Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Facebook Announces PGP End-to-End Encryption Used by Snowden
Monday, June 1, 2015
Former CEO of Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation Joins Ripple Labs as Advisor
Ripple Labs, the creators and developers of the Ripple network, have appointed Donald Donahue, former CEO of The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), as an adviser. The new addition to the advisory board comes amid the digital currency startup’s efforts to push adoption of the Ripple payment network onto banks and financial institutions.
DTCC is one of the largest clearing houses of securities and derivatives in the United States, processing $1.6 quadrillion worth of transactions last year. It is also one of the largest clearing houses in the world.
“I’m very interested in the capabilities distributed payment technologies seem to offer for improving the safety, soundness and cost effectiveness of global payments and settlement infrastructures,” Donahue said in a Ripple Labs press release. “Ripple is already a clear leader in this space; I’m looking forward to working with the Ripple Labs team to deliver on these exciting possibilities.”
The hunt for institutions
The addition of Donahue as an adviser comes at a great time for Ripple Labs. After creating the digital currency ripple in 2012 and supporting the development of it since, the startup has been looking for a use case that would set the digital currency on the road to mainstream adoption.
First, the company focused on the potential of ripple for international consumer remittances, but more recently, it has pivoted to a new business-to-business use case; a settlement network for financial institutions.
According to Ripple Labs CEO and co-founder Chris Larsen, the new direction for the company and payment network has gotten quite a bit of traction so far. In a recent interview he said Ripple Labs already has about 30 partners in different stages; preliminary discussions, pilots and production, but who have yet to publically announce. However, Ripple Labs has publically announced it is working with Western Union, The Commonwealth Bank Of Australia and Fidor Bank, among others.
An industry veteran
Ripple Labs faces an uphill battle trying to get large financial institutions to adopt a settlement network that uses digital currency but Donahue’s experience and connections in the sector will certainly help ease that challenge.
“He has spent an entire career building, assessing and safeguarding the country’s financial technology infrastructure,” Larsen said. “His insights will be invaluable as we continue to expand adoption of Ripple as payments infrastructure technology by financial institutions around the world.”
Besides serving as president and CEO for six years at DDTC, he was also the clearing house’s COO prior to that. Before DDTC, he held several executive positions at American financial institutions, including the American Municipal Bond Insurance Services Corp, and advised the U.S. Treasury Department and other government departments about cyber security after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Image via dtcc.com
Android Pay Unveiled at Google I/O Could Make Mobile Payments Ubiquitous
In February, Bitcoin Magazine reported Google’s preliminary announcement of Android Pay. Now, at the annual Google I/O event on May 28 and 29, Google officially announced its upcoming payment platform and revealed more details.
Android Pay isn’t a separate payment app, but an open platform that enables developers to integrate mobile payments into their apps. In fact, Android Pay is built right into the core Android operating system. It will be available for download from Google Play soon, and included in the next version of the Android OS – dubbed Android M – expected to be released this fall.
“[W]e’ve approached Android Pay the same way we approach every other part of the Android family – partnering with the ecosystem – bringing together mobile carriers, payment networks, banks and retailers to deliver you choice and flexibility,” states the Google announcement.
Android Pay will be supported by leading financial service providers, including American Express, Visa, MasterCard, Citi and Bank of America. It will support NFC payments and biometric authentication tools, and it’s designed to be easy to use and seamlessly compatible with all sorts of Android apps.
“Instead of relying on you to load the app and unlock it with a PIN, Android Pay lets you simply tap your phone on an NFC terminal to approve the purchase,” notes Nicole Lee on Engadget. “In addition, Google is also allowing Android Pay to be integrated in apps like Lyft, Grubhub and Wish, so users can easily use that to pay for things. I just used Android Pay here at Google I/O, and I can say this: If it’s as easy to use in real life, then I suspect mobile payments are about to be a lot more ubiquitous.”
A question that comes immediately to mind is whether the new Android Pay framework will support bitcoin payments. Since Android Pay is not an app controlled by Google, but a platform that can be used by all app developers, nothing seems to prevent Bitcoin payment services from using Android Pay to make bitcoin payments easier.
“To make it easier for developers to add Android Pay to your favorite apps, we’ve designed our platform to work with any payment processor,” states the Google announcement. “And we’re partnering with top payments processors including Braintree, CyberSource, First Data, Stripe and Vantiv to make integration even easier.” At least two of the payment processors mentioned, Stripe and Braintree, integrate bitcoin payments.
“Today, the latest ‘what’s next’ was unveiled at Google I/O. Launching in the coming months, Android Pay will become the new mobile payment solution for consumers to make purchases with their Android devices,” said Braintree’s CTO Juan Benitez. “We’re excited to share that we’ve integrated Android Pay into the v.zero SDK to make it easier for our merchants to add it as a checkout option in their Android apps. We’ve connected with Android Pay on our back end to reduce the number of API calls and provide a streamlined payment flow. Starting today, merchants can sign up for Braintree’s private beta to be ready for Android Pay. With very little effort, merchants will be able to add Android Pay, in addition to credit and debit cards, PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, and bitcoin – all with a single integration.”
