Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Uber in India: Bitcoin ‘Makes Sense’ For Future of Urban Transport
Merchant Site PayIvy.com Acquired by Digital Currency Investor Newnote Financial
After its recent purchase of the bitcoin exchange Cointrader.net, Canadian company Newnote Financial has now moved into the multi-vendor website market. On May 12, 2015, the Vancouver-based corporation announced its acquisition of PayIvy.com, an online site that allows vendors to register and sell digital products and services, including ebooks, software, graphic designs, web designs and intellectual property.
PayIvy co-founder Lode Kennes says in a press release that the company hopes to better reach its potential following the acquisition.
“With the investment from Newnote, PayIvy will be able to serve more sellers with features that no other site can offer,” he said.
Kennes, along with co-founders Ton Manh Nguyen and David Snyder, will stay on at PayIvy to assist with daily operations and development.
“This is a very strategic acquisition for Newnote,” said Newnote CEO and President Paul Dickson. “Each of our services will be integrated into one another utilizing our APIs.”
Besides Cointrader.net, Newnote also owns and operates the CoinExchange Android app, Coinpayments.net, and the BitVisits.com paid-to-surf advertising platform, in addition to several other cryptocurrency-related assets.
“Merchants can now set up shop with PayIvy.com, accept payments through Coinpayments.net, convert bitcoin to cash on Cointrader.net, and transfer the funds into their bank account or remit overseas instantly,” says Dickson. On April 24, 2015, Newnote announced that it had signed a strategic partnership with Rebit.ph of the Philippines to enable remittances.
PayIvy merchants are also able to protect their digital wares from online piracy and other unauthorized software distribution and sharing. Custom fields enable customer data collection and an advanced affiliate program is available for sellers looking to promote their products. The site accepts various crypto-currencies, including bitcoin, litecoin and omnicoin via Coinpayments.net.
Dickson stressed Newnote’s commitment to cracking down on recent illicit sales of Netflix and other accounts through the PayIvy site.
“Our priority is to protect intellectual property,” Dickson said in a telephone conversation with Bitcoin Magazine.
In its first six months of operation, PayIvy has registered over 10,000 merchants, processing over $200,000 per month in sales. Newnote reports paying a purchase price of CDN $260,000 in cash and stock.
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Tuesday, May 12, 2015
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Overstock: “Nasdaq Could Help Push Blockchain Tech into Financial Sector Mainstream”
Nasdaq has become one of the first multinational financial services companies to delve into non-currency usage of blockchain technology. On Monday, May 11, the company announced that it would begin to leverage the colored coin protocol Open Assets to “expand and enhance the equity management capabilities offered by its Nasdaq Private Market platform.”
According to Nasdaq CEO Bob Greifeld, the distributed ledger function of the blockchain will “modernize, streamline and secure typically cumbersome administrative functions, and will simplify the overwhelming challenges private companies face with manual ledger record-keeping.”
Nasdaq joins the blockchain-integrated securities exchange market field just a few weeks after Overstock’s Medici Project filed S-3 forms with the Securities and Exchange Commission, outlining its intention to issue new stocks or securities, including the potential to issue digital securities.
In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Overstock.com’s director of communications, Judd Bagley, welcomed Nasdaq’s announcement, noting several ways in which it could have a positive impact on the financial sector.
The first is in overcoming the hurdle of market acceptance. “The actual people who will be clicking the mouse authorizing real trades need to feel comfortable with this new paradigm, which upends a 75-year-old system some don’t currently see as broken,” said Bagley. Having Nasdaq on board could help to push blockchain technology into the financial sector mainstream.
Regulatory acceptance is another matter. According to Bagley, it’s up to companies like Overstock and Nasdaq “to impress upon regulators that a stock exchange based on decentralized ledgers is not only as good as what’s currently in place, but better.”
Bagley said that with Overstock in the process of getting SEC approval to issue digital shares, it has developed some “very interesting financial innovations” that will be rolled out on the Medici platform in the near future.
“Understandably, we’re expecting some probing questions. After all, regulators are, by nature, conservative. But this is one of the reasons we are so pleased to see NASDAQ getting in on blockchain trading. We can use all the support we can find when it comes to getting this new approach approved. Having NASDAQ working to meet the same regulatory goals as we are can only help us.”
Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne has been outspoken in the past about Wall Street’s culpability when it comes to shielding bad actors in the financial sector. Bagley does not expect that Nasdaq’s latest move will do much to affect this larger problem.
“One of the reasons young companies avoid the public equity markets is concern over the predations of illegal short sellers,” he explained. “Blockchain trading of pre-IPO shares will go far to keep bad actors from preying on these companies. So on that level, Nasdaq is joining us in doing a good thing.”
Trading of pre-IPO shares, however, represents only a small fraction of the overall financial trading picture, Bagley added. “Decentralized ledgers like the blockchain are also extremely well-suited for the trading of shares of public companies, and so we’re incorporating that functionality into Medici as well.”
Photo: Time Square/New York / CC BY 2.0
Investment Platform Omnichain Wins Blockchain Hackathon Sponsored by DBS Bank and IBM
Leading experts and blockchain enthusiasts gathered in Singapore this weekend to compete in a blockchain hackathon sponsored by DBS Bank, formerly known as the Development Bank of Singapore, and computer giant IBM.
