Bitcoin Plaza

Saturday, June 27, 2015

Ascribe Raises $2 Million to Encode Artistic Copyrights on the Blockchain

Ascribe, a platform which enables artists to record their intellectual properties on the Bitcoin blockchain has raised US $2 million in a seed funding round from investors including Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group, Earlybird Venture Capital, Freelands Ventures, and other angel investors.

With the new financing, Ascribe aims to improve its platform to make it more efficient for artists to record ownership of their works, to onboard new developers to build on their API that helps marketplaces and platforms to display the registered artwork, and to increase awareness of their platform.

Using the Bitcoin blockchain, Ascribe allows artists to create records of permanent and unchangeable copyright and ownership of their artwork that can be verified and tracked instantly. Since the data and copyright cannot be changed once it is registered on the blockchain, artists will be able to defend their works without the need to spend money on the traditional process of hiring lawyers to create legal documents.

While traditional forms of copyrights and patents are difficult to track and usually take days or even weeks to sell or transfer, Ascribe allows its users to sell their ownership securely and cost-free through the bitcoin blockchain.

Since the platform allows users to embed images and texts on the blockchain, artists also may register copyrights for physical art such as sculpture, by simply uploading images of the work with follow-up descriptions.

Copyrights to the artworks registered on Ascribe will be available to public like a torrent file, which can be downloaded and used freely. However, the distributor or the user in this case, will always have full authority over the artwork, and will always possess the power to deny or grant access to their works.

According to the company, more than 600 artists have already signed up for access, and over 2,600 works of art have been registered. Several marketplaces and platforms are also using Ascribe’s API to display the copyrights to the artwork.

Ascribe is currently in progress of designing a machine learning technology which will be able to search through the web to classify copied works without watermarks.

Encrypting Unique Data on the Blockchain

Ascribe is using the function of the Bitcoin blockchain to encode additional information in transactions. On May 6, rock band 22HERTZ encrypted the copyrights to their album on the Bitcoin blockchain, using a function of the blockchain called OP_RETURN, which is a standardized function of the Bitcoin blockchain that allows data to be passed onto a transaction.

In this case, a user defined sequence of up to 40 bytes can be stored in the blockchain, which is enough to store encrypted texts of links to images, songs and long texts.

While storing information and data on the blockchain has been criticized as being inefficient, the transparency of the blockchain makes it extremely easy for artists to track their copyrights and ownerships to their works instantly.

Image via Ascribe

Blockchain Technology: The Key to Secure Online Voting

Originally designed to democratize power within the financial system, Bitcoin’s blockchain technology is now playing a role in the area of democracy itself.

Despite receiving much attention, online voting adoption has yet to take off meaningfully worldwide, amid concerns that existing platforms are vulnerable to fraud, corruption and sabotage. Last year a team accredited to observe the 2013 municipal elections in Estonia – the only country to run Internet voting on a wide scale – revealed that they observed election officials downloading key software over insecure Internet connections, typing PINs and passwords in view of cameras, and preparing election software on insecure PCs.

Norway also canceled trials of e-voting systems in local and national elections, concluding that voters’ fears about their votes becoming public could undermine democratic processes.

There are, however, increasing examples of political organizations and technology startups experimenting with secure digital voting systems based on the use of Bitcoin’s blockchain technology. Last year Denmark’s Liberal Alliance became the first political party to vote using a blockchain-based system for its internal elections. Similar systems have since been adopted in Norway and Spain and the movement is gathering momentum in the United States.

“There is a common misconception that voting cannot be done online in a secure way. However, the introduction of blockchain technology is changing the conversation,” Adam Ernest, CEO of Virginia-based FollowMyVote – an organization committed to developing an online open source, transparent voting platform – explains.

Just as Bitcoin users make transactions by sending the digital currency to the recipient’s digital wallet, blockchain voting systems involve creating wallets for each candidate or option in an election. All voters are then allocated a digital “coin” that represents one vote, which they can cast by sending their “coin” to the wallet of their choice.

As in a bitcoin transaction, the entire process is recorded in the blockchain public ledger, meaning that unlike most current elections, a voter can verify that his or her vote was actually counted.

While the lack of anonymity in the Bitcoin system is a drawback for adoption in voting platforms, the use of anonymizing software can help ensure that voters’ identities are not revealed.

The New York-based V-Initiative is working on delivering open-source, fraud-proof, fully anonymous digital voting solutions based on the blockchain and uses zero-knowledge proof cryptography allied with IP masking software such as the “TOR” program to safeguard voter anonymity.