MIT’s Joi Ito Calls for a ‘Supporting’ Role for Governments as Community Awaits BitLicense Release
As the Bitcoin community awaits New York State’s BitLicense regulations, expected to be released today, the debate about regulating digital currencies is in full swing.
Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab Joi Ito recently commented on the need to regulate in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit saying:
“If we want Bitcoin to be widely adopted by people around the world, we need to make governments comfortable so that they don’t overregulate. Otherwise, it will become a sort of underground thing that is useful for only those people savvy or intent enough to use it…”
Recognizing the inevitability of some form of government regulation, Ito said, “I think the key is that the regulators shouldn’t be running the show and should take a supporting stance. If you look at ICAAN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), for example, there is a ‘Government Advisory Committee’ as one of the groups that advise the board, but the board is independent and the government doesn’t control ICANN …”
“What would be bad is if each state and government came up with lots of regulations that contradicted each other or were slightly different so that every Bitcoin company or idea had to get permission in each state and country and had to be slightly different in each region.”
Recently, MIT Digital Currency Initiative lead Brian Forde issued detailed criticisms of the proposed BitLicense program and urged regulators to take a more balanced approach, protecting both consumers and digital currencies innovators.
MIT Media Lab hosts an open forum to debate increasing the blocksize
Although asked about his personal view on increasing the blocksize for Bitcoin, Ito says the most important thing for him is that the community of developers, entrepreneurs, miners and users openly debate and collaborate on this issue until a consensus is reached.
To assist with this process, the Media Lab has set up an online open public forum to debate whether an increase in blocksize to increase the number of Bitcoin transactions per second, is a needed step forward.
Ito says the Media Lab is “happy to support the community in this way” and hopes that the current discussions can serve as a model for resolving future issues.
Is bitcoin the first or the last digital currency?
About bitcoin, Ito says: “It probably took me more time than I would like to admit for me to ‘come around.’ Also, I’ve come around to feeling it’s super-important, but as Reid Hoffman likes to say, I’m still not sure if bitcoin is the first or the last digital currency. In other words, whether bitcoin itself evolves to be the final winner or whether something else inspired by bitcoin eventually takes off is still a question, I think.”
Lightning Network
On Lightning: “It’s a great idea. I’ve been thinking of bitcoin as a layer on the Internet stack, like TCP/IP. Protocols like lightning are like HTTP, making it easier and more accessible for the world. … the key is balancing the needs of people in a huge variety of environments.”
ZeroCash
On ZeroCash: “I’m excited about the potential for technology like ZeroCash to revolutionize this space. The tricky part of any global protocol or network is that anything we do in one country ripples across the world and has unintended consequences.”
Holograms
On holography: “The Object-Based Media group at the Lab is working on holography, and their various projects are on their group site. There’s a hologram of me that is still a surprise when I come around the corner and end up face-to-face with it.”
Joi Ito was an early pioneer in the development of the Internet, helping start the first commercial Internet service provider in Japan. A former CEO of Creative Commons, Ito also has been an investor in a number of startups, including Twitter, Flickr, Kickstarter, littleBits and Formlabs, and has served on the boards of the Open Source Initiative, ICANN, The Mozilla Foundation, Public Knowledge and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Ito believes that MIT can provide a neutral and respected academic home for the development of blockchain standards, technologies and best practices, independent of the powerful commercial and regulatory interests that are forming around the emerging digital economy.
ECUREX Becomes First Digital Currency Platform Fully Compliant with Swiss Banking Acts
ECUREX, a digital finance marketplace for professional traders and financial institutions headquartered in Zurich, announced that it has become the first digital currency exchange platform to be fully compliant with the Swiss Banking Act. ECUREX has also been the first digital currency exchange platform to be compliant with the Swiss Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Act since April 2014.
Switzerland considers digital currencies such as bitcoin equivalent to any other foreign currency. This means that the professional operation of Bitcoin trading platforms constitutes financial intermediation with the requirement to comply with both the Banking Act and the AML Act.
“Switzerland probably has the most challenging regulatory environment for such a business and we are thrilled to be the first with a business model that allows us to operate here,” said ECUREX CEO Paolo Tasca. “We think a stable regulatory environment is not only beneficial for us in the long term, but also for our customers.”
The ECUREX trading system is not yet operating, but the team announced that this is the next important milestone. Within the next three to five years, the objective of ECUREX is to become the leading European digital finance hub for professional traders and financial institutions interested in digital currencies and blockchain technologies.
“By observing the current trend in blockchain innovation, in the near future we envision a landscape where this disruptive technology will create more agile and disintermediated financial and economic systems,” Tasca said in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine. “Blockchain technology will dramatically transform our economic systems, and our society in general, into something very different to what we have got used to thinking about in the last few decades. The disrupting force of the blockchain technology will hugely expand the use of digital currencies, because digital currencies and blockchain technology are an indissoluble tuple.”
He added that in the coming years banknotes, coins, checks and credit cards will all become hugely inefficient and will be replaced by digital money, which is easier and faster to process. According to recent studies, by 2020 90 percent of all payment transactions made in the United States and more than 50 percent of those made in Europe will be cashless.
