Category: weekly recap

The Ethereum universe grows really fast and you get lost very soon when you try to get a good intro on actual developments, “The Ethereum Wiki”  is good start to get an overview on Ethereum projects and related tokens.  

When you start thinking about your own Ethereum application, you have to solve the question how to store the related data, some startups using the IPFS filesystem. Then the next decision could be: “How can I search efficiently on this Filesytsem ?” . A solution could be the AFIX – Advanced File Index from Novus.  

Andreas Antonopoulos has also some new inspiring films in his youtube channel. He also announced his new book “Masting Ethereum” for autumn

… and the first beer was paid over the lightning network.  

There are lot of news in the BC universe and it’s not easy to achieve a balance between repeating everything and doing nothing. Our target is to log things that we found interesting. Here we go:

One news is overdue: the R3 (what ever it is) is coming down to earth. The first members are leaving the ship. Nobody knows if it is sinking or just pivoting. Goldman and Santander will leave the R3 consortium. If you follow the news, you can also find a lot of articles about their own BC activities. It seems that they didn’t see a benefit of being a part of this consortium. R3 also announced their own open source strategy, so they appreciate that open source is the key for building stable, transparent and secure BC solutions. 

JPM delivers the promissed open source code for Quorom, an Ethereum based blockchain implementation with support for permissioned networks, privacy and a faster consensus algorithm able of processing dozens to hundreds transactions per second. Let us hope that JPM’s  activities will help the Ethereum community to grow faster and become more robust. 

Siemens is also waking up. They started a collaboration with the LO3 startup for a decentralized energy micro trading platform. 

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.

From Blockchain to Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) If you follow the news, you might have realized that the term DLT is currently more and more used to describe what we usually describe with “the Blockchain”. Even though the definitions are more or less subjective, a good comparison between these technologies is here. In really easy terms, the DLT is the Blockchain without the “chain of blocks”, which also means without the security and immutability of the blockchain. However, as with private chains vs. public chains, this might exactly be what you need for your use case. So, keep in mind that Bitcoins are not the Blockchain and that the Blockchain is more than DLR and all of these technologies fit perfectly to their use cases, which are certainly not the same. It helps to know about the definitions to get more information about the complete topic, since DLT is not as spammed (aka SEOed) as Blockchain, a Google searchs gets you more valuable results like the BaFin evaluation and the really well made UK Government Science report. Even more about the Blockchain Fed up with all the small bits and pieces about Blockchain technology on all those news sites? Then read a book, we recommend “The Blockchain” from leanpub and hope that it will be completed soon. More into videos? Then watch primavera in her talk about Skynet or Freenet or her more current talks.  

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