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ThreeD Capital Inc. $IDK.ca – KPMG: Tech Execs See the Future- It’s Blockchain $HIVE.ca $BLOC.ca $CODE.ca

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 9:54 AM on Monday, March 4th, 2019

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.

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KPMG: Tech Execs See the Future- It’s Blockchain

  • Almost a full 50% of the executives polled (76% of whom are C-level executives — meaning they have titles like CTO, CEO, COO) firmly believed that blockchain is ‘very likely’ or ‘likely’ to change the way their company does business — within three years. That is a short time, especially in the business world.

By R.R. Hauxley

Plenty of people love blockchain. Plenty more hate it. But the biggest chunk of people by far are those who are neutral about it. They neither love it nor hate it. They’re just waiting for the world to make up its mind — like when VHS fought Betamax or Bluray fought HD-DVD. Well, the world is making up its mind right quick — and the winner is blockchain.

A survey was recently released. A big, meaningful one. It was released by KPMG, one of the top four auditor agencies in the world. They call it the Technology Industry Innovation Survey and it polls over 740 gigantic tech leaders across twelve countries around the world. The results are fascinating.

  1. Almost a full 50% of the executives polled (76% of whom are C-level executives — meaning they have titles like CTO, CEO, COO) firmly believed that blockchain is ‘very likely’ or ‘likely’ to change the way their company does business — within three years. That is a short time, especially in the business world.
  2. Taking that one step further, 41% of these higher-ups also believed that, in these next three short years, the company they direct will, in fact, implement blockchain tech.
  3. Perhaps the most telling statistic, however, is the change from last years survey. Despite the crypto bear market, despite hacks and scams, the executives who were neutral last year are moving bullishly into the blockchain believer category. Last year a full 42% of respondents were neutral on all this and 30% even responded that blockchain changing things would be “very likely.” Today the neutral camp has shrunk to 24% — with the majority moving camp to the “we will use blockchain” side of the story.

So you see, the battle between blockchain believers and doubters is coming to a close. High powered executives running multi-billion dollar companies (which produce products and services that we all use) are learning about blockchain, believing in it, and will be shaping their companies to use it — all in the next three years. It’s high time, then, that those who are also neutral take a page from the tech exec playbook and read “An Introduction to Blockchain.” These titans of industry are not making their decisions because of tabloid headlines. They are educating themselves about blockchain with proper guides. That is the only way to make proper profits. We should follow such footsteps if we want to profit from blockchain too.

Source: https://cryptomaniaks.com/latest-cryptocurrency-news/KPMG-future–is-blockchain

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Posted in Bitcoin, Blockchain stocks, Canadian Blockchain Stocks, Smallcap Blockchain stocks, ThreeD, ThreeD Capital | Comments Off on ThreeD Capital Inc. $IDK.ca – KPMG: Tech Execs See the Future- It’s Blockchain $HIVE.ca $BLOC.ca $CODE.ca

ThreeD Capital Inc. $IDK.ca – 10 Major #Blockchain Trends in 2019 $HIVE.ca $BLOC.ca $CODE.ca

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 10:58 AM on Friday, March 1st, 2019

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.

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10 Major Blockchain Trends in 2019

  • While cryptocurrencies took a hammering, 2018 was huge for Blockchain, the technology that underpins Bitcoin and a myriad of other coins.
  • Blockchain has plenty of use cases outside of the cryptocurrency space with IBM, Oracle, and Amazon and other multi-billion dollar companies trying to capitalize on the disruptive technology.
  • Now, it’s time to find out what major Blockchain trends will define the current year.   

By: Alex Morris  

From the Internet-of-Things (IoT) convergence to startups for the unbanked — find out what to expect from Blockchain in 2019

While cryptocurrencies took a hammering, 2018 was huge for Blockchain, the technology that underpins Bitcoin and a myriad of other coins. Blockchain has plenty of use cases outside of the cryptocurrency space with IBM, Oracle, and Amazon and other multi-billion dollar companies trying to capitalize on the disruptive technology. Now, it’s time to find out what major Blockchain trends will define the current year.   

STOs replacing ICOs

Security tokens (STOs) have been a hot topic in the crypto space, and it looks like they will continue to be hot now that Overstock’s tZERO announced the launch of the new STO platform on Jan. 21. The Blockchain-powered platform will provide any company with the opportunity to raise funds by launching its own STOs. Prior to that, the startup made an announcement about the completion of its utility token distribution.

STOs, which combine the best features of the stock market and cryptocurrencies, arose as a fully regulated alternative to ICOs, which turned out to be the passing fad of 2017.   

