5 Years Ago

Libra. The new Facebook coin will be pegged to a basket of different currencies i.e. Yen, $, £, € etc. 

Facebook is looking to establish a foundation to oversee the governance, by selling positions to 100 different organisations which will be on the governing body, which itself, will oversee the Digital Asset. According to Blockcrypto, the initial members will all pay $10million and include:  Mastercard, PayPal, PayU, Stripe, Visa Inc., Booking Holdings, eBay, Calibra, Farfetch, Lyft, MercadoLibre, Spotify, Uber, Iliad SA, Vodafone, Anchorage, Bison Trails, Coinbase, Xapo, Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Initiatives, Ribbit Capital, Thrive Capital, Union Square Ventures, Creative Destruction Lab, Kiva, Mercy Corps, and Women's World Banking.
Interestingly, the majority of the above-proposed members have millions of users already as customers. Presumably, one of the conditions of being a member is that Libra will be accepted and usable by the customers of the governing board members, so further increasing the adoption and acceptance of this new Digital Currency. It is notable that the organisations that are missing are Airbnb, with over 150 million members globally, no airlines, no retailers, no car companies, no Fast Moving Consumer Goods companies (FMCF) - Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Colgate, and no oil companies (with their thousands of petrol stations all over the world!)
Unsurprisingly, there are also no banks since Facebook’s coin will potentially take revenue from them if it is a success - nor are  Amazon, Apple, Nike, Alibaba, or Google have agreed to fund Facebook and pay $10million each, they all are watching how Libra is embraced by consumers and regulators before they launch their own Digital currency.
I suspect that the vice president of Amazon, Patrick Gaulthier, will regret what he recently  said: “Amazon would only consider discussing the creation of its own Cryptocurrency like Facebook’s Libra in several years’ time”
The ability to be able to buy and sell goods globally (without the need to use banks) and so undercut the current costs and charges levied by financial institutions, potentially make Digital Currencies very attractive, especially if you have a global brand - with 2.4 billion customers- like Facebook. By pegging Libra to a basket of currencies, as opposed to just the US $, ought to make this Digital Asset even more attractive.
In a message to investors, RBC managing director Mark Mahaney wrote: “We believe this may prove to be one of the most important initiatives in the history of the company to unlock new engagement and revenue streams.” He goes on to say that “himself and the rest of the RBC team suspect that Facebook will integrate Libra into payments, e-commerce, apps, and gaming. With the Libra launch around the corner, RBC is placing a $250 price tag on Facebook’s stock”.
Facebook, according to the Guardian newspaper “is looking at paying users fractions of a coin for activities such as viewing ads and interacting with content related to online shopping, in a system similar to the loyalty schemes run by retailers.”
I do not think we should underestimate this last comment from the Guardian as, in effect, Facebook, which has for years used its customers’ data without paying them, and then sold it to...


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Digital Currency
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Visa, who according to Forbes, handled over $11.2 trillion of payments in 200+ countries last year, is now looking to attack the international money transfer market - which is said to be valued at over $125 trillion.

Since 1973, Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), headquartered in Belgium, has dominated the market for international payments. However, SWIFT uses old technology, making it relatively slow and expensive to move money around the world, which is why Ripple is arguing that it is able to replace SWIFT, as Ripple’s Blockchain-powered solution is so much faster and cheaper. If indeed Ripple is successful, it would make the business extremely valuable. This may explain why Ripple rose in value by over 35,000% in 2017 and caught the imagination of many Crypto-enthusiasts, as well as sparking a wave of “Fear of Missing Out” (FOMO) across dinner tables around the world and people searched for the next token that could offer them the hope of early retirement.

Visa has also announced that it is going to expand the number of countries from not just the UK, but to six more countries - Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Ireland, and Holland - by now enabling Coinbase to expand its Crypto to fiat debit card for clients. The card allows users to spend in Euros and Sterling, then their Cryptocurrency holdings will automatically be sold to meet the fiat equivalent cost of the purchase. The Coinbase card is attractive for those that travel overseas, as it will reduce the normal expensive foreign exchange fees that many other cards levy. Unfortunately, so far the reaction has not been that positive, with the card scoring only 2.4 on the Google App store. However, new upgrades are promised, which hopefully will improve the customer experience.

Initiatives, like the above from Visa, have to be welcomed as they are driving down the costs of sending and spending money globally while making it much easier for holders of Digital Assets to access their investments in easy and convenient ways. It ought to make it easier to redeem digital loyalty rewards, which are being touted as an important market for Digital Assets. Companies are looking to use Digital Assets to attract new customers while incentivising existing clients to do more business. We are seeing companies offering to pay for clients’ data, as opposed to just collecting it and then reselling it to advertisers - Google and Facebook have been doing this for years!

IOTA has been giving tokens to drivers of Jaguars and Land Rover vehicles during tests in Ireland, it collects information about road conditions and traffic congestion. Facebook has just announced a project called Study, where it will be paying clients for their data (possibly using the soon-to-be-launched Facebook Digital currency, Globalcoin).

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Cryptocurrency
Digital Money
Digital Assets
In order for institutions to be fully engaged with Digital Assets, they are going to need a third party to look after their assets - a role which has historically been provided by custodians.

The regulators in most jurisdictions insist that the organisations that manage your funds have to be independent of the entity that physically looks after the assets.

The good news is that the options and choices for those looking for custody solutions for their Digital Assets continue to evolve. Metaco has announced that it is using Aon (the world’s second-largest insurance broker) and a group of Lloyds of London underwriters, as they are now able to offer “crime-protection” insurance for Digital Assets held in Metaco’s Crypto-wallet. This means that clients’ Digital Assets will be protected, both when their assets are stored “hot” - online, and “cold” – offline.