Recently, the Denmark Central Bank declared that it will be discontinuing the printing of new fiat in 2016. Moreover, 45 percent of 25-34 year olds in the United States say they feel comfortable with the idea of using independently issued currencies.
At the moment there are more than four thousand privately issued currencies in more than 35 countries, and from 2009, when bitcoin was deployed in the market, there are now almost 500 different digital currencies.
“We glimpse a future characterized by the creation and diffusion of ‘brand’ currencies that will be used in closed-form environments as tools for internal rewarding, customer loyalty programs or incentive and governance schemes,” said Tasca. “ECUREX will be the single marketplace where users will instantly trade a massive range of online and offline, centralized and decentralized currencies cheaply and instantly.”
The ECUREX platform targets primarily professional traders and financial institutions, and provides professional tools like technical indicators for chart analyses, the possibility to trade from charts, multiple drawing and annotation tools, market data, reports by ECUREX Research, network data, price and trading news, and sentiment Indices.
The goal of ECUREX Research, part of the New Finance European research consortium, is to keep innovating by identifying the most important trends in nascent digital economies, but also to push boundaries on topics such as decentralized finance, economic networks, and generally to conduct cutting-edge research at the border between economics and complex systems that will benefit the community as a whole.
“At ECUREX Research, we believe that applied and fundamental research are complementary and yield benefits for the company, the industry and the world, and we have a long-term vision for independently funded, transdisciplinary science,” said Tasca.
ECUREX will distinguish itself from leading Bitcoin exchanges such as Bitstamp and Coinbase because instead of focusing only on bitcoin, ECUREX will allow users to trade in real-time and high-frequency different pairs of crypto-to-crypto and crypto-to-fiat.
“At the moment there exist about 500 different digital currencies,” said Tasca. “The digital currency market is so young that we welcome a Hayek’s regime of competitive monies where in the coming few years different digital currency protocols will co-exist to serve different needs. This is why we consider ourselves as a digital finance marketplace, and not a bitcoin-restricted exchange.”
Photo Rob Pongsajapan / CC BY 2.0
SuperNET Sponsors Drachmae “Blockchain Solution For Greece” Project
- SuperNET, a mega network of cryptocurrencies that offers innovation in the digital currency sector, has announced its Platinum Sponsorship of the unprecedented Drachmae project.
- Drachmae undergoing research in Greece to see if the technology has a viable opportunity as a parallel digital currency to the Euro.
- Groundbreaking Crypto777 technology will enable private chains for Drachmae users.
SuperNET was founded almost 9 months ago, and in that time has built up the largest collaborative network of digital currency developers and enthusiasts in the world: with over 700 members. Drachmae, its newest entrant offers an unprecedented project to outline a “Blockchain Solution For Greece”. Drachmae’s founder, Lee Grant of Coinstructors, is currently in Greece on an exploratory trip for a small test case to present Drachmae as an innovative solution to obtain live test results to confirm in the different case scenarios if the Blockchain can be used and how. Lee has also been invited to Singapore, to present and discuss Drachmae to the Asian banking sector in a round table meeting in July.
Drachmae is a centralised hybrid banking platform that harnesses the security and transparency of blockchain technology. As a complex blockchain project, Drachmae requires infrastructure that supports multiple blockchains. As well as supplying a pool of digital currency developers and professionals, SuperNET also provides the multi-blockchain technology that will contribute to Drachmae’s success. SuperNET’s 700 + members also bring to the Drachmae think tank immense technical expertise.
SuperNET’s Sponsorship enables Drachmae to be presented on the 4th of July in London at a private and closed door event to the Fintech world. Drachmae will also be presented on the 9th of June at the Crypto Workshop at www.payexpo.com, alongside blockchain development platform NXT, which is the Crypto Sponsor at Payexpo.
Another recent SuperNET project is the Crypto777 NXT Asset which is listed on www.secureae.com. Crypto777 will play a key role in Drachmae, as it reduces the size of the main chains and enables private chains for specific sectors
Drachmae will now participate in SuperNET’s mega network alongside a number of leading digital currencies, where it will be able to share features and services for the mutual benefit of all participants. With SuperNET’s integrated blockchain services and huge pool of cryptocurrency talent, Drachmae is now positioned to evolve from being an idea, to a reality. SuperNET only admits unique and groundbreaking projects that will mutually benefit all other participants.
Lee Gibson-Grant, founder of Coinstructors said:
SuperNET’s sponsorship of Drachmae project enables Coinstructors presence with the NXT Team at this year’s Payexpo, and adds to the credibility of Drachmae as a viable option to solve real time issues with blockchain technology. We’re very excited by Drachmae’s potential to demonstrate the way governments and their citizens can take advantage of the unprecedented opportunities provided by blockchain technologies.
To learn more about SuperNET please go to: http://ift.tt/1F3wRph
To learn more about Drachmae please go to: http://ift.tt/1cXyYV9
Media Contact:
Name: John McLeod
Email: press@drachmae.org
Ph: +442074047477
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