Tokenization creating more investment opportunities

The launch of the Estonia-based DEX, which buys the shares of the biggest companies in the world in the form of ERC20 tokens, proved that 2019 is all about tokenization. The Ethereum-powered startup will allow non-US investors to engage in the US stock market without any limitations pertaining to their location or investment amount.  

Crypto startup Zilliqa also recently introduced Hg Exchange, a fully regulated exchange that allows accredited investors to buy US stocks.   

Tokenization already became a pervasive trend in 2018, going far beyond the stock market, but this is the year when pretty much everything will be tokenized – art, wine, real estate, etc.

Blockchain and IoT forming an alliance

Back in January, leading digital security company Gemalto released a report that states that 23 percent of responders think that Blockchain technology could be a boon for securing IoT-powered devices. Meanwhile, almost 91 percent of businesses who do not utilize Blockchain consider making use of the technology in the future.

The number of IoT-powered devices is expected to reach 26.66 bln in 2019, but less than half of all businesses can detect whether their device experienced a security breach.   

IBM also illustrated the benefits for this convergence with the help of their game-changing platform Watson IoT. Apart from bringing more security to the table, Blockchain significantly simplifies the task of managing different devices and increases the efficiency of the transaction.

Wall Street transitioning from dabbling to actions

The fact that cryptocurrency prices took a nosedive in 2018 doesn’t mean that the global financial industry is going to suddenly give up on Blockchain. As U.Today reported earlier, Bakkt, the ICE-backed exchange, was supposed to go live in January, but its launch was eventually delayed due to the longest government shutdown in history. Speaking of other ‘big-fish’ players, NASDAQ and the NYSE plan to launch Bitcoin futures while also being keen on Blockchain. Since the crypto hub died down, there is a good reason to believe that 2019 will be the year of exciting developments in the Blockchain space.

More decentralized exchanges appearing on the horizon

Decentralized exchanges, while actually living up to Satoshi’s vision, have numerous usability issues that take a toll on their popularity. There is no centralized authority that manages the users’ funds, but it’s also a double-edged sword problem – there is no way to revert a certain transaction if private keys are stolen or lost. Keep in mind that there are certain degrees of centralization. Case in point: the Bancor DEX, which suffered from a $13.5 mln hack, though Charlie Lee later claimed that no decentralized exchange can lose its funds.   

With that being said, major crypto startups – from Binance to Tron – have launched their own DEXs in order to spearhead the shift towards decentralization in the crypto world.     

Governments will continue looking into Blockchain

The wide variety of Blockchain applications are being explored by governments across the globe (even those ones who are openly hawkish towards cryptocurrencies). China cracked down on Bitcoin, but this country is hell-bent on becoming the leader in the Blockchain race. Shanghai, Guangzhou and other major cities are all supporting Blockchain developments. As reported by U.Today, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) launched an initiative to incentivize business who are working with the DLT technology. Moreover, there are specific Blockchain guides in China for educating government officials.

Estonia is yet another country that is focused on the e-Estonia program that will digitize the government. Meanwhile, Dubai could become the very first government that is powered by Blockchain. The implementation of Blockchain could help Dubai save up to $1.5 bln per year by cutting the red herring and creating a fully paperless government.

Blockchain-powered startups banking the unbanked

Africa, where a substantial part of the population remains unbaked, represents a breeding ground for different startups that utilize Blockchain technology in order to increase economic inclusiveness. The Rohingya Project went even further by using Blockchain to restore the identity of stateless Rohingyas and give them access to banking services.  

Real-word use cases beyond fintech  

It is worth noting that Blockchain is the most disruptive technology of the last decade, but it remains unknown to the general public. Yes, along with Bitcoin, Blockchain was one of the buzzwords in the tech space, but it’s all about real-world adoption. According to PwC research, 84 percent of companies have dipped their toes into Blockchain, but they are not ready to embrace it due to numerous ‘trust issues.’ Those who will be able to integrate Blockchain into their businesses will turn out to be the true winners of 2019.

Scalability becoming one of the main issues

Without a doubt, scalability is one of the major bottlenecks of Blockchain, which poses a major hindrance to mainstream adoption. That became very evident when CryptoKitties, one of the best-known dApps, created congestion on the Ethereum network. Bitcoin and Ethereum are only able to handle seven and 25 TPS (this level of scalability doesn’t hold a candle to mainstream payment processors in the likes of VISA).

Hence, many promising solutions, such as sharding and sidechains, are expected to be implemented in 2019. Bitcoin’s Lightning Network (LN), for example, is witnessing growing popularity with major industry players, with an eye-popping 830 percent surge in half a year. LN will significantly boost Bitcoin adoption while solving scalability pain points.   