This is not the first time Aon has been involved in supplying insurance for Digital Asset custody providers, as it announced earlier this year it was working with Anchor labs in the USA. However, while AON claims to have 50% of the current insurance market for Digital Assets, other firms, as the chart above illustrates, are also active in offering insurance solutions for the custody of Digital Assets.

Another potential new custody provider for Digital Assets is 20/30. Robert Gaskill, from 20/30 (the first company to issue a Security Token, to be listed on the London Stock Exchange), recently told 20/30 is looking at an acquisition in the custody sector. 20/30 is considering buying a firm that integrates its current custody solution and so will offer full insurance for custody of Digital Assets provided by Lloyd’s of London.

Interestingly, we are seeing companies relocating from the Channel Islands (where being a trustee is a regulated function) to the UK, where currently trustee services are not regulated. The reason, no doubt, is that it will save these companies compliance costs. This means they ought to have lower professional indemnity insurance premiums and less capital tied up in the business, as not being regulated the capital adequacy rules are totally different. But why is this relevant?

Well, there are a number of people who believe there is no reason why a trustee could not, in effect, offer a very similar service as a custodian and, because the compliance cost-base is potentially less, trustees will be able to offer this service at a lower price. Assuming that the FCA does not insist that you need to be regulated to “look after” assets for regulated firms, could we see traditional custodians like BNY Mellon, State Street, Northern Trust, JP Morgan or Citigroup, to name a few, offering themselves as trustees as opposed to being custodians?

Given JP Morgan’s foray into the Digital Asset sector by launching the JP Coin, will this give it an advantage over its competitors, as it has potentially a deeper understanding of some of the challenges and opportunities being presented by Digital Assets?

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Regulators
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Target, who is the eighth largest retailer in the USA, has been working with Hyperledger, IBM, and Bitwise to use Blockchain technology, initially to help it improve its supply chain logistics for a number of its paper products.

Target is also looking at using Hyperledger as it is used by Cargill, who is one of Target’s main food suppliers. In a recent blog, Joel Crabb, at Target said “Working directly with one of our largest food suppliers will allow Target and all other participants to learn from one another as blockchain technologies mature. This also gives us an instant use case in determining which data to share and how to govern a multi-enterprise, blockchain-backed distributed ledger.

Once again, as we have seen in the luxury goods sector with LVMH and the shipping sector with Tradelens, Target is looking to collaborate with suppliers and other parties enabling them to all share their experience and knowledge. This style of “collaborative capitalism”, where independent organisations are actively engaging with each other and sharing information and knowledge, is intended to create a stronger, more robust and transparent solution which will help the market and not just the interests of one organisation. This collaborative style is well summarised by Crabb: Maturity in this space will take time, but we’ll only get there when enterprise partners like Target and Cargill dive in together.

Meanwhile, the third largest retail store in Russia, Dixy, is using Blockchain technology to help it develop an open-trade finance platform, called Factorin. This platform is designed to enable it to engage with factoring firms and help Dixy’s cash-flow management. The Factorin platform has been under trial for a few months and has already processed over 10,000 transactions. It has been developed to help improve efficiency, cut out human errors and speed up payments due to small and medium-sized business - which are estimated in Russia to be valued at $45 billion.

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Blockchain
Supply Chain
Retail
In January 2018, KodakOne announced that it was going to launch the Kodak coin and, as a result, Kodak Inc share price went up 120%.

The basic idea behind KodakCoin is to use Blockchain technology to help photographers manage their photos by creating permanent, immutable records of ownership. It was believed that KodakOne would make it significantly cheaper and faster to register and sell digital images. The Platform was said to offer a simple, transparent Blockchain-powered worldwide royalty accounting, licensing, and payment system. The KodakCoin was never a part of Kodak Inc but was a separate company that licensed its name from Kodak Inc. While KodakCoin’s Initial Coin Offering (ICO) never proceeded, a year on, KodakCoin has generated over $1million in revenue in its beta-test trials.

Kodak Inc is back in the press and this time it is Kodak, the company that
invented the digital camera, and then decided not to commercialise it. This time it is looking to create a Blockchain-powered platform to store and manage documents, all held in the cloud. Kodak claims that its new platform could generate as much as 40% in terms of cost savings, using Blockchain technology.

So second time around, no ICO, no huge increase in Kodak’s share price, but just another example of a global brand using a Blockchain to offer its customers a service to help make business processes hopefully more efficient and cheaper.


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Blockchain
Cryptocurrency
Digital Assets
The images below highlight the dramatic results earlier this year in the Philippines, when over 45 tonnes of plastic and rubbish were collected off a beach in Manila Bay.

Plastic Bank and Bounties Network have been encouraging people to collect rubbish and plastic and rewarding the collectors by paying them in Ethereum (a Cryptocurrency). These two companies then partnered with a local Philippine cryptocurrency firm, which itself took the Ethereum and converted it into the Philippine peso.

SC Johnson, the makers of Raid, Pledge, Kiwi, Glade, etc, has been involved in a number of projects in Indonesia, where it has been giving away Digital currencies in exchange for local villages to collect plastic waste. According to a press release, SC Johnson teamed up with Plastic Bank to establish eight plastic recycling centres and is giving Digital tokens as an incentive to pick up rubbish off their local beaches, as “people can then use the tokens to buy needed goods and services – reducing the risk of loss or theft”.

These are great examples of how Digital Assets are being used to encourage positive behaviour and help reduce the amount of rubbish in our communities. This could not be further from how some people few Cryptocurrencies being the preserve of drug lords, terrorists, and generally unsavoury characters.

A little closer to home, in 2017, the
Hull Coin was launched. Whilst it cannot be bought, it can be earned by doing “good work” for Hull’s local community and then spent in local shops to receive a discount. Other towns in the UK have also looked at issuing local currencies, but as yet we have not seen widespread adoption.

