Author: Andreas Albrecht

Swenden Land Registry
One of the first serious ideas to use blockchains and smart contracts was the land registry use case. We heard about projects in Greece and Honduras. Now Sweden do some research, it has high potential to show the applicability of this approach. 

more projects
During the last weeks we saw more and more interesting Blockchain activities.
– Polish Gouvernance 
– Dutch Central Bank 
– Kazakhstan Central Bank 
– ……
It seems more or less every institution works on this technology. 

R3 Ethereum Review  R3 published an Ethereum review, written by Vitalik Buterin. In the managed summary written by the R3 CTO, he highlights the challenges of Ethereum for financial marked requirements. From our perspective it just emphasizes the fact that one blockchain concept doesn’t fit all requirements. Ethereum has the first mover advantage for smart contracts development and DApps, like Bitcoin for crypto currencies, both is unstoppable. Santander Introduce Blockchain Technology for International Payments Most institutes still discuss the Blockchain like the car industry the electric engines. Santander UK starts with international payment based on blockchain. The Santander solution works with Ripple (!!!), it works well for this kind of use cases. During the last months, with everybody looking at Ethereum, it’s a good idea to look little bit more left and right. First salary offers for Blockchain developers As there are almost all institutes of the financial service industry, but also companies from health care, real estate and music, evaluating the blockchain and starting first proof-of-concepts, it becomes obvious that there is a huge demand meeting a real scarcity of developers, with probably “…less than 100 true blockchain experts in the world”. Obviously, this mismatch raises the salary offers, and the first official offers are about $250.000 at Wall Street (free German Jaxenter-Post). So, if the blockchain still doesn’t impress you, here’s one argument more for dealing with it more closely in the future.

The DAO .. reached $ 157 mio. founding. The ethereum based crowd funding decentralized business organization collects a lot of money to support ether based business. It looks like the first blockchain venture capital organization to boost the ethereum cosmos. Strong disruption alert ! Deloits Rubix blockchain Beta launched Deloits starts their own blockchain program Rubix. It focuses on Enterprise Blockchain distributed apps (Dapps). Rubix should become an industry-leading blockchain infrastructure provider. It’s still enough space for solution witch helps to transform the old economy to the distributed economy. The DAO – Part 2 What is it? Is it a bubble or even a ponzi scheme (as everything unknown is a ponzi scheme obviously)? Is it a great investment possibility? Is it Freenet or Skynet? Or is it just the betting on Vitalik Buterin and his gang that they will put forward something extremely useful which is worth all this founding? Make up your own mind, but beware that this is no recommendation to buy DAO-Tokens. Don’t get it wrong: we actually believe in the concept of the DAO and that it will establish an intelligent, interactive investment possibility with huge gains, but looking at the current DAO: ~$200 mio. for slock.it and another, not even published proposal? Smells like tulips.  

NATO Blockchain Innovation Contest The NATO is a decentralized organisation with a lot of partners, processes and logistical challenges. It’s a clever idea to use a decentralized ledger for a couple of problems in this kind of organizations with strong security needs. They start with an inovation contest to find good use cases. Congratulation for this innovative approach. Cryptovalley Zug accept Bitcoins  The city Zug in Swiss starts to accept Bitcoins on first of July for the payment of public services. It looks like a good marketing strategy for the local economic promotion. Zug is know as the hometown of Ethereum and other crypto companies. (Sorry, the official city website is just in German.) Youtube channels  If you don’t find anything on TV look at : A presentation from BlackRock Engineering about Ethereum or the channels from Andreas M. Antonopoulos  and BitBond  

Amazon’s Blockchain as a Service Amazon announced Blockchain as a Service. You can use a blockchain from Microsoft Azur or from the IBM Cloud, now Amazon also want to offer a service. I like working with AWS, so I hope the blockchain service will fit perfectly to the existing datacenter services. Akasha Project  The Akasha Project has a high disruption potential. It is a decentralized social multimedia network, based on Ethereum.  Akasha could be a game changer. Satoshi Nakamoto This week you found many articles about Craig Steven Wright. “Is he Satoshi, or not”, the trough is … the articles are interesting, but you know nothing, Jon Snow.