Blockchain jobs will become more common

Despite Bitcoin, the major use case of Blockchain, taking a hammering in 2018, the number of Blockchain-related jobs continued to grow throughout the year. Moreover, as reported by CNBC, the salaries of Blockchain engineers skyrocketed to $175,000 per year, which means that they receive the highest salaries in the software development niche on par with AI specialists. According to Hired CEO Mehul Patel, ‘there’s a ton of demand for Blockchain.’ On top of that, Upwork, the leading freelance platform, had a 35,000 percent uptick in the number of Blockchain freelancers (it’s the fastest-growing freelance sector).

However, earning a six-figure salary is not an easy feat. Blockchain developers have to code in numerous languages, including Go and Solidity. As mentioned above, major companies do not want to miss the boat on Blockchain, so they are striving to hire talented programmers.

Source: https://u.today/10-major-blockchain-trends-in-2019

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ThreeD Capital Inc. $IDK.ca – Report: Blockchain Home Equity Loan Platform Raises $65 Million $HIVE.ca $BLOC.ca $CODE.ca

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 10:38 AM on Thursday, February 28th, 2019


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.

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  • A blockchain-based home equity loan platform, Figure, has raised $65 million from various major financial and venture capital firms, tech news site TechCrunch reports on Feb. 27.

By Aaron Wood

The firm, which was founded by SoFi founder and former CEO Mike Cagney, reportedly raised the funds from such majors as Morgan Creek, DST Global, DCM, Ribbit Capital and Nimble Ventures. The recent investment bumps the total funds raised by the firm up to $120 million, according to TechCrunch.

Cagney’s new firm, which reportedly has issued over 1,500 equity lines, is purportedly targeting older clients who are “cash light and rich in equity” or “CLAREs.” The company is currently lending $1.5 million per day, a figure which Cagney expects to double every few months, reports American Banker.

The founder told American Banker, “At the end of 2019, Figure should look like a robust financial platform that can meet the needs of our customers.” Cagney also added that Figure is moving into other areas like wealth management, checking accounts, and unsecured consumer loans.

Cagney’s former company SoFi is partnering with major United States-based crypto exchange Coinbase to roll out crypto trading support. The partnership with Coinbase will purportedly allow SoFi to launch crypto services by the second quarter of this year. CEO Anthony Noto said in an interview:

“Our target audience wants to see what the price of cryptocurrency is, and to buy it. They have a desire to do that and in many cases they already are.”

Noto assumed the role of SoFi CEO after Cagney stepped down amid sexual harassment allegations in 2017. Cagney told American Banker:

“One of the biggest takeaways is that at SoFi, we grew so fast and we never really understood what we were going to grow into, and culture never took a front seat. [At Figure] we have a very clear adherence to a ‘no-asshole’ policy.”

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/report-blockchain-home-equity-loan-platform-raises-65-million

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ThreeD Capital Inc. $IDK.ca – Blockchain Fund Launches With $22 Million Round Backed By Roger Ver $HIVE.ca $BLOC.ca $CODE.ca

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 10:01 AM on Wednesday, February 27th, 2019

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.

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Blockchain Fund Launches With $22 Million Round Backed By Roger Ver

  • Switzerland-based Pangea Blockchain Fund is making its debut after closing a $22 million seed round backed by crypto investor Roger Ver.
  • Announcing the news on Wednesday, Pangea said other investors in the round included Copernicus Asset Management, a Swiss firm regulated by the country’s Financial Market Supervisory Authority. Copernicus is also acting as investment manager for the fund.

Pangea will invest in “transformative” blockchain startups around the world to provide them with an early-stage capital boost and other resources. The aim is to focus on the “commercial and industrial applications” of blockchain technology, and there are no plans to invest in cryptocurrency, the fund said.

The fund’s Swiss investment advisor is Blockchain Investment Advisory Sagl, while U.S.-based Blockchain Investment Advisory LLC is acting as sub-advisor. Pangea expects to cap its fundraising at $200 million.

James Duplessie, co-founder of Blockchain Investment Advisory Sagl, said he believes blockchain technology will “fundamentally alter the way society collaborates, transacts, governs and brings new concepts to life.”

He continued:

“Blockchain technology has the potential to change the nature of the systems that lie beneath the things we do every day and could be the greatest driver of value creation in our lifetime.”

Maggie Rokkum-Testi, chief investment officer of Copernicus Asset Management, added that the use cases for “a transparent, verifiable register of data transactions are endless.”

Blockchain Investment Advisory Sagl will also launch a Swiss-based incubator to be called Ticino Labs in the coming months.