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Cryptocurrency
Token
Pollution


At Bond Street underground station recently, what the Americans call an Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) or a cash point machine in the UK, someone tried to convert their Bitcoin into pound notes and it began issuing so much cash the withdrawer could not cope…

As you can see, a security guard tried to keep shoppers and commuters at bay, who looked on in amazement, as used bank notes littered the floor.

The ATM turned into what looked like a Las Vegas one-arm bandit machine that had hit the jackpot, and bank notes were soon flying out of the machine all over the floor… If nothing else I am sure it cheered up the commuters and certainly distracted the shoppers on Oxford Street!

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Cryptocurrency
Digital Assets
There are a number of organisations trying to convince investors of the merits of Tokenising different assets classes, on the basis that once it is possible to buy a fraction/share in a property or piece of art or a car, etc, it will enable smaller investors to participate and create a pool of liquidity.

While this sounds very plausible in practice, illiquid assets such as art, property, and classic cars tend to be the preserve of the very wealthy or institutional investors. These asset classes usually have little day to day liquidity, as these more sophisticated investors tend to buy and hold for the longer term. However, the jury is still out since by tokenising these illiquid assets, it will instead lead to other people actively buying and selling on a daily basis!

The Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) market started in the USA in September 1960, as a way of encouraging investors to participate in buying property in the USA. This REITs model has been subsequently copied by many other countries around the world.

The statistics below show it is estimated that 80 million people are exposed to USA REITs, which is valued to be over $3 trillion in size, with the majority REITs being quoted on a regulated stock exchange.

It is possible to buy a USA REIT at a discount of its asset value and, indeed, at the end of 2018, the discount of the median RIET was as large as 18%. Therefore, one has to question if there are potentially 80 million investors exposed to over $3 trillion of assets, which one can buy at a potential discount of 18% - how will tokenisation help?

The other popular misnomer has been how Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) and the tokens they created will democratise capital. To put this a different way, ICOs offered the promise to enable smaller investors to have access to smaller exciting tech start-ups. These have historically been the preserve of wealthy-sophisticated investors and institutions, like Venture Capital and Private Equity Funds. In 2017, Naga, a German publicly quoted company, epitomised this by raising over $50 million from 63,000 people. Unfortunately, apart from a handful of tokens, there is relatively little liquidity in the secondary markets and exchanges for many of the organisations that have issued a token.

According to Coinmarketcap.com, there are less than 100 tokens that had a volume of more than $1million, after which the volumes fall dramatically to a few thousand over most 24-hour periods. But this really ought not to be a surprise, as there are relatively few investors who buy even quoted smaller companies. In the UK, there are 481 companies on the Alternative Investment Market (AiM), that have a capitalisation of between £2+ million, but less than £100 million, and another 272 companies listed on the main London market valued under £100 million. So, just in the UK, we can see there is plenty of choice for investors but, unfortunately, it is almost impossible for even these publicly-quoted companies to raise fresh capital. There are multiple reasons for this - lack of information about these smaller companies, difficulty in valuing the company, few tangible assets being owned and lack of institutional interest, etc. Often there is no liquidity to buy and sell these quoted smaller company shares. How familiar are these reasons cited as to why...


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Real Estate
Regulators
Digital Assets
Bank of New York Mellon (BNY) is the largest custodian in the world, with assets in its custody of $34.5 trillion, and has been experimenting with Blockchain technology since 2016.

However, the first firm it has agreed to look after it’s Digital Assets on a public Blockchain is Bakkt. Bakkt is a company backed by International Clearing Exchange (ICE) which, in turn, owns and runs over a dozen regulated stock exchanges around the world. BNY is keen to emphasise that it is currently providing “safekeeping of Digital Assets for Bakkt” and not providing a custody service for them, partly because BNY feels the need to have far more regulatory clarity before it can offer full custody services.

One of BNY’s bigger custody competitors, Northern Trust, is also looking at offering custody for Digital Assets (according to Forbes) as it realises it, too, needs to keep ‘up to speed’ with how it may be able to offer services for those that wish to deal with this fast developing new asset class – Digital Assets. However, it is not just both the massive and traditional existing custodians who are looking at offering custody services for Digital Assets. Anchorage is a newly launched, crypto-custody firm backed by Silicon-valley based and highly successful VC investors, Andreessen Horowitz.

Bank Frick is a private bank based in Liechtenstein which now has a range of Blockchain-banking services, including Digital Asset custody. BitGo, from California, has been offering for Bitcoins a qualified custodian service since 2018. The California-based company is using its six years of experience as a ‘security-as-a-service provider’ to provide financial institutions and fund managers with Digital Asset custodianship. Also from California, San Francisco-based Digital Asset exchange and wallet provider, Coinbase, added a crypto custody service to its offering in 2018. Coinbase Custody is a qualified custodian which enables institutional investors to store over 30 different Digital Assets securely with a regulated and insured third-party storage solutions provider. Regulated Digital Asset exchange, Gemini, launched its qualified custodian service for institutional investors also in 2018.

Fidelity Digital Assets is the recently launched crypto-venture by Fidelity Investments Inc, which has $7.2 trillion of clients assets. The New York-based asset manager launched its crypto custody service in March 2018. Also in New York, Digital Asset exchange itBit launched a crypto-custody service last year to complement its exchange and Over The Counter (OTC) business. As a regulated New York State Trust Company, itBit ensures that all customer assets and funds are fully backed by mandatory capital reserves.

Alternative asset custodian Kingdom Trust, launched in 2017, was one of the first custodians to provide Digital Asset storage solutions. Currently, the Kentucky-based company has become a market-leading qualified Digital Asset custody service, with insurance provided by Lloyd’s of London. Koine, launched in June 2019, offers Digital Asset custody and settlement for institutional clients. The London-based start-up is targeting trading venues, institutional investors, Digital Asset issuers, and market infrastructure providers.

