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IT'S A BLOCK PARTY: On Thursday, shipping giant Maersk and IBM announced that their blockchain trade platform – now dubbed TradeLens – has a total of 94 companies as clients.
The goal for the platform – which is in a kind of early-access stage – is to enter full commercial scale by the end of 2018. IBM and Maersk have struck a new approach that allows each company to pocket the revenue from the customers it onboards, rather than the originally planned 51/49 split.
And according to Maersk, which went public with its work around blockchain last year, the market is demanding new solutions to address issues around global trade, especially for companies on the financial side of things. Full story.
BAKERS' BILLION: The number of Tezos stakeholders who run the hardware underpinning its $1 billion blockchain – known as “bakers” – is on the rise, as it were.
As CoinDesk’s Brady Dale reports, Tezos has been gradually building up its base of bakers, the validators on the network (akin to bitcoin's miners). While there's been some attrition among these organizations, the net change has been an increase.
Like in any blockchain, the more nodes participate in securing the network, the harder it is to undermine. So this is a key early metric for the new protocol. Full story
SUCH A TEASE: It’s getting close to decision time – for officials at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), that is.
As CoinDesk’s Muyao Shen reports, proposals for a total of nine bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are set to be decided upon over the next two months.
Much of the crypto world has been focused on this topic – some observers say that an ETF tied to bitcoin opens up a new crowd of investors to the nascent asset class, albeit indirectly – and the market has gyrated in response to some of the decisions announced or delayed in the last month.
To be sure, the agency could release decisions ahead of its deadlines (as the SEC did this week with the delay on the SolidX-VanEck proposal). But past examples suggest that the SEC will wait until closer to the deadlines, all but ensuring additional nail-biting by the crypto community. Full story |
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 CoinDesk’s venture capital tracker shows that blockchain technology startups raised $228 million in July. Notably: - Compared to June, funding fell 64 percent, and the total number of deals fell 21 percent
- July’s largest raise was BlockFi Lending, which brought in $52.5 million from Galaxy Digital and other investors
- The latest haul brings the 2018 yearly total to $2.2 billion, which accounts for a whopping 47 percent of all reported blockchain VC funding
Learn more crypto research insights here. |
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| | OVERSOLD? Bitcoin fell to a three-week low of $6,121, as disappointment lingers over the SEC delaying a decision on the VanEck SolidX ETF. But technical charts indicate the cryptocurrency may be in for a period of sideways trading if not a minor corrective rally. Full story |
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BEST OF THE BEST
QUARTZ: Despite the recent disappointment and backlash against once-hyped enterprise uses of blockchain, IBM is committed to the technology.
Big Blue has 1,600 employees working on DLT-related projects, leading other tech companies in headcount and investment, executive Marie Wieck tells Quartz. The tech giant is betting blockchain will follow "Amara's Law," the idea that the adoption and effects of a new technology tend to be overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the long term.
A nice little flourish in the article: blockchain is likened to "doing a crossword puzzle in ink." We'd add that this is a helpful way to think about the common description of the tech as a "shared source of truth."
Obviously, filling in the boxes with a pen rather than a pencil doesn't mean you have the right answer. But proof that an incorrect answer (or a correct one, for that matter) was originally put down on paper can conceivably be valuable in itself.
THE REST
ENTREPRENEUR: The number of hacked accounts on cryptocurrency exchange websites rose an astounding 369 percent, to 720 accounts in 2017 compared to the previous year, a recent report by security firm Group-IB shows.
The U.S., Russia, and China are the top three countries affected by the attacks, with a third of all victims in the U.S. Both users and exchanges have been overlooking information security and underestimating cybercriminals, the report suggested.
WALL STREET JOURNAL: Iranian hackers are generating cryptocurrency-focused software attacks across the globe, according to researchers at Accenture. San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency, the aforementioned container-shipping giant Maersk, and some hospitals in the U.K. were among the targets.
In some cases, these hackers used ransomware to extort crypto from victims, while in other cases they hijacked computers to mine cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. |
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