For many digital voting advocates, the end goal is “liquid democracy” – a combination of direct and indirect democracy whereby all citizens have the potential to vote on every issue but can dynamically delegate some or all of these votes to others that they feel are better qualified to vote.

Ernest notes that this concept is gaining much traction in countries such as Norway, Iceland and Germany. FollowMyVote, in partnership with BitShares and Cryptonomex, Inc., is working on a voting platform that is integrated directly with the BitShares 2.0 Smartchain that supports this use case.

Despite the positive reception in parts of Europe, Ernest is quick to point out that a number of obstacles remain along the road toward a fully digital democratic system.

“Pushing for provably honest elections in the U.S. and abroad, we have a tremendous amount of money and influence stacked against us,” he said.

As a result, FollowMyVote is changing its approach. Instead of trying to lobby election officials or legislators whom they feel have no incentive to improve the voting process in the U.S., it is preparing to launch an educational marketing campaign targeted directly at the voter in an attempt to get them to lobby the government.

Ernest says he is confident that once voters are better informed about the benefits of a blockchain-based online voting system – from convenience and cost-effectiveness to security and transparency – governments will have little choice but to adopt these systems.

“I firmly believe that in the future, voting will be done from our smartphones and our votes will be stored securely on the blockchain,” he said.

Photo London elections – e-count scanners / photopin

Tomer ‘IamSatoshi’ Kantor: ‘I Still Look at Bitcoin as Political Activism’

Tomer Kantor is a London-based film producer who, for the past three years, has been documenting the Bitcoin phenomenon under his “IamSatoshi” label

Top 5 Ways Bitcoin Beats the Dollar (Op-Ed)

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FinTech Digest: Alibaba Enters Into Online Lending, Credit Karma Has $3.5B Valuation, Mobile-Only Banking Application Receives License

Alibaba and Chinese banks do battle over online lending, Credit Karma secures new funding to expand its service as it looks to become the default for consumers’ complete financial identity, and more n

Your Last Chance to win 5BTC as a CoinTelegraph SuperWriter! Join our team!

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The Greek Dilemma: Hyper Inflation, Austerity, or Bitcoin?

The never ending tragedy known as the Eurozone is flirting with disaster and the unknown consequences of what would happen if Greece is ejected by brute force or leaves by sheer will from the EU.

Friday, June 26, 2015

Blythe Masters’ Digital Asset Holdings Acquires Hyperledger and Bits of Proof

In March, Bitcoin Magazine covered the digital economy startup Digital Asset Holdings, headed by the financial superstar Blythe Masters, a former JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive.

Digital Asset Holdings uses distributed ledgers to track and settle both digital and mainstream financial assets in a cryptographically secure environment where counterparty risk is minimized, and settlement times are drastically reduced.

Now, Digital Asset Holdings LLC announced two acquisitions, Bloomberg Business reports. The company bought San Francisco-based Hyperledger and Budapest-based Bits of Proof for undisclosed amounts.

“Hyperledger and Bits of Proof add valuable new dimensions to our product offering and great talent to our team,” said Masters. “We build tools to help clients harness the power of distributed ledgers to serve their own customers. We integrate financial infrastructure with a variety of innovative new technologies inspired by the blockchain. Different ledger technologies serve different purposes and all of those we integrate with are additive.”

Hyperledger, a finalist in the SWIFT Innotribe startup challenge, developed an innovative distributed ledger to allow banks and other financial institutions to clear and settle transactions in realtime. The company’s technology enables financial institutions to create multiple private blockchains across a known group of participants. Unlike other distributed ledgers, Hyperledger does not have an inbuilt cryptocurrency and uses a proven consensus algorithm capable of thousands of transactions per second.

Bits of Proof developed and deployed an enterprise level server to integrate blockchain technology into financial applications.

Hyperledger CEO, Dan O’Prey, will become Chief Marketing Officer of Digital Asset, and CTO Daniel Feichtinger will join the senior engineering team. Támas Blummer, founder and CEO of Bits of Proof, has joined Digital Asset Holdings as Chief Ledger Architect.

According to information disclosed to Bloomberg Business by a person familiar with the matter, several large investors have expressed an interest in funding Digital Asset Holdings and entered private negotiations. A deal could be announced in the third quarter.

In related news, Digital Asset Holdings and other leading-edge fintech companies demonstrated their products and services to dozens of top bank, venture-capital and technology executives at the fifth annual New York FinTech Innovation Lab Demo Day organized by Accenture and the Partnership Fund for New York City.