More than 70 people partook in the competition, but Omnichain, a platform for investing in emerging market businesses, won first place and 15,000 Singapore dollars (roughly $11,300 USD).
The two-day hackathon, hosted by DBS Bank’s Chief Innovation Officer Neal Cross, had two challenges for participants: Either make a hack that would help the unbanked have greater access to financial services or make banking in the developed world easier and more enjoyable.
NuBank delivered on the goal to bank the unbanked and won second place. The team created a way to connect financial institutions with people living in remote or undeveloped villages using blockchain technology.
BlockIntel won third place with a program that visualizes the blockchain and uses know-your-customer controls to catch suspicious transactions. NuBank and BlockIntel won cash prizes as well, $10,000 SGD ($7,500 USD) and $8,000 SGD ($6,000 USD), respectively.
According to Ron Hose, CEO of Asian bitcoin exchange Coins.ph, the hackathon did a lot more than just build new products and services; it brought people from the digital currency and financial worlds together.
“I really feel like this event marked a milestone for blockchain tech in Asia,” Hose said. “Beyond emphasizing how valuable this technology is to solving banking problems and giving a platform for new ideas, the hackathon brought together great minds and industry influencers to think together about the future on blockchain and the banking industry as a whole.”
A bank-backed blockchain hackathon
The event was located at StartupBootcamp Fintech Singapore, an accelerator for financial startups, and was done in partnership with Singaporean Bitcoin company, Coin Republic. The event featured numerous executives and experts from the region’s finance and technology industries. The judges panel included IBM Executive Architect Tan Kah Seng and Sim Boon Kee Institute for Financial Economics Professor Dr. David Lee.
According to Adam Giles, co-founder and CEO of Neuroware, some of the hackathon participants weren’t familiar with blockchain or bitcoin at all but were interested in exploring the technology. Giles and his company spent the two days prior to the hackathon hosting workshops with the attendees and familiarizing them with the blockchain. Neuroware’s API Blockstrap, which allows developers to create apps for a number of digital currencies, along with Bitx’s and Colu’s API were used in the hackathon.
“Considering this was the first time a bank has ever so publicly backed blockchain technology it’s difficult to imagine how it could have gone better,” Giles said. “DBS were very well organized and made every effort to understand the technology and work with the developers. All teams got to keep the IP for their ideas, and DBS could be working with some in the future to see how they can support them. Startupbootcamp also provided a great venue and did a fantastic job on organizing the hack and looking after everyone involved.”
Thanks to CoinGecko, David Moskowitz and Tim Swanson. All image courtesy of Tim Swanson / Twitter.
Decentralized Application Development Network Corona Launches
Corona is a new collaborative-oriented network and community for decentralized application (DApp) developers in search of resources and financial support.
Corona is a technology agnostic site that supports a diversity of decentralized platforms, technologies and digital currencies, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, MaidSafe, Codius, Sidechains, Eris Industries, NXT, Factom, Counterparty and Omni, among others.
Although there are several initiatives to fund development on various platforms, founder Daniel Greene says there are no programs currently doing anything similar to Corona.
“The closest projects to ours which operate similarly, such as DEVgrants and College Cryptocurrency Network (CCN), are actually complementary to our goals and share a strong potential for symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationships,” he said.
DEVgrants is a project built by the Ethereum team that offers funding for contributions to both the Ethereum platform and projects based on Ethereum. While, DEVgrants is not a funding platform, it does provide resources to continue building a Dapp.
CCN, founded in 2014, is a nonprofit dedicated to blockchain education, innovation and development. CCN focuses on connecting the novice with the experts and has reached a network spanning the globe in more than 150 locations.
Proponents of DApps claim that the decentralization of software services people use on a daily basis, such as Dropbox, WhatsApp and eBay, could greatly benefit the users of those services. For example, a decentralized marketplace would mean that buying and selling goods and services would be conducted directly between buyer and seller without unwanted third-party involvement, and would be regulated by cryptocurrency smart contracts and arbitration.
“Over the next decade businesses will start assessing their decentralization strategies. Decentralization technology undermines the core control mechanism businesses use today to monopolize their customer base thanks to its abstraction effect,” states the Corona whitepaper.
Corona also outlines the possibility that decentralized identity, reputation and credit rating applications could possibly be the backbone in the creation of more competitive peer-to-peer insurance and loan markets which have the potential to disrupt these industries, as well as serving the unbanked worldwide who cannot currently benefit from such protection. Decentralized messenger and network applications free from government interference could also have positive impacts on democracy and freedom of speech.
About Corona
Founded by Greene and backed by an experienced team of developers and advisors, Corona strives to make DApps easier to develop while promoting their use cases.
According to Greene, DApps can be built “in a shorter time period compared to standard applications because of the turnkey infrastructure, lowered barrier to entry and simplified deployment. The increasing ease of creating such software will lead to the rapid expansion of decentralized services. These peer-to-peer services are revolutionizing the Internet economy, offering alternatives to centralized corporate monopolies.”
By building a networking hub for DApp developers in need of funding and resources, Corona is poised to advance new blockchain technologies, open-source software solutions and disruptive decentralized business models that may benefit billions worldwide.
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