functionality.

“Only a few steps away before you can turn your phone into a hardware wallet.”

TrustWallet’s Viktor Radchenko said Apple is one step closer to facilitating a hardware wallet

Apple’s Frederic Jacobs, part of the cryptographic and security engineering team, said CryptoKit is “a fast and secure Swift API to perform cryptographic operations.”

Jacobs did not respond to a request for further comment at the time of publishing.

Apple bitcoin icons

The company also released the new San Francisco icon set designed for iOS3. Among the set of 1,000 icons are four bitcoin logos. Two circular BTC logos and two square. There are no ethereum logos or any other cryptocurrency.

Apple releases new icon set complete with bitcoin logos

The new icon set means developers can easily integrate bitcoin icons into their apps.

Apple following Samsung’s cryptocurrency lead?

As CCN has extensively reported, Samsung has taken the initiative with cryptocurrency integration. The Samsung Galaxy S10 launched earlier this year with an integrated hardware wallet designed to store private keys. 

Samsung is also reportedly readying crypto asset integration into Samsung Pay, a payment system with over 10 million users. And in May, CCN reported that Samsung plans to extend its hardware wallet into budget Galaxy models too.

Everything we know about CryptoKit

Apple’s CryptoKit will allow developers to perform common cryptographic operations, such as:

“Compute and compare cryptographically secure digests” and “generate symmetric keys, and use them in operations like message authentication and encryption.”

For developers, it provides a toolkit to build more secure apps and frees apps from handling raw pointers.

The tech giant will reveal more about CryptoKit in a WWDC session on Wednesday. 

Still too early to predict Apple’s crypto plans

It’s too early to draw any conclusions about Apple’s cryptocurrency plans, if there are any. But at least Apple is providing the tools for cryptocurrency developers to build on iOS. For now, consider this the start of a much longer story.

Ben Brown

Ben is a journalist with a decade of experience covering financial markets. His writing has appeared in The Huffington Post and he worked at Block Explorer, the world’s longest-running source of Blockchain data. Reach him at benjamin-brown.uk