“[Digital Assets Holdings] is building next-generation, cryptographically secure distributed settlement and ledger services,” states the Innovation Lab press release. “The company will provide safe and efficient settlement of conventional and digital assets that eliminate counterparty risk and can reduce trade- processing time from T+3 to same-day settlement.”

At the recent Exponential Finance 2015 conference in New York, Masters said that Bitcoin’s underlying technology has the opportunity to improve settlement latency and system security for firms, and, therefore, the market for financial blockchain applications will ultimately be measured in the trillions. Digital Asset Holdings “bridges the gap between the blockchain development world and financial services,” she added.

“How seriously should you take [the blockchain]?” Masters asked. “About as seriously as you should have taken the concept of the Internet in the early 1990s. It’s a big deal.”

Image via Hyperledger

Blockstack Joins the Growing Number of Fintech Companies That Use the Blockchain to Streamline Mainstream Finance

Blockstack, a San Francisco-based firm, is adapting the technology of Bitcoin for mainstream finance, including clearing and settlement. A small group of banks have started beta testing Blockstack’s technology, Bloomberg Business reports.

The startup, run by former Google Inc. and Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. employees, is jumping into the competition to use digital-currency technology to tackle financial companies’ slow, antiquated back-office operations.

“We’re not trying to destroy banking or financial services as they are today,” said Peter Shiau, Blockstack’s co-founder and chief operating officer, who previously worked at Standard Chartered Bank in product innovation. “We see what we’re building as technology that can help improve the back-office infrastructure that financial institutions are using.”

Blockstack’s team also includes Philip Harris, a former Nasdaq executive, as an adviser, and chief executive officer and founder Miron Cuperman, who used to work as a senior security engineer at Google.

According to the company’s website, Blockstack is a licensable software package to enable financial institutions and other enterprises to build sophisticated blockchain 2.0 applications on their own private blockchain.

Blockstack.io is a hosted version of Blockstack to allow anyone to start building applications on a fully-featured private blockchain. Available in private beta, Blockstack.io gives financial institutions a stack of inter-operable components to build on, including a private, hosted blockchain, a colored coin issuer for representing assets, a framework for smart contracts using oracles and multi-signature transactions, and the ability to plug in external open source components.

“The initial benefit of a private blockchain is simple: a financial institution can accelerate their learning about blockchain technology and prototype blockchain-based applications quickly and easily,” states the Blockstack product and service announcement. “The ultimate benefit of a private blockchain is that it gives enterprises a choice of infrastructure: whether to run an application on a public blockchain or run on a private blockchain with a group of known counter-parties.”

Blockstack includes critical functionality for financial services: managing time-dependent financial transactions like coupon payments for bonds, ensuring complex compliance requirements from multiple groups in an organization, and scaling up the infrastructure to handle millions of transactions at low latency.

The Blockstack platform is designed to work with technologies designed for Bitcoin Core. As improvements are made to Bitcoin, they can be rolled in Blockstack so that it stays current with the latest technology.

“When you have this private blockchain that’s shared by a number of financial institutions, all you’re doing is just keeping records of the transactions and who owns what,” Shiau said. “What’s nice about the blockchain is you can do that in real time. There are no fees involved.”

Blockstack joins a growing number of fintech companies that want to use or adapt the blockchain technology of Bitcoin to enhance the efficiency and lower the cost of traditional banking and financial systems. Other companies developing ways to use the blockchain to streamline mainstream finance are Nasdaq, which recently partnered with startup Chain to implement the blockchain technology in its Nasdaq Private Market, and Blythe Masters’ Digital Asset Holdings, which uses distributed ledgers to track and settle both digital and mainstream financial assets in a fast and secure environment.

BTC.sx Rebrands as Magnr, Introduces Bitcoin Savings Accounts

According to BitcoinRichList.com there are over $750 million worth of bitcoin sitting idle. Magnr, a company dedicated to providing Cryptocurrency Financial Services, is trying to change this by allowing the first-ever blockchain-based “savings accounts.” Magnr currently operates across two verticals: trading and saving.

“Magnr allows users to independently verify the safety of their deposit on the blockchain’s public ledger,” says CEO Joe Lee. “Additionally, the interest payout is calculated from blockchain data. This lets users verify they are being paid the correct amounts. This is the first time that savings accounts have received a fintech makeover.”

Magnr was created from the founding team of BTC.sx. It is a new, rebranded version of the BTC.sx trading platform. BTC.sx Bitcoin Trading Platform has brokered more than 60,000 trades since the introduction of its leveraged trading service in 2013.

Magnr generates interest from traders, which is partly paid out as interest to savers.

