Kadena launches a hybrid platform to connect public, private blockchains

Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2020 12:10:00 -0800

Brooklyn-based spinoff Kadena has launched a hybrid blockchain that can scale horizontally, enabling multiple electronic ledgers to talk to each other via smart contracts – and letting users transfer cryptocurrency between the chains.

Hybrid blockchains combine permissioned chains for businesses to transact in the background while connecting to a public blockchain (via an API) for consumers and others to make money transfers or access information about products moving across supply chains.

“Their hybrid blockchain model looks interesting, mainly because it enables interoperability via smart contracts that run on public chains and talk to/with private chains,” said Avivah Litan, a vice president of research at Gartner. “That way, enterprises can keep their private data and transactions limited to the private chain but benefit from the liquidity and cross-chain access available by leveraging smart contracts running on the public chain.”

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Kadena launches Chainweb, a hybrid platform to connect public, private blockchains

Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2020 12:10:00 -0800

Brooklyn-based startup Kadena has launched a hybrid blockchain that can scale horizontally, enabling multiple electronic ledgers to talk to each other via smart contracts – and letting users transfer cryptocurrency between the chains.

Hybrid blockchains combine permissioned chains for businesses to transact in the background while connecting to a public blockchain (via an API) for consumers and others to make money transfers or access information about products moving across supply chains.

“Their hybrid blockchain model looks interesting, mainly because it enables interoperability via smart contracts that run on public chains and talk to/with private chains,” said Avivah Litan, a vice president of research at Gartner. “That way, enterprises can keep their private data and transactions limited to the private chain but benefit from the liquidity and cross-chain access available by leveraging smart contracts running on the public chain.”

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Amid privacy and security failures, digital IDs advance

Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Mon, 06 Jan 2020 03:00:00 -0800

Frustration over a growing number of privacy and security failuresin recent years is driving the creation of digital identities controlled only by those whose information they contain.

Known as “self-sovereign identities,” the digital IDs will be used by consumers, businesses, their workers and governments over the next few years to verify everything from credit worthiness and college diplomas to licenses and business-to-business credentials.

“We are slowly graduating from crawling to walking. It takes one to two years ’til we have reliable capabilities to spark meaningful decentralized identity adoption,” said Homan Farahmand, a senior research director at Gartner. “A major non-technical hurdle is for organizations to learn the concept and take the necessary steps to appropriately adapt their business processes to decentralized identity ecosystems.”

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Blockchain/IoT integration accelerates, hits a 'sweet spot'

Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2019 03:00:00 -0800

Three-quarters of companies implementing IoT have already adopted blockchain or plan to use it by the end of 2020, an indicator of the growing connection between the two, according to a survey of 500 U.S. companies by Gartner.

While the marriage between the two technologies has been expected to be crucial for  industry digital transformation, the adoption rate is happening at a “much faster pace than expected,” Gartner said.

“Among the blockchain adopters, 86% are implementing the two technologies together in various projects,” Avivah Litan, a Gartner vice president and report author,  wrote in a blog. She called IoT integration “a sweet spot” for blockchain, the much-hyped distributed ledger technology.

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Blockchain/IoT integration accelerates, hits a 'sweet spot' for the two technologies

Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2019 03:00:00 -0800

Three-quarters of companies implementing IoT have already adopted blockchain or plan to use it by the end of 2020, an indicator of the growing connection between the two, according to a survey of 500 U.S. companies by Gartner.

While the marriage between the two technologies has been expected to be crucial for  industry digital transformation, the adoption rate is happening at a “much faster pace than expected,” Gartner said.

“Among the blockchain adopters, 86% are implementing the two technologies together in various projects,” Avivah Litan, a Gartner vice president and report author,  wrote in a blog. She called IoT integration “a sweet spot” for blockchain, the much-hyped distributed ledger technology.

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How blockchain will kill fake news (and four other predictions for 2020)

Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2019 03:00:00 -0800

As blockchain’s hype cycle continues to befuddle many about its potential beyond  cryptocurrencies, businesses and governments are moving ahead with projects involving everything from digital identities to voting and supply chain tracking.

Blockchain has slipped into the “Trough of Disillusionment” (see Gartner Hype Cycle), because it got ahead of its technical and operational maturity. As a result, interest has waned as most experiments and implementations failed to provide expected results.

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Utah county moves to expand mobile voting through blockchain

Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 03:00:00 -0700

Disabled voters in Utah County will be able to use their smartphones to vote in the November municipal election, an expansion of an earlier pilot test of the blockchain-based technology and anothert step toward allowing all voters to cast ballots with a mobile device.

The county, which has more than a half million residents, is the third in the U.S. to partner with Tusk Philanthropies, a non-profit focused on expanding mobile voting nationally. The latest pilot is a collaboration between the Utah County Elections Division, Tusk Philanthropies, the National Cybersecurity Center and Boston-based voting app developer Voatz.

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Can Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency survive the exodus?

Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2019 12:00:00 -0700

After the withdrawal of seven of the 29 founding members of the Libra Association, the governing council for Facebook’s planned global cryptocurrency, the project’s fate  looks increasingly uncertain.

PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, eBay, Stripe, Mercado Pago and Brooking Holdings have backed away from participation on the Libra Association; their hands were forced when  all members met Monday in Switzerland for formalize their commitment to the project.

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Why France and Germany fear Facebook’s cryptocurrency – and plan to block it

Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2019 03:00:00 -0700

Facebook’s plans to launch its own Libra cryptocurrency next year is getting resistance from France and Germany who have promised to block it and plan to create their own national cryptocurrencies.

Last week, the two nations said Libra could threaten the Euro’s value and unlawfully privatize money. Last year, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the country’s central bank, announced a ban on the use of cryptocurrencies by any regulated financial entity because of risks associated with it.

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Hedera Hashgraph launches mainnet, hopes to compete with global business networks

Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2019 05:00:00 -0700

Hedera Hashgraph, an electronic public ledger developed for corporate use, launched its mainnet beta today, allowing developers to create an account and build decentralized applications (dApps) for it.

The distributed ledger technology (DLT) is a direct competitor to blockchain distributed ledgers such as Ethereum and Hyperledger, and claims it can outperform traditional financial and business networks.

“There is no direct equivalent to Hedera Hashgraph today,” said Martha Bennett, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. Hedera is potentially competing with public networks and all the enterprise DLT frameworks (such as Hyperledger Fabric & Sawtooth, R3 Corda, and others) and their commercial providers, which include AWS, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle.

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