The Intercontinental Exchange’s (ICE) cryptocurrency project Bakkt celebrated New Year’s Eve with the announcement of a $182.5 million equity round from a slew of notable institutional investors. ICE, the operator of several global exchanges, including the New York Stock Exchange, established Bakkt to build a trading platform that enables consumers and institutions to buy, sell, store and spend digital assets.
Continue reading… “NYSE operator’s crypto project Bakkt brings in $182M”
From wealth management to autonomous robots: four prominent startups at the end of 2018
Investors are no longer interested in ICO projects with no real use. According to Icodata, $150 million were raised in October 2018 through token sales compared to $1.5 billion in January of the same year. “The blockchain space is getting to the point where there’s a ceiling in sight,” claims Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. The Russian-Canadian programmer believes that the next step will be “real applications of real economic activity.”
Despite the statements and hopes that the end of 2018 will bring about a return to practicality, it is still difficult for applicable projects to break through the information noise. We have picked out four noteworthy blockchain projects that have not yet gained traction in the media, despite featuring a range of out-of-the-box solutions.
Continue reading… “4 Blockchain projects solving real-world problems”
Blockchain is touted as a technology that will revolutionize the finance sector.
Slow transaction speeds and a lack of standardization threaten to restrict growth.
Deloitte has highlighted five hurdles that the technology must overcome to hasten widespread adoption.
Success could transform these territories into cryptocurrency tax havens and safe spaces, and models for smaller economies of the future.
Payday won’t be the same next year for the soccer players of Gibraltar United, a team in the premier division of the sport’s league in the British overseas territory. Only a part of their salary will hit their bank accounts, and the rest will come to them in the form of cryptocurrencies. But the soccer team is no outlier there. Nor is Gibraltar unique — it’s among a growing set of tiny territories betting on cryptocurrencies as economic weapons of the future.
Continue reading… “The tiny nations plotting to become tax havens for cryptocurrency”
Right now, there’s an online bidding war over whether or not Donald Trump will die before the year is out. All a would-be assassin has to do is stake a whole bunch of money on “yes” and they’d make a fortune.
These not-quite death threats reportedly lodged against the president and other public figures, including Jeff Bezos, John McCain, and Betty White, can be found on Augur, a decentralized app recently launched by the nonprofit Forecast Foundation. Augur is a protocol through which people can create prediction markets, which are crowdsourced platforms where people stake cryptocurrency (in this case Ethereum and the Augur-specific token Reputation) on a prediction’s most likely outcome.
Public embarrassment is a horrible feeling. We’ve all experienced in one form or another. Predicting the future of technology is daunting enough but mix that with the future of money and markets – forget about it. The effort was to convey a whole worldview in less than ten minutes. Needless to say, it required a fair amount of sweating to be more than an embarrassment, which it undoubtedly will be