Prime Trust is a Las Vegas-based qualified Digital Asset custodian which supports Bitcoin, ETH, and ERC20 tokens. Finally, Xapo is one of the longest-standing Bitcoin storage solution providers. In the past five years, the Hong Kong-based company has grown its assets in storage to over 700,000...


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Banking
Blockchain
Financial Services
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We wrote a few weeks ago about how the Singapore Government was developing a Blockchain-powered platform, allowing various Singaporean academic institutions to be able to enter their students' qualifications on to a Blockchain.

This is important because many CVs include information that is incorrect – in one survey of 5,000 CVs, it was found that 80% of CVs had at least one incorrect piece of information! By having qualifications and experience recorded on a Blockchain, it creates a transparent immutable record for relevant people to see.

It is understood that The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is now also going to be using Blockchain technology to hold and manage academic records, meaning that over 75,000 students’ qualifications will now be available online.

These are good examples of how Blockchains can help build trust and help to reduce fraud although, the users will not be aware of what technology is being used to make this happen  - nor will they care.

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Academic
Blockchain
Higher Education
Carrefour has already found that, by enabling its clients to be able to track the provenance of some of its meat, dairy, and fruit products, there has been an increase in sales.

In the hyper-competitive grocery market, anything which one supermarket can give them an edge is bound to be copied by its competitors. Carrefour has said it will increase the number of products it sells using its Blockchain platform which offers greater transparency as to where these products originate from, where they were packed or picked, and if it subject to any genetically modified organisms, antibiotics or pesticides. It is now looking to expand in the future by adding non-food lines, i.e. clothing, as well as more information such as how much the farmer earns out of the shelf price. It is also experimenting with ways to identify products which do not rely on a “quick response’ (QR) code.

Emmanuel Delerm, Carrefour’s Blockchain project manager, told Reuters “The Blockchain initiative has proved most popular so far in China - where it is already common for shoppers to scan QR codes, followed by Italy and France, with some people spending as long as 90 seconds reading the provenance information. They are interested in information about the origin of products and how animals are cared for, with one video of a farmer with his chickens proving popular, millennials are buying less, but buying better products for their health, for the planet.”

To date, Carrefour has focused on using Blockchain technology to provide details on its own label brands. However, it has also been collaborating with Nestle to give consumers access to information for Nestle’s
Mousline potato puree products, thus allowing customers to be able to see it is only made from French potatoes.
It is not just Carrefour which is using QR codes and Blockchain technology to allow customers to get detailed information about the food they are buying - SAP has a platform too. Blueberry farmers in Chile are adding QR codes to their products so that the end-buyer is able to track the journey from the farm to the shelf. As reported in a
Forbes article by simply scanning the QR code with our smartphones, we’ll see proof of where the berries were grown, learn about the farm’s sustainability practices, and be assured that the harvesters are well-treated under fair labor laws. Blockchain will be behind it all”.

In Asia, the
South China Morning Post reported that Alibaba is trialling a project with four farmers in New Zealand to enable consumers to be able to identify what raw ingredients have been used, simply by using their mobile phones to scan the QR code. The intention is to build a “Food Trust Framework”, giving more information about the food consumers are buying. In the event of there being a problem, e.g. some form of contamination getting into the food distribution chain, if one is able to track the provenance using Blockchain technology, it will be faster to identify the source of the problem.

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Blockchain
Food & Beverages
Logistics And Supply Chain
The United Nations, in 1996, established the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT).

UN/CEFACT was mandated to find ways to improve global coordination and cooperation in trade facilitation and electronic business standards.

Its main priority continues to encourage interoperability: simplifying the exchange of information up and down the supply chain, including commercial and governmental processes. TradeLens has tried to digitise the written standards that UN/CEFACT created, as it has striven to harness Blockchain technology to bring greater traceability and transparency to international shipping of goods. It processes over 10 million shipping events on a weekly basis.

The challenges of interoperability are considerable for those involved in global logistics when different players in a supply chain cannot agree on different definitions. An example of this is when shippers, carriers, and customs authorities continue to rely on paper documents simply because their computers can’t talk to each other! Having agreed standards and definitions enables humans and computers to operate on “the same page”, to help improve the efficiency of container shipping, global trade, and world economies.

French shipping firm, CMA CGM Group, and the Swiss shipping line, MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), have recently announced that they are joining TradeLens’ Blockchain-powered shipping platform to help improve their supply chain logistics.“Digital collaboration is key to the evolution of the container shipping industry. The TradeLens platform has enormous potential to spur the industry to digitize the supply chain and build collaboration around common standards,” reported André Simha, Chief Digital & Information Officer, MSC.

TradeLens has been developed by AP Moller Maersk and IBM, using IBM’s Blockchain expertise. Maersk was established in 1906 and is one of the world’s largest shipping firms. This is another interesting example of “collaborative capitalism” - one company develops a Blockchain platform and then allows what have historically been its competitors to use the same platform.


Tradelens now has over 100 companies using its platform, giving
shippers, carriers, freight forwarders, customs officials, port authorities, inland transportation providers, and others a complete view of their respective data. It also allows participants to digitally collaborate as cargo moves around the world. The platform aims to improve the efficiency and trust across the global supply chains, to make them more transparent and secure in order to foster greater collaboration.

As with a number of examples where Blockchain technology is increasingly being used, the end customer will not be aware, nor do they need to know anything about the technology that is being harnessed by multinational organisations to improve business’ efficiency.

TradeLens is also a good example illustrating how Blockchains can be used to handle large amounts of data globally by many different independent parties, who in the past have had very little co-operation between them since they are often in competition with each other.

