Tag: Blockchains

Moody’s Research Warns Corporations That Private Blockchains Contain New Risks

boss

United States credit rating agency Moody’s Investor Service warned about the dangers of private versus public blockchains in new research issued on April 25. Part of an investigation into the potential impact of blockchain technology on structured finance, the report highlights key differences between current market trends. Specifically, corporations should be aware of the pluses and minuses involved in using private blockchains, which can run without a decentralized consensus or governance mechanism and thus become open to manipulation. “New risks with blockchain technology in securitizations may emerge as well as…

CEOs of Mastercard and Wells Fargo Concur on Blockchain’s Long Term Potential

boss

Top execs at Mastercard and Wells Fargo agreed that blockchain technology has long-term potential, but it has not been realized to date, CNBC reports on March 28. Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan and Mastercard CEO Ajaypal Banga concurred that the potential of distributed ledger technology (DLT) is yet to pay off, but that there are still no clear business use-cases as of now. The executives made their comments to CNBC at the Fintech Ideas Festival on Wednesday. Wells Fargo’s CEO emphasized that the technology has been very slow to roll…

No Solution Yet Found to Bring Public Blockchains Under EU Privacy Laws

boss

Sam Palmisano — retired IBM chairman and current chairman of United States nonprofit The Center for Global Enterprise — says he doesn’t know of a solution that has been found to make public blockchain networks compatible with European data privacy laws. Palmisano made his remarks during a joint interview for Bloomberg Markets with David Kappos, partner at U.S. law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, which was broadcast on the Bloomberg Technology channel on March 4. Palmisano and Kappos focused on the interaction between blockchain innovation and the General Data Protection…

Private, Enterprise Blockchains ‘Make No Sense’ and Are Set to Fail: Abra CEO

boss

The idea of private blockchains, such as enterprise blockchain platforms, will eventually “fail miserably,” the CEO of Abra said during Fortune’s “Balancing The Ledger” show on Feb. 25. Bill Barhydt, CEO of cryptocurrency wallet and investing app Abra, has argued that the idea of a truly decentralized cryptocurrency contradicts the notion of private blockchains. Unlike public blockchains, such as those of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), which can be accessed and joined by anyone, private blockchains represent a permissioned network with access controls that restrict who can join, meaning that…

Security Token Startup Templum Shifts to Private Blockchains

boss

Security token specialist Templum is shifting from public to private blockchains. Announced Monday, enterprise software vendor Symbiont is building a private blockchain and smart contracts system that Templum will use for future security token offerings (STOs) by its clients. Previously, the regulated broker-dealer left the choice of blockchain protocol up to the issuers, but this posed problems, Templum CEO Christopher Pallotta told CoinDesk. Many were choosing ERC-20 tokens that run on top of ethereum, said Pallotta, but that network’s well-known scaling challenges meant trading could be hampered during periods of high transaction…

Blockchain’s Promise of a Trustless System Is False, Wired Author Argues

boss

An opinion piece published by American online magazine Wired on Feb. 6 has leveled criticisms at the promise of new blockchain-based architectures of trust. The article’s central argument is that trust is not eliminated, but rather displaced, in blockchain systems — principally from institutions and social conventions onto technology. The article’s author, Bruce Schneier, alleges that this techno-maximalism overlooks both the residual trust in tech systems whose governance remains irreducibly human, as well as the frequent — and often opaque — fallibility of the technology itself. Schneier’s take on trust…

Blockchain’s Main Strengths Are Transparency and Instantaneity: HSBC Exec

boss

Transparency and instantaneity are the main strengths of blockchain technology, an HSBC executive claimed in an interview with French business and tech journal L’Usine Digitale, Feb. 4. Béatrice Collot, Head of Global Trade and Receivable Finance at multinational banking giant HSBC, described the role of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain, in trade finance. She made her comments in the context of the upcoming IN Banque conference in Paris this week. According to Collot, blockchain is poised to transform global trade finance…

Could Unit-e Finally Break Blockchain’s Scalability Impasse?

boss

Amid a seemingly constant stream of new concepts claiming to be key to crypto to breaking through to the financial mainstream, one immovable issue remains ever-present: scalability. The crypto community is abuzz with new projects relating to the issue, from the Bitcoin (BTC) Lightning Network to a brand new cryptocurrency designed by some of the top names in crypto and American academia. Cointelegraph takes a look at the latest scalability developments and what they can bring to blockchain and crypto. Some of the United States’ finest academic and technological have come…

Who Scales It Best? Inside Blockchains’ Ongoing Transactions-Per-Second Race

boss

Open-source project Qtum representatives claim that their enterprise blockchain dubbed ‘QtumX’ can accommodate “more than 10,000” transactions per second (TPS), according to a press release recently shared with Cointelegraph. With yet another player being added to the scalability race, it makes sense to look back and see how the main blockchains and cryptocurrencies stand in regard to TPS — and whether their numbers are actually authentic. Transaction speed: How important is it? Scalability is one of cryptocurrencies’ main issues, especially when it comes to the older coins. In fact, one…

VeriBlock ‘Spams’ Bitcoin Network to Secure Blockchains of Other Cryptos

boss

Photo: VeriBlock / Twitter Recently, Bitcoin developers noticed some strange activity on the blockchain. Specifically, a large number of unidentified OP_RETURN transactions were discovered, according to Forbes. OP_RETURN is a type of Bitcoin transaction that is used for embedding data into the blockchain. It can be used for anything from proving the existence of some data at a specific point in time (proof-of-existence) to issuing new assets, such as the controversial US dollar-pegged Tether, on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. This function accepts a user-defined sequence of up to 40…