Roger Ver image via CoinDesk archives 

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/blockchain-fund-launches-with-22-million-round-backed-by-roger-ver

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ThreeD Capital Inc. $IDK.ca – $66 Million Building to Be Tokenized on Ethereum Blockchain in Record Deal $HIVE.ca $BLOC.ca $CODE.ca

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 1:26 PM on Tuesday, February 26th, 2019

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.

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$66 Million Building to Be Tokenized on Ethereum Blockchain in Record Deal

  • ICP is about to put this idea to the test. The company plans to tokenize some $260 million in four private real estate and debt transactions, starting with a WeWork-occupied building in downtown Miami, Florida.

For Patrick O’Meara, there is a world of difference between security tokens and tokenized securities.

A security token merely means an issuer is selling a crypto token in compliance with securities laws. But with a tokenized security, “it’s a whole different world,” where blockchain technology gives investors an unprecedented level of transparency, said O’Meara, chairman and chief executive officer of Inveniam Capital Partners (ICP).

ICP is about to put this idea to the test. The company plans to tokenize some $260 million in four private real estate and debt transactions, starting with a WeWork-occupied building in downtown Miami, Florida. Announced Tuesday, the firm intends to sell tokenized shares of the building, valued at $65.5 million, likely the largest piece of real estate to be financed this way to date.

The company placed a deposit on the building last month using an unspecified amount of bitcoin. Once the other three deals are finalized, ICP will be auctioning off shares in the assets, represented by ERC-20 tokens on the ethereum blockchain, in the coming weeks.

Shares in the four assets will be sold through what is known as a Dutch auction, meaning potential investors will place their own bids outlining how many shares they want, what price they would like to pay per share and which cryptocurrency they would like to pay with.

Inveniam will accept bids denominated in the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market cap at launch.

When the sale concludes, tokens will be distributed in order from the highest bids to the lowest, O’Meara told CoinDesk.

“The price that every bidder pays will be based on the lowest price of the last successful bid dependent upon the bidder’s fiat-to-crypto conversion rate limit,” a press release noted.

In order to participate, potential buyers must hold at least $10 million in crypto, with a minimum purchase of $500,000. The sale will be conducted in accordance with private placement rules issued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, according to Inveniam.

Tokenized transparency

Perhaps more ambitious than the auction, however, is what ICP intends to do with the tokens representing each share.

A Wall Street veteran, O’Meara explained that typically, shares come with large amounts of data, from how they are created, as well as data collected through its life and performance â€“ which could be 20 or 30 years in the case of some debt offerings. ICP will put all of this data onto its platform and associate it with a token, he said.

“We built our entire software, our stack, everything we do, the way we tokenize the instrument is so the enormous amount of data that’s associated with the financial instrument … can be aggregated and is attached to the token,” he explained.

One of the benefits to collecting all of this data into one system is that it is suddenly “uniquely searchable,” he said.

At present, legal documents are converted into PDFs or similar file types, which make them difficult to search through.

If, instead, a company stores the hash and a cipher that is associated with a legal document on a blockchain, it allows for these documents to be stored in their native form.

“We can store those documents in their native form, Word, Excel, because an Excel table in a PDF document is uniquely useless,” he said, adding:

“If we can store all this data in its native form, and the way that we have surety is because of the hash and the cypher … you can literally trace, as a regulator, every document associated with this transaction.”

This allows a large amount of data to be stored, which in turn can allow the investing world to make decisions based on quantitative data in a way that was not as accessible before, O’Meara said.

Other offerings

In addition to the WeWork building, Inveniam plans to tokenize shares for a student housing facility in North Dakota, which is being valued at approximately $90 million; a North Dakota water pipeline worth $50 million; and a multi-family housing facility in southwest Florida worth $75 million.

Like the WeWork auction, shares from each building will be sold as tokens and can only be purchased using cryptocurrency.

The proceeds will be converted into their fiat equivalents before being passed to the buildings’ sellers, O’Meara noted.

The company may launch other projects as part of this transaction as well prior to the auction’s starting date.

All told, the total value of the four properties will add up to $260 million.

Future of real estate?

Tokenized real estate has become an increasingly popular use case for blockchain in recent months. Templum Markets, a token trading platform and advisor, sold a security token representing shares in a Colorado ski resort last year, accepting U.S. dollars, bitcoin and ethereum.

Similarly, security token startup Harbor is selling 955 shares in a high-rise building in South Carolina, though each share is only worth $21,000.

Harbor CEO Josh Stein told CoinDesk last November that using tokenized shares allowed the company to more easily track shareholders and verify that they are compliant with relevant securities laws.