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Digital Currency
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Facebook is potentially going to offer their staff to be paid in Globalcoin (which is potentially the name for Facebook’s soon-to-be-launched Digital currency) on a monthly basis i.e. as their salary, further illustrating how Digital Assets are coming into our day to day lives.

It is rather ironic that Facebook has been selling advertisers’ data it has been gathering on its clients – generating $16.8 billion in 2018 -  and trust in Facebook has been plummeting. In a recent article, it was claimed that “more than 60% of Americans do not trust Facebook with their personal information”, so why will Facebook customers buy and use Globalcoin? Surely for any medium of exchange – a currency for transactions - one needs to have confidence and trust in the currency? It is potentially for this reason that Facebook has, allegedly, agreed to cede control of the governance of its new Digital currency to an independent board.

Meanwhile, the rollout of Globalcoin is gathering momentum, as it has been reported that Facebook has been in discussions with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in the USA to help smooth the way for Globalcoin, ready for its launch. It is understood that Facebook is also in discussion with Visa and Mastercard.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, recently commented on the future of Facebook saying: Payments is one of the areas where we have an opportunity to make it a lot easier… I believe it should be as easy to send money to someone as it is to send a photo.

Globalcoin is a very significant evolution for the  Digital Assets’ sector, as it will allow
Facebook’s 2.3 billion monthly users, as well as its 7 million advertisers, to use this currency and bypass the traditional banking system. But only time will tell if Facebook’s customers' trust is sufficient to using its new Digital currency.

P.S. As if Facebook needed it! It is being reported that Facebook is going to operate Globalcoin on a closed Blockchain, and charge the organisations operating each of the
100 nodes $10 million, so generating an extra $1 billion. This additional income will be a drop in the ocean for Facebook as, at the end of March 2019, it was sitting on over $41 billion of cash!

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Cryptocurrency
Data Analytics
Social Media
Wherever there is money to be made, it seems there is always someone who wants to carry out “dodgy dealings”, and unfortunately, this does not help the public’s perception about Cryptocurrencies.

Law courts globally continue to hand out prison sentences to people who have some form of involvement with Cryptos and, while some of the nefarious activities are clearly criminal, some of those perpetrators are indeed extraordinary.

Take Mr. Ye Lin Myint who was jailed for two years in Singapore, as he admitted to criminal intimidation and harassment against a multitude of people. The 36-year-old threatened to harm 30 people unless they transferred one Bitcoin each to him. However, instead of signing off his threats from Harry Potter’s arch-enemy “Lord Voldemort,” he added an extra “R” and signed himself as “Lord Voldermort”!

Meanwhile, rather than “whistle while you work” (aka Snow White and the seven dwarfs), an Australian government employee is being charged for “mining while he worked”. The 33-year-old man has been charged for mining Cryptocurrencies using government equipment that he had modified. This type of illegal Cryptocurrency mining using government property is similar to the story reported by the BBC last year about the Russians who allegedly rigged-up a supercomputer at The Federal Nuclear Centre in Sarov, western Russia, to mine Bitcoins.

In the US, Jacob Burrell Campos, a 22-year-old, has admitted breaching anti-money laundering checks, and operating a Bitcoin exchange business without registering his company. Campos has had to forfeit the $823,000+ money he made, and he has been in custody since August 2018. Also in the USA, Morgan Rockcoons from Nevada, has been charged with operating an illegal Bitcoin exchange and charged with fraud, resulting in being sentenced to 21 months in prison. Rockcoons allegedly sold 18 acres of land “which was supposed to be used to build Bitcointopia, a “Bitcoin megacity” in Elko County, Nevada” but he only owned 5 acres!

Then there is the case of Mark Karples, who has spent 11 months in a Japanese prison due to his involvement with the Mt. Gox affair, where over 600,000 Bitcoins (which would be worth today just under $5 billion) went missing. Karples has been charged with tampering with Mt. Gox’s records and was given a 2.5 year suspended sentence.

So, regardless of which jurisdiction, we have already seen people “doing time” and no doubt there will be many others facing the “strong arm of the law”. Hopefully, as these charlatans are apprehended and dealt with, this will deter others from carrying out criminal activities involving Crypto and Digital Assets.

The fact that “bad actors” are being sentenced ought to offer reassurance that people working with Digital Assets are subject to the normal law of the land and will face appropriate consequences.

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Blockchain
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FlashBoys, in Holland, has been working on a number of initiatives using Blockchain technology to help the retail sector in an effort to reduce fraud and improve transparency in supply chains.

One of the projects that it has developed is to use Near Field Communication (NFC) chips, and have these placed on bottles of wine or within items of clothes. An advantage of NFC chips is that no special equipment is required to read them, just a smartphone, and a product’s provenance can be held on the chip as well as other details, helping to tackle the sale of counterfeit goods.

Indeed, Flashboys is currently in discussions with Luxottica, the world biggest eyewear  manufacturer, to have an NFC chip inserted into a pair of sunglasses. Once the chip is in the sunglasses, it could create a unique token which could have information about the owner stored on a Blockchain. This would hopefully reduce the sale of second-hand sunglasses, as the new owner could easily scan them to see if they have been reported as lost/stolen. Ideas such as these are also being explored by fashion retailers, as they struggle to drive sales to their ‘bricks and mortar shops’ and find ways to differentiate themselves from online sales. One way would be to insert an NFC chip into items of clothes that are only sold in-store and say to customers “if you buy from one of our shops, you will get a discount of another purchase, or you will be able to see who and how your garment has been made”. By using an NFC chip, customers could use their mobile phones and retrieve discounts, and/or access to various different types of information. This could help retailers to encourage customers to use their physical shops more.