“One of blockchain’s greatest innovations is its immutable ledger,” says Lee. “When developing our interest-bearing product, we asked ourselves on a technical level how we could rely on the blockchain as an external database as much as possible. To calculate interest payable, we take the timestamp from each client deposit directly off the blockchain. At the end of each month, this allows us to pro-rata interest calculations to whole 24-hour periods on the realtime transaction record that is the blockchain.”

The Magnr platform doesn’t require a settlement period or a wait time for them to receive funds as payments to client accounts can happen in real-time. This also allows for the saver to check the on public blockchain for payments made to his or her Magnr account.

The Magnr team is founded by investment banking veterans. Joe Lee, formerly of Barclays Bank and Macquarie Group, first discovered Bitcoin in 2011. Joe began trading bitcoin and turned $100 into $200,000. This profit was then used alongside seed-funding to start BTC.sx. Colin Kwan, COO, worked at the senior management level at UBS and Deutsche Bank. He ensures the company’s products have institutional-grade quality and compliance.

“Our team is currently focused on product refinements and back-office operations,” says Lee. “Experience from the banks and investment banks we used to work with has taught us the value of building out a solid back-office operation as a matter of importance. We find that client trust starts with prioritization of the fiduciary responsibility we have when handling our client bitcoins. As we seek to engage with institutions and regulators worldwide to push the adoption of digital currencies, a well-managed operation speaks loudly for itself. This shows proof that business can be built in a trustworthy way using blockchain as its core rails.”

“Fintech startups have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to revolutionize banking,” Lee said. “We are very excited to be pioneering digital currency savings accounts. This is transparency in modern finance, redefined.”

Filament Develops Ad-Hoc Mesh Networks of Smart Sensors Operating on the Blockchain

Filament, a technology platform company focused on Internet of Things (IoT) applications and long-range wireless sensor networks for industrial settings, is developing ad-hoc mesh networks of smart sensors for industrial applications, operating on the blockchain.

Announced at the O’Reilly Solid Conference, Filament‘s wireless sensor devices, or Taps, can cover industrial areas with low-power autonomous mesh networks for data collection and asset monitoring. Taps have built-in environmental sensors, a USB port for other sensors or devices, and are equipped with hardware cryptographic chips and long-range radios for secure accessibility and communication across large geographic areas. Taps can talk directly to each other at distances of up to 10 miles and have a battery life of up to 20 years.

“We believe that all economic elements, digital and physical, old and new, must be fundamentally autonomous and distributed in order to maximize their potential,” said Jabber/XMPP creator Jeremie Miller, now CTO of Filament.

Taps operates in a decentralized way without a central network authority. Designed to generate ad-hoc mesh networks in the absence of cellular or Wi-Fi networks, Taps will be able to process bitcoin payments and enforce digital smart contracts. The company is leveraging existing blockchain technologies to create an open platform for Distributed Sensor Transactions (DIST). The Filament platform builds on the blockchain (Bitcoin and Ethereum for transactions), Telehash (private communication), JOSE (smart contracts), TMesh (low-power mesh networking), and BitTorrent (firmware and remote management updates.)

Two DIST components have been created by Miller. TMesh and Telehash, a lightweight interoperable protocol with strong encryption to enable mesh networking across multiple transports and platforms, are available on Gitbub as open source software.

“Blanket a factory in sensors, or control the streetlights of an entire city – our standalone networks span miles and last for years, all without Wi-Fi or cellular,” says the Filament website. “We’ve combined end-to-end encryption (telehash) with private-key crypto hardware to provide ultra-secure, decentralized communications between millions of devices. By enabling operations on the Blockchain, we’ve made it possible to generate new, recurring sources of revenue by selling access to your devices or data.”

Before the conference, O’Reilly Radar noted that Filament and IBM are exploring how specially designed decentralized ledgers can be used to enable devices to communicate service needs and other information among their owners and vendors for household, commercial and industrial purposes. IBM is building a similar proof-of-concept system for the next generation of the IoT, dubbed Autonomous Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Telemetry (ADEPT).

Filament, after raising a $5 million Series A Round led by Bullpen Capital, started to ship an early version of its hardware and to provide services to pilot customers. It lists many possible applications for Taps networks in industrial sectors where risk and operational efficiency is critical to success. Applications range from locating thousands of bicycles across an urban bike-sharing service to monitoring weather and soil conditions across large farms, or avoiding collisions between vehicles on remote worksites.

US Investments in FinTech to Lead Globally in 2015, Following Triple Increase in 2014

A new report says that U.S. banks and corporations have outpaced every other country in global investments in FinTech over the past few years.