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/66-million-building-to-be-tokenized-on-ethereum-blockchain-in-record-deal

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ThreeD Capital Inc. $IDK.ca – Mastercard, Amazon and Accenture Partner To Establish Transparent Blockchain Supply Chain $HIVE.ca $BLOC.ca $CODE.ca

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 11:04 AM on Monday, February 25th, 2019

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.

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Mastercard, Amazon and Accenture Partner To Establish Transparent Blockchain Supply Chain

By: Leslie Ankney  

  • Mastercard, Amazon and Accenture plan to connect consumers and producers through its work on a blockchain-based supply chain.Getty
  • Today Accenture introduced a “circular supply chain” allowing consumers to make more sustainable choices about what they buy. Consumers are also able to tip producers, directly rewarding them for their choices in production.
  • All of this is made possible through digital identity management and blockchain technology.

Accenture is collaborating with Mastercard, Amazon Web Services, Everledger and Mercy Corps to build its supply chain capability. Everyday, whether we think about it or not, we interact with a global supply chain, for example when we shop, and these innovations could help us better navigate the system. A recent Nielsen study shows nearly two-thirds of Americans want a frictionless online shopping experience and want to support more efficient and eco-friendly farming and manufacturing. The problem today is that we don’t have much access to how things are made or who makes them.

David Treat, a managing director and global blockchain lead at Accenture says,

Over the past several years, we have built upon our longstanding identity work with a focus on the more than 1 billion people in this world who lack any form of recognized identity. We saw directly linking consumers and the value created at the end of a supply chain directly back to help small producers at the beginning as critical to actually driving real social and environmental change.”

Treat says Accenture and its partners are working on in-store, web and app-based implementations where consumers could scan a unique digital identifier on an item registered to the people who produced it. Scanning the tag on a pair of jeans, for example, would give customers its supply chain origins from start to finish, along with the opportunity to send a token of appreciation to the people who produced them. This allows the system to benefit not just huge corporations who know the system well, but also individuals such as smallholder farmers, who grow crops on small plots of land.

For the 3.4 billion people â€“ almost half the world’s population – that still struggle to meet basic needs, we believe that digital technologies are largely untapped.” says Tara Nathan, Executive Vice President, Humanitarian & Development at Mastercard, “Through our work with smallholder farmers in Kenya, India, Mexico and elsewhere, we’ve deployed digital solutions helping to drive commercially sustainable social impact – and we understand that collaboration is essential for this journey.”

Why Blockchain?

A blockchain provides a public, independent digital record called Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). By distributing a public ledger, Amazon, Mastercard, Accenture, consumers and smallholder farmers can all interact with the same information without risk of someone altering the data.

DLT could benefit consumers and farmers interacting across the supply chain, helping people across the entire process by increasing transparency and sharing profits more deliberately throughout. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/leslieankney/2019/02/25/accenture-mastercard-and-amazon-partner-to-establish-transparent-blockchain-supply-chain/#393a39341f81

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ThreeD Capital Inc. $IDK.ca – Why #blockchain may be blockchain’s best cybersecurity option $HIVE.ca $BLOC.ca $CODE.ca

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 4:29 PM on Wednesday, February 20th, 2019

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.

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Why blockchain may be blockchain’s best cybersecurity option

By Jong Kim, Contributor, Network World

One of the hallmark features of blockchain is that it is supposedly much more secure, adding remarkable levels of transparency that could help better identify and mitigate cyber threats. But, at a time when we’re approaching 2,000 blockchain projects in development worldwide, watching thousands of crypto miners do their thing each day and seeing billions of investment dollars pouring in each year, are we taking warnings about potential threats seriously? Has the greater community taken some aspects of blockchain’s security for granted? The hard truths reveal affirmatives to both questions.

There are multiple ways that enthusiasts can contribute to their favorite blockchain projects – whether that’s mining, staking or operating all types of nodes. Regardless of what they’re doing, these private deployments require an investment of time, money and effort to set up, so the last thing anyone wants is to fall victim to hackers. Unfortunately, people often don’t invest as much energy in securing their deployments as they do in getting their different features to work and scale, making the hacker threat very real.

Various attacks have already been seen on mining software, and there have been multiple high-profile thefts that were worth a lot of money. Tokens in staking wallets make very attractive targets. Malicious actors have successfully infected enterprise infrastructures with sneaky mining malware, called cryptojacking; and in 2016, Hong Kong-based exchange platform Bitfinex was hacked, resulting in more than $60 million (at the time) of crypto losses. The fact is that a victim may not even realize they’ve been hacked until it’s too late. Savvy hackers are careful to cover their tracks and siphon only a portion of tokens at a time.

