Category: Blockchain

And just like that, the Digital Yuan has its route into the mainstream

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor

Alibaba’s controversial financial services arm, the Ant Group, has been welcomed into trials of China’s digital currency.

China’s state-controlled media on Monday reported that the Alipay app has added a feature allowing transactions in the Digital Yuan. Alipay has over 700 million monthly active users in China alone.

State-backed journal China Securities Journal reports that functionality to link to a bank is currently limited, and that no merchants are listed. Nor has the feature been made available to all users. But the Journal reports that real-time, anonymous, transactions are possible.

A second Journal piece reports that an Ant-Group-backed bank has also linked accounts to the Digital Yuan, as have some other banks.

Continue reading… “China’s digital currency adds support for AliPay – the Alibaba payment app with over 700 million users”

By Ejiofor Francis  Updated by Leila Stein 

• Blockchain will break up entertainment monopolies.
• This technology will put the power back in the hands of the creators.
• Many industry problems can be solved through the blockchain.

The innovations in blockchain technology are evolving at the speed of light. Industries are planning to deal with current challenges with the help of these technological advancements. 

Continue reading… “Blockchain in Entertainment Industry to Help Develop New Business Models”

The solution will track a car throughout its sales history, clamping down on mileage tampering and fraud.

By Charlie Osborne 

BMW, Ford, and major technology companies have indicated their support for a new blockchain project to assign “birth certificates” to vehicles. 
Announced on Tuesday, the initiative is focused on developing technologies able to track a car from its manufacture and beyond, including when the vehicle has changed hands, its maintenance history, and records of mileage and any past damage. 

The developer of the system, the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI), says that this could stop second-hand sellers from misleading buyers, could wipe out the use of tools including roll-back odometers, and could “better track and protect vehicles’ true identities.”

Continue reading… “BMW, Ford back development of vehicle ‘birth certificates’ built on the blockchain”

Beginning in April, the electronics giant and university R&D team will evaluate and tweak the new trading system’s performance before commercialization. 

By MARIE HUILLET 

NEWS 

Mitsubishi Electric has teamed up with researchers from the prestigious Japanese university, Tokyo Tech, to jointly design a blockchain-based trading system that can support more flexible, peer-to-peer energy trading.

Announced on Jan. 18, the new system is intended to support the efficient use of surplus electricity that is generated from renewable energy sources. In particular, it is hoped that the trading system can ensure that at any given moment, there will be the maximum available amount of surplus electricity accessible on the market for consumers. 

Peer-to-peer energy trading set-ups allow consumers and prosumers to engage in direct trading as buyers and sellers. To make their new system less reliant on hardware-intensive, high-volume computations, Mitsubishi Electric and Tokyo Tech have customized their blockchain system in order to optimize matches and make clearing buy and sell orders more efficient. 

According to the announcement, a distributed-optimization algorithm, which differs from most blockchain technologies, enables customer computers to share their trading goals and data and then to “optimally match buy and sell orders using minimal computations.” As well as requiring fewer computations, what Mitsubishi and Tokyo Tech call their “new mining method” can be executed on a micro-computing server. The four steps involved in the method are as follows:

Continue reading… “Mitsubishi and Tokyo Tech create blockchain system for P2P energy trading”