Meanwhile, American Express is looking at how it can use Blockchain technology to upgrade the many different loyalty programs it offers. Qiibee, founded in 2015 and based in Switzerland, also believes that Blockchain is a technology ideal for the loyalty industry as it offers brand owners more options and ways in which they can engage with customers, and hence offer them better value and information. Qiibee is trying to address the challenge such as when customers shop with a brand they like, they are rewarded with the branded token, ending up collecting numerous different tokens. These, in turn, are a hassle to use. However, by using the Qiibee platform, they can exchange the tokens they need from someone who requires the tokens they themselves have i.e. swap tokens!

So, it would appear that the retail sector is embracing Blockchain technology in a variety of ways, but I suspect, as this industry had greater adoption, more ways will be found to harness it still further for both on and off-line retailers.


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The Bank of England has been working with a number of FinTech companies exploring possible uses for Blockchain technology, as it looks at possible solutions to upgrade the Clearing House Automated Payment System (CHAPS) platform.

CHAP processes £500 billion a day as it transfers money between banks in the UK. It was first introduced in 1984 but, at a cost of £35 per transaction, cheaper, faster and more efficient alternatives are being researched.

One of the firms that the Bank of England has been working with is Clearmatics, which raised $12million last year, and now Reuters has reported that a consortium of some of the world’s largest banks are looking to invest a further $50 million into Clearmatics.

Clearmatics has been working on a project which aims to create a more efficient clearing and settlements platform and hopes to have it running by 2020.

BNY Mellon, ICAP, Deutsche Bank, and Santander all joined UBS bank and Clearmatics on the “utility settlement coin” (USC) project. Clearmatics founder, Robert Sams, said: “USC is as a form of digital cash that is fully backed by cash assets at the central bank.” It is understood USC would be like a “central bank-backed cash digital equivalent” that would run on a platform powered by Blockchain Technology, i.e. it would be convertible at parity and backed by cash assets held at a central bank. Therefore, using the USC would be the same as spending the fiat currency it would be paired with. However, in order to be successful, the USC project will need to have multiple central bank approval and prove that it can be scalable to handle potentially millions of transactions securely and accurately on a daily basis. This potentially will require different jurisdictions to agree on the legal compliance and potential tax treatment for this Digital Asset, which could pave the way to help others adopt Digital Assets.

Meanwhile, The Central Bank of The Bahamas (CBoB) is looking to launch its own digital currency by 2020, as the bank has announced that it has selected a company called NIZA to provide the technical expertise for its digital currency. The CBoB’s aim is to have a digital currency, so enabling its citizens and businesses to have an affordable electronic payment system and to have cheaper, easier access to global markets.

In Sweden, where the use of cash is the lowest in Europe as more and more people use credit and debit cards, the Swedish Riksbank believes that an e-krona (a state-backed national currency using Blockchain technology) could be a promising and reliable substitute. But Riksbank is not rushing to introduce this asset to the general public in the short term. These are clear examples of how Digital currencies are being driven “top-down” (i.e. by governments and global banks) as opposed to Digital tokens being driven “bottom-up”(start-ups issuing cryptocurrencies via Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs)).

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The largest single owner of Bitcoin is believed to be Satoshi Nakmoto, who is thought to own over 980,000 Bitcoins, taking a Bitcoin value of $8,600 they would be worth approximately 8.4 billion.

He/she is credited to have been the person that originally created Bitcoin over 10 years ago.

Bitcoin miners, who are holding just over 1.6 million Bitcoins, worth approximately $13.7 billion according to Byte Tree, a company that has analysed the entire Bitcoin Blockchain history of transactions. Byte Tree claims that there are currently over 1.6 million Bitcoins that have been mined but are still residing in the initial wallets they were transferred to when they were created. Byte Tree monitors this number to study the correlation between Bitcoin’s price and the % of, in effect, “virgin Bitcoins” that are yet to be spent for the first time. It also has a running update which shows if miners have been net sellers or accumulators of Bitcoin on a rolling weekly basis. This could be interpreted as to whether miners anticipate if Bitcoin is likely to rise or fall in price in the short term - or maybe they are just selling Bitcoins to pay their electricity bills!

The Bulgarian government is reported to be holding enough Bitcoins to pay off 25% of the country’s national debt, as it holds over 200,000 Bitcoins, worth over $1.7 billion. These Bitcoins have been confiscated by the Bulgarian government, due to companies and individuals being accused of carrying out various nefarious activities. Interesting, that as yet the Government has not reduced its exposure and sold off the stash! Maybe the Bulgarians have decided they do not want to make the same mistake that the FBI made! The FBI seized over 144,000 Bitcoins, which would be currently worth $1.2 Billion, when it closed down the illegal Silk Road in 2013, which was a website selling sex, drug arms and all sorts of other illegal goods and services.

There are lots of sites that list the biggest Bitcoin owners, but the reality is it is very difficult to be sure who actually owns what, as understandably many prefer to keep their finances confidential. What is more interesting is we are seeing the volume of Bitcoin being traded and, indeed, other currencies gaining momentum as record volumes have been recorded on different exchanges around the world. This is leading to higher prices, so making those holding Bitcoin even wealthier!

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If you are involved with Blockchain technology, it is not long before the subject of Smart Contracts arises.

Smart Contracts was a term Nick Szabo was talking about in 1997, and he described them the following way: “Smart Contracts utilize protocols and user interfaces to facilitate all steps of the contracting process. This gives us new ways to formalize and secure digital relationships which are far more functional than their inanimate paper-based ancestors”.

A more simplistic way to explain Smart Contracts is to think of them as an algorithm. For example, if the plane is late, then there is pay compensation, if it is on time, no compensation is due.