Another emerging security challenge in the crypto community is the potential exposure of  sensitive metadata through common actions like checking balances, initiating transactions or just receiving block updates. This was recently called out by Ethereum Core Developer Peter Szilagyi. While metadata may seem harmless, it can lead to exposing the physical location of a blockchain deployment, which is something most would prefer to avoid. Why is it important to call out some of these threats?

The difficulty of securing blockchain projects with traditional security applications

Addressing these and other threats today can lead you down a rabbit hole. Some of the chatter on BitcoinTalk forums reveals useful advice – often learned the hard way – about using virtual private networks (VPNs) and firewalls to secure deployments. However, these discussions are often light on more specific details, especially on adequately configuring protective applications. As you dig deeper, you can get lost in threads upon threads detailing which ports need to be opened for each blockchain and which should be locked down. That’s all to say that solutions like traditional VPNs and firewalls to protect blockchain networks are possible solutions, but it’s difficult, messy and sometimes fragile. And it’s not just necessarily fragile in the sense of penetrable, but even more so in that one misstep or misconfiguration could open the door to vulnerabilities. What you’re left with is a security fig leaf: a false sense of safety actually covering for a gaping hole.

Then there is the centralized nature of network traffic management itself, as it is largely managed by a few centralized internet service providers (ISPs), which are vulnerable to threats like routing attacks. In fact, research previously suggested that just 13 ISPs host 30 percent of the Bitcoin network, while just three ISPs route 60 percent of the transaction traffic.

Making blockchain work for blockchain

So how can we be sure that the networks blockchain developers and crypto miners use are secure? The answer may be to fuse network security directly into blockchain implementations. For example, secure channels for data transport using packet-level encryption can be enabled by default for any deployment, rather than enabling with a separate solution like a VPN. VPNs not only require specialized knowledge to set up and maintain, but also introduce a central authority and point of failure into an otherwise decentralized system. Isn’t decentralization one of the main points of blockchain?

It’s also essential that peers establish secure connections between all nodes in a network so traffic is securely transported. Many existing networks may have transport layer security (TLS) for encryption, and some networks still have its predecessor, secure sockets layer (SSL). But neither may be enough in today’s complex cybersecurity environment, especially as it relates to metadata. Instead, directly building in things like network layer virtualization and traffic proxying within a blockchain implementation would make protecting traffic much easier.  

Speaking of protecting traffic, by managing traffic routing and packet processing with rules stored in blockchain-based smart contracts, users could simplify deployment and maintenance of rules across multiple machines instead of updating them individually. Furthermore, this configuration allows developers to define their own network traffic rules, such as conditioning on packet-level features to spot common phishing strategies (e.g. a misleading website, similar to a trusted one, is sent to lure in a user). However, these framework ideas are just the beginning, especially with an enthusiastic blockchain developer community. Developers should take the initiative to build their own decentralized security applications for anti-phishing, anti-malware, intrusion detection and distributed VPNs to deploy on the global blockchain.

The bottom line is that it’s not enough to just trust blockchain’s security because of more transparency than other technological data security and privacy methods. Developers, miners and even enterprises need to look at the entire digital ecosystem when considering security, as every single point provides savvy hackers a weak link to exploit. As blockchain investment continues to skyrocket and the crypto markets continue to diversify – even with the recent slowdown – we will see more unique and sophisticated examples of cyber criminals penetrating blockchain’s security veneer.

That’s the paradoxical ratio of technology: for as many positive innovations that tech creates, there almost is an equal amount of sinister “innovations” to match. This is most certainly true regarding blockchain. The key is to keep discussing threats to blockchain to inspire those securing it.

Source: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3342037/blockchain/why-blockchain-may-be-blockchains-best-cybersecurity-option.html

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Coinbase Acquires #Blockchain – Tracking Startup Neutrino for Undisclosed Price $HIVE.ca $BLOC.ca $CODE.ca

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 9:10 AM on Tuesday, February 19th, 2019
  • Coinbase has acquired blockchain analytics startup Neutrino as part of a wider push to offer more diverse crypto assets across borders.
  • “This is particularly important as we work with regulators and agencies in different countries to bring new assets there,” Coinbase’s director of engineering and product, Varun Srinivasan, told CoinDesk

Leigh Cuen

Coinbase has acquired blockchain analytics startup Neutrino as part of a wider push to offer more diverse crypto assets across borders.

“This is particularly important as we work with regulators and agencies in different countries to bring new assets there,” Coinbase’s director of engineering and product, Varun Srinivasan, told CoinDesk. He added that Neutrino would help Coinbase identify “which new tokens are gaining value and gaining traction in the space.”