ECB – works on blockchain  The European Central Bank works on blockchain concepts, but they don’t talk about their own currency, they just spend some work on distributed ledger technologies (DLT). Since R3 announced Corda the big players don’t talk about blockchain anymore, they use the description DTL. more IBM IBM launch a blockchain cloud service, you can start your own test environment directly at the Bluemix site. Local Meeting in Ethereum Space: the Ethereum-MZ meetup Last week there was an Ethereum Meetup in Mainz (at the Hipster space dock eins mainz, an old customs port). So, Mainz really is a beautiful city, but with 200.000 citizens, why is there a Ethereum Meetup? For a really good reason: Heiko Hees, core developer of the Ethereum Python client pyethapp, which is one of the Ethereum Foundation supported clients, founded his company brainbot technologies AG there. Heiko and Max from brainbot gave a introductory talk about Ethereum and an insight in developing for the platform with the Ethereum wallet to an interested and active auditorium. Several people had to leave at 11 pm for Frankfurt, but would have liked to stayed even longer. Nice, interested people, cool location and last but not least beer & pizza. Thanks again Heiko & brainbot! If you have the opportunity to go to the next meetings, you should not hesitate.

Die Blockchain bei der JAX 2016 Vom 18.04. – 22.04. fand mit ca. 2000 Besuchern die größte Entwicklerkonferenz Deutschlands in Mainz statt. Anfänglich stand JAX für Java, Apache und XML und dies sind auch immer noch die Schwerpunkte, es geht viel um Enterprise- und Webentwicklung mit Java, um Architekturen und Vorgehensmodelle in der IT usw.. Umso erstaunter war ich, dass mit Taming the Bitcoin Blockchain von Caterina Rindi ein reines Blockchainthema als Keynote vorkam, zwar erst um 20 Uhr abends, aber mit ca. 200 Teilnehmern sehr gut besucht (von denen auf Caterinas Nachfrage auch einige Bitcoins besitzen). Der Vortrag war eine gute Einführung, Caterina kam über NGOs zu Bitcoins und beschäftigt sich seitdem aus einer fachlichen Sicht mit der Blockchaintechnologie. Eine weitere Nachfrage von Caterina ans Publikum: „wer kennt Ethereum?“. Auch hier gab es vereinzelte Meldungen, aber „noch zu wenig“.  Genau dies war auch die Kernaussage Ihres Vortrags: ihr seid Entwickler, ihr könnt mit dieser Technologie die Welt ändern, also macht das auch. Dieser Aussage können wir uns nur anschließen. Decentralized, Peer-To-Peer Bitcoin Exchange Bitsquare to Launch Next Week Nachdem mit OpenBazzar ein peer to peer Marktplatz für alles mögliche live gegangen ist, gibt es bald die dezentrale Bitcoin Börse Bitsquare. Der Ansatz ist hat ein hohes Disruptionspotential. Zentrale Marktplätze bekommen Konkurrenz. SWIFT arbeitet an der Blockchain Technologie Bekanntlich ist das SWIFT Netzwerk der quasi Bankenstandard. Die Blockchain Technologie gefährdet dieses Monopol. Um selber im “Driver Seat” zu bleiben, arbeiten sie jetzt intensiv an dieser Technologie.

The FED discuss the potential of blockchains A member of the US Federal Reserve’s board of governors issued new remarks this week on the potential of blockchain technology. In her speech, Lael Brainard said she believes the financial industry and regulators should be optimistic of technologies that have the potential to bring positive change. Ethereum based Energy trading The idea sounds good, you can sell your energy from your solar cells direct based on Ethereum smart contracts to an end user. The decentraliced energy market fits to the decentralized privat energy producer. Strong disruption alert on this concept. Andreas Antonopoulos .. has published a new motivating video about Bitcoin basics and ideas. Better than boring TV shows in the evening. He is an inspiring Bitcoin evangelist.

R3 Introducing Corda  R3 works on their own distributed ledger Systems Corda. The first blockchain test from R3 with 11 banks based on Ethereum and Microsoft technologies. Corda should not become just another blockchain, it should be something different, a distributed ledger between trusted partners. more IBM IBM starts to combine their blockchain activities with watson. I think watson is a realy interesting AI technology. I  have no idea what kind of product will come out of this combination. We have to look on this activity. more Microsoft The Microsoft Ethererum blockchain activities looks pretty serious. Azure can become a standard cloud service for blockchain nodes. OpenBazzar OpenBazzar is new decentralized market place. In the new Silicon Valley econnomy the market places have the control about every transaction. OpenBazzar can break this new empires with a new concept of a decentralized marketplace with bitcoin based transactions.