As the diagram above illustrates, essentially Smart Contracts are able to digitise agreements. After all, Smart Contracts are, in effect, a software that automatically executes instructions without the need for any human interaction. Smart Contracts have their contractual terms encoded in computer language, instead of the legal language that you would find in a standard contract. Many lawyers will readily tell you that ‘Smart Contracts are not smart, nor are they contracts!’ Indeed, Nobel prize winner for economics in 2016, Oliver Hart, who won his award for the work he had done on contract theory, has recently claimed that Smart Contracts “are quite convenient, taking into consideration the fact that they are automatically executed”. He goes on to state that “their basic outlines suggest that the contracts are not a cure or solution for all issues plaguing the crypto verse… but contracts do not address conditions or problems where a smart contract may have been drawn out to cover a long-term situation”. However, we do need to take Hart’s comments with caution as he admitted he, himself, knew very little about smart contracts, or Blockchain, from a practical point of view!

These mixed views on Smart Contracts have not stopped Gartner from predicting that, by just 2020, autonomous software (not reliant on any human interaction) will account for 5% of economic transactions. As we see the global economy increasingly become more digitised (i.e devices using technology like Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchains that can execute Smart Contracts) the challenges, as well as the opportunities that Smart Contracts present, will no doubt be tested in courts across the world.

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Ernst and Young (E&Y), one of the top four accountants globally, has just announced that it is helping a firm called Blockchain Wine, in Singapore, to operate a platform using Blockchain technology.

The platform will be called Traceability, Authenticity, Transparency, Trade, Origin, and  Opinion (TATTOO), and will initially be used by an Asian wine retailer, called The House of Roosevelt, to be able to track and ensure the provenance of wine from vineyards to customers. It is also the intention to be able to use tokens, which help producers pay to track wine, by improving their supply chain logistics. In time, this may lead to lower insurance premiums, as TATTOO offers greater traceability from vine to a shop’s shelf.

There are other companies that are also using Blockchain technology to help track, trace, and improve the provenance of wine. Everledger, which started its platform in 2016 in response to research, claimed that up to 20% of international wine sales were counterfeit. Vinsent also has a Blockchain-powered platform for wine. It was formerly known as VinX and attracted investment from the venture capital arm of US-based Overstock (the firm that has created a Digital Asset trading platform in conjunction with the Boston Stock Exchange). Vinsent’s platform enables consumers to buy wine directly from vineyards and so cuts out many of the intermediaries while speeding up the time for the viticulturist to be paid.

The chart above shows the demand for red wine from China and Hong Kong has been increasing, and the Asian total wine market is predicted to grow by 4% p.a from its current $57,372 million size. As the Chinese population ages, it is expected that China will become the second biggest wine market globally. The US has 8.7% of the international share of imported wine – worth $22.9 billion, according to Vinexpo/IWSR figures.

Global sales of wine are expected to reach over $224 billion by 2021, and there is increasing demand for sparkling wine, together with premium wines, where provenance is so important. Therefore, with the credibility of a firm such as E&Y offering their Blockchain skills to create the ability to track and trace wine from vineyard to consumer, the outlook for Blockchains being used in the wine industry looks “rosé”.

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There are over 1.8 billion Muslims in the worldwhich accounts for nearly 25% of the global population), with many of them living in Asia and having thriving, young and growing demographics, so this 1.8 billion is likely to expand further.

Indeed, in a report on the halal market globally, it was predicted this market will grow in value to be worth over $9.7 trillion by 2025. Therefore, it is of no surprise that a number of initiatives are being launched by different companies to ensure that Muslims can have better transparency as to where their food, cosmetics or pharmaceutical products have come from, and how they have been prepared.

Halal in Arabic means “permissible”, but halal is not just restricted to meat - it covers a wide range of other products and services.

Halachain claims to be the first public Blockchain company that is focussed on the Halal sector, helping companies to be able to assure their clients that certain food, drugs, and cosmetics comply with halal specifications. In Malaysia, Miss Elwani is a cosmetics company that is using the Halachain platform, offering transparency of where products have come from, details of the certification each product has, and what the certification actually entails.

In Singapore, WhatHalal has just launched an App designed to help companies that wish to trace the origins of ingredients, and so be able to offer assurance that a product is ‘halal-compliant’, as there is an auditable record from producer to the shop shelf.

Multinational companies will not want to ignore the rapidly growing Islamic markets and, as global supply chains become larger and more complex, any solution that can create greater transparency and is tamper proof (which is what Blockchain technology is able to offer) is going to be increasingly in demand.

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Microsoft had a stock market valuation of $1 trillion in April 2019, and for years has been a leader in software development, transforming the way organisations do business, having developed Windows, Excel, and Word.

Microsoft is embracing Blockchain and Digital Assets more and more, an example being how it is now looking to have a “Bitcoin icon” as a currency option as part of its latest version of Excel.

Microsoft was one of the first multinational companies to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment in 2014, so it is by no means a “newcomer” to using Digital Assets. It has also been using Blockchain technology internally to help speed up license and royalty payments for its Xbox video games. Microsoft claims that it has decreased the time it takes to get statements and information on payments from 45 days to just minutes. This could help Microsoft further target the global video games market which grew in 2018 by over 10% to $135+ billion, helping Microsoft to be more efficient and profitable.

Microsoft has also been rolling out it’s Azure cloud-based service, and by using its Blockchain expertise is now attracting attention from a wide range of different industries. Working with the luxury brand and goods manufacture, Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, Microsoft is creating a platform that will try and combat fraud in the luxury goods sector. Starbucks has also been using Microsoft’s Azure and Blockchain knowledge to help it have greater transparency over its supply chains. Starbucks’ customers will be able to download an App so they can see where Starbucks is sourcing its coffee beans from, and understanding how Starbucks is helping some of the 380,000 coffee farmers that it uses.