Neutrino’s eight employees will move into Coinbase’s London office this week, retaining their distinction as a separate entity in order to continue serving external clients. Srinivasan said this acquisition will help Coinbase research new assets while simultaneously ensuring the cryptocurrency exchange can identify undesirable activity, like theft, without handing over internal information to external companies. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The move comes just a few weeks after Israeli blockchain analytics firm Whitestream identified a Coinbase account that was funneling bitcoin donations to the Palestinian military-political group Hamas, which the U.S. government deems a terrorist organization. Coinbase declined to comment on this incident and Srinivasan said the Neutrino acquisition was already in the works for some time.

Broadly speaking about the benefits of owning an in-house analytics platform, Srinivasan said: “We are beefing up our abilities to do compliance and to work with regulators on issues across the space.”

Neutrino CEO Giancarlo Russo said in a statement that the acquisition was an “important milestone” for innovation in Italy, where it is based, adding:

“We decided to join Coinbase because we’re totally aligned with the company’s mission of building an open financial system and we share the same commitment to regulation, compliance and security in the cryptocurrency space.”

Compared to its competitors, such as Whitestream and Chainalysis, Srinivasan said the Neutrino team was working much faster to include features for cryptocurrencies beyond bitcoin. Plus, Neutrino’s European connections could help Coinbase gain a foothold in that region.

“They’ve done a really good job of building up in the European market,” Srinivasan said. “But we want to bring them to the American market and the international market and introduce them to companies that are doing all kinds of things with crypto that need blockchain intelligence.”

Srinivasan prefers the term “blockchain intelligence,” rather than analytics because it includes the aim to predict trends based on data insights, among other applications.

Rising sector

Blockchain analytics is becoming an increasingly important part of the broader cryptocurrency landscape.

Jonathan Levin, co-founder of the rival blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, told CoinDesk his company is now working with 100 clients across the industry, including exchanges.

While Coinbase was busy acquiring Neutrino, Chainalysis raised a $30 million Series B and opened a new office in London, preparing to expand even further into the European market now that the European Union’s Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive is expected to inspire new compliance requirements in several countries.

“Our revenue in 2018 quadrupled,” Levin told CoinDesk, declining to specify how much Chainalysis earned. “We’ve definitely seen an increase in demand across the board. And that’s because we’ve seen greater clarity in regulation, in APAC [the Asia-Pacific region] and in Europe.”

Coinbase has a significant amount of historical data that could help differentiate Neutrino from younger analytics startups. Overall, Srinivasan said Coinbase is looking to become the “Google of crypto” with “many different products” across the sector.

Srinivasan also added that several other acquisitions are still in the works related to smart contracts and diversifying crypto-asset offerings.

“If we see a really great team that’s built a really great product, like Neutrino, for example, you’ll see us go out and talk to them and try to bring them into the Coinbase family to extend the suite of products that we have,” Srinivasan said.

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-acquires-blockchain-tracking-startup-neutrino-for-undisclosed-price

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ThreeD Capital Inc. $IDK.ca – 6 blockchain trends in 2019 $HIVE.ca $BLOC.ca $CODE.ca

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 9:08 AM on Thursday, February 14th, 2019

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.

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6 blockchain trends in 2019

  • 2018 was yet another big year for blockchain
  • Organizations across many industries from retail to shipping are using the technology to counter disruptive threats, and push into new markets to create new revenue streams.

Rupert Colchester (CIO)

One of IBM Australia’s major projects is the work we are doing with Herbert Smith Freehills, Data61 and King & Wood Mallesons to pilot the Australian National Blockchain (ANB).

In this consortium, we are designing and building an enterprise-grade blockchain to serve as the backbone to Australian business and address a challenge that spans all industries – the age-old, but indispensable, process of contracting.

The ANB will serve as an ecosystem for smart legal contracting, bringing to life key terms and connecting these to the data sources and business processes that they ultimately govern.

This is my third full year working solely on blockchain, and I am often asked by organisations to help them anticipate market shifts and changes in the competitive landscape.

So, what will this year hold for blockchain? Here are 6 blockchain trends we think you should look out for in the coming months.

1. Blockchain quietly goes mainstream

Consumers will begin to see blockchain applied to a variety of everyday uses without even recognising it as blockchain. Much of this exposure will come through supply chain projects, such as the ability to scan a label on a food product – put in place by the food ecosystem to enhance consumer trust and improve food safety and traceability.

2. Regulators flex their muscles

Expect to see government agencies worldwide issuing opinions as they work to classify blockchain-based financial instruments and build sustainable regulatory frameworks. For what is, in theory, a borderless technology, borders are playing a big role.

