Credit to Author: Evan Schuman| Date: Tue, 05 Jul 2022 03:00:00 -0700
There are some scary reports popping up that various major financial institutions no longer credit back all fraudulent transactions, even when victims file a police report. If true, it’s a disastrous move that will painfully hurt the institutions.
Let’s look a recent New York Times report on the problem:
Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2020 03:00:00 -0800
The Federal Reserve is investigating the potential of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) as the backbone for a new, secure real-time payments and settlements system.
The move toward a form of government-backed digital currency is being driven by Fintech firms and a banking industry already piloting or planning to pilot cash-backed digital tokens, according to Lael Brainard, a member of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors.
“Today, it can take a few days to get access to your funds. A real-time retail payments infrastructure would ensure the funds are available immediately – to pay utility bills or split the rent with roommates, or for small business owners to pay their suppliers,” said Brainard, who serves as chair of the committees overseeing Financial Stability and Payments, Clearing and Settlements.
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.”
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.”
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.”
Credit to Author: Sharky| Date: Fri, 03 Jan 2020 03:00:00 -0800
Pilot fish is working at a bank, but it’s the 1970s, and ATMs are far from common. What this bank has is an after-hours teller window, available from 3 to 7 p.m. It’s located in a small enclosure accessible from the street, and its operation involves a human teller working behind a reinforced-concrete wall.
When the bank develops an online customer system, the night teller is chosen as the testing ground, because the new system will allow for instant posting of deposits instead of waiting for the next day. And fish, a computer science major, will serve as teller/guinea pig.
But first, a new window has to be constructed, right next to the two-story glass façade of the bank. The work includes putting the cabling inside heavy steel pipes to ensure that no one can tap into them.
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.
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.
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.
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.