In the financial services sector, Microsoft is working with JP Morgan, as the bank will be using Microsoft’s Azure as it rolls out the JP Coin - a Digital Asset pegged to the US$. Microsoft is also working on a project to manage and verify identity, called Identity Overlay Network (ION). This enables your identity to be digitised, and then be shared, but only once you have given permission for others to have access. It would operate a little like Facebook Connect, whereby users can connect to over 15,000 websites based on details that they have initially entered onto their Facebook account. The big advantage that the Microsoft identity solution offers is that YOU, not Microsoft, control who and how your information is used.

Thus, one can see Microsoft is engaged with Blockchain and Digital Assets in many different ways, helping its clients develop new markets, such as ION, or bringing greater transparency to companies like Starbucks.

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This podcast interview with the founder and CEO of eToro, Yoni Assia, is over 1 hr long, but it is worth listening to https://pod.link/1434060078.

eToro was only established in 2007 when Yoni and his brother thought there had to be a more user-friendly way for people to be able to buy and sell shares, currencies and other financial assets. They have achieved this by creating what they refer to as a “social market”. The eToro platform enables someone in Hong Kong to find an investor in Germany (that buys and sells German smaller companies) and then follows and automatically invests in these same companies in the same proportion. This type of ‘mirror-trading’ is also known as “copy trading” and has been popular for a number of years, being possible to do copy-trading with relatively small sums of capital. Typically, the person who is initiating the trading ideas and strategy will earn either a % of the profit (from the person who is mirroring the trade) or a % of any brokerage that is created.

However, I digress - what is also interesting in the podcast is that Yoni was involved in Colour Coins in 2014 which, in effect, were what we now refer to stablecoins i.e. Digital Assets pegged/linked to real assets - $, £, gold, etc. The Colour Coins were run on the Bitcoin Blockchain, as Ethereum did not yet exist. When he was only 19, Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum’s founder) helped Yoni with some of the initial codings for Colour Coins. Vitalik decided that digitising assets was a great idea, but the concept needed a new blockchain - so he invented Ethereum.

From 2015 to 2016, eToro grew by 600%, and then from 2017 to 2018 by a further 400% (according to this podcast). eToro has now become a very successful company, which has over 10 million clients who, in 2018, traded over $1 trillion worth of assets. Yoni believes that, in the same way Bitcoin has proved it can replace cash as a medium for people to trade, Smart Contracts has the ability to replace and totally disrupt the legal system. Smart Contracts can replace many intermediaries and allow computer/machine-driven execution of trades and agreements, which will be cheaper, faster and not prone to human error.

eToro has been offering the ability to trade Bitcoin for over 5 years and, during Cryptocurrencies’ bull-run in 2017/18 Ethereum went from $4 to over $350 and Ripple increased in value by over 35,000% in a year. This encouraged people to open accounts with eToro to such an extent, that eToro signed up over 20,000 new customers in a single DAY! Given eToro’s success in traditional and Digital markets, how much credence ought one pay to its CEO’s pronouncement, that financial markets are going to radically change? The combination of Digital Assets and Smart Contracts disintermediate the financial services sector and could result in 66% of the $150 Trillion global bonds and equities becoming digitised.

Certainly, younger investors are spending increasing amounts of their time online, usually on a mobile phone, and therefore to engage with them, financial service providers will need to communicate and offer services...


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Blockchain technology is being used in a variety of ways to help improve efficiency, cut costs, create greater transparency and offer provenance of where goods have come from in the agriculture sector.

Here are four ways through which this is happening:

      -Traceability - Blockchains are helping supply chains and logistics in the agriculture sector to improve traceability. This helps companies to quickly track unsafe products to their original source, so potentially preventing illness and reducing the cost of product recalls. A good example of this is the Walmart venture with IBM to track green leaf products it sources and sells. Frank Yiannas of Walmart has said “that the improved data traceability provided by the IBM platform reduced the time it took to trace a mango from the store back to its source from seven days to 2.2 seconds. That reduction in time enables companies to identify contaminated supply chains and recall affected products before they are consumed and cause illness”. Meanwhile, Irish-based arc-net has collaborated to create a whiskey Blockchain with Scottish distillery Ardnamurchan, which includes information on the water and grain used in the production of Scotch, as well as the identity of the distillers who made the whiskey. Wyoming cattle ranchers, who wanted to know where their beef was being sold, have created BeefChain, which tracks beef along the supply chain, and so enables the end-consumer to have provenance i.e. where the beef they buy has come from.

      -Payments - San Francisco - based Veem is used by tea distributor Tealet, to pay more than 30 different farmers and suppliers in countries across Africa and Asia, using a platform that harnesses Blockchain technology. Fees with which to pay suppliers can be as much as 12%, and international payments can take up to five days. The Veem platform uses Blockchain technology to convert payments from the source currency into the local currency. International payments cost 1.9% and are paid to vendors in one to three days (so it is faster and cheaper using Blockchain technology).

      -Commodity Management - Agricultural commodities business is massive and it can be difficult to collate the volume of data and minimise the time-delays it takes to get paid. Blockchain technology is able to help with these challenges. Australian company, AgriDigital, provides cloud-based agricultural commodity management services recorded onto a Blockchain. In 2016, AgriDigital completed the world’s first “farmer to buyer” wheat sale recorded on a Blockchain. Since then, it has run projects for supply chain provenance, real-time payments, digital escrows and supply chain finance for the food sector. At the end of 2017, Dutch-based Louis Dreyfus Co completed its first agricultural trade, using Blockchain technology, for a sale of US soybeans to China. Documentation, including contracts, letters of credit, and government certifications, were all digitised, and data was automatically matched in real time via a Blockchain platform, which avoided duplication and the need for manual checks. This reduced the time to process documentation to one-fifth of the usual time, and cut overall transaction time from two weeks to one.

      -Sharing information - Companies which buy or invest in agricultural products like to have information about...


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