3. Production-ready blockchain initiatives emerge in government

We fully expect to see state-led projects setting the tone in this space and acting as the proving ground for subsequent federal initiatives and whole-of-government work. This has started to emerge with examples across governments in Delaware and Idaho in the United States as well as the NSW government in Australia.

4. Engineers start skilling up

Blockchain proof of concept (POC) initiatives aren’t especially hard but production-ready blockchains running live transactions across a (sometimes very large) group of organisations need highly capable software engineers.

Expect strong software engineers that turn their attention to blockchain to become the new rock stars of the tech world in 2019. Diverse and multi-disciplined tech teams will be as important as ever too, to bring IOT, AI, analytics and other technologies together with blockchain to unlock the next level of value that these networks should bring for early adopters.

5. Blockchains get chatty

Blockchain networks to date, while sharing the same underlying technology, typically remain siloed. But in 2019, as organisations integrate their existing systems and business processes into these solutions, this will in turn trigger the linkage between blockchain solutions – likely at all levels of the tech stack.

Everyone knows that blockchain interoperability is a ‘must’ at some point, the question is when and how it will manifest in solutions and projects.

IBM is doing work in this space and we expect to see it becoming a common ask from consortia and clients as we move through the year. Standards are going to be crucial as part of this challenge too.

6. Consortiums become clearer

The word ‘consortium’ seems to get more airtime in relation to blockchain than ever before. At the heart of consortiums, is collaboration. Blockchain networks struggle to grow or trigger the all-important network effect without collaboration.

Mobilising a consortium or business venture when you are establishing governance models around shared data and distributed systems, as well as encouraging fast product development and setting things up to scale, is not easy.

This level of complexity is why the experience and expertise to guide projects from a POC phase to a pilot and then to a production-ready solution is becoming so valuable. Companies and people that know this stuff and have done it before will be the ones to give consortiums greater clarity and confidence this year.

Rupert Colchester is head of blockchain, at IBM Australia and New Zealand.

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

Source: https://www.cio.com.au/article/657749/6-blockchain-trends-2019/

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ThreeD Capital Inc. $IDK.ca – #Blockchain Intelligence Firm #Chainalysis Raises $30 Million From Accel, Others $HIVE.ca $BLOC.ca $CODE.ca

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 9:54 AM on Wednesday, February 13th, 2019

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.

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Blockchain Intelligence Firm Chainalysis Raises $30 Million From Accel, Others

  • New York-based blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by venture capital giant Accel, the company confirmed in a post on Feb. 12.

By Marie Huillet

The fresh funding will reportedly be used to expand Chainalysis’ corporate operations, which include a proprietary Know Your Customer (KYC) product that allows financial institutions and digital asset trading platforms to vet and verify the identity of their clients.

The firm reports that the latest funding round was led by Accel, “with participation from existing investors.”

Chainalysis reports that it also plans to open an office devoted to research and development in London, with Accel partner Philippe Botteri set to join the firm’s board of directors.

In an interview with American business magazine Fortune, Chainalysis CEO Michael Gronager revealed that, whereas 90 percent of the firm’s revenue formerly came from clients in the law enforcement sector — who used Chainalysis’ blockchain analytics tools to track illicit use of cryptocurrencies — corporate clients now comprise the lion’s share of the business, at 60 percent.

Aside from diversifying research and products, Gronager told Fortune that Chainalysis was benefiting from the momentum of the burgeoning stablecoin sector. As previously reported, 2018 saw the proliferating issuance and adoption of new stablecoins — a type of crypto asset designed to experience less price volatility — either by being notionally fiat-collateralized or via an algorithmic peg.

Chainalysis’ CEO remarked:

“Born out of the ashes of this [the crypto bear market and initial coin offering downturn] was the stablecoin as another way to easily and safely create tokens. This ability to trade U.S. dollars against crypto is very powerful.”

While not disclosing financial specifics, Gronager told Fortune that Chainalysis’ revenue had grown threefold since April 2018, when it raised $16 million from Benchmark Capital to increase the number of cryptocurrencies it monitors. However, the company has yet to become profitable, he noted.

As reported, Chainalysis also conducts research into the blockchain sector. This January, a report from the firm argued that two — likely still active — organized hacker groups have reportedly stolen $1 billion in cryptocurrency, accounting for the majority of funds lost in crypto-related scams.

Chainalysis’ co-founder and chief operating officer, Jonathan Levin, notably declined to comment as to whether the firm had contributed to the United States Department of Justice investigation into the alleged use of Bitcoin (BTC) to fund purported interference in the U.S. 2016 presidential elections. In connection with said allegations, 12 Russian intelligence officers were indicted in July 2018.

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/blockchain-intelligence-firm-chainalysis-raises-30-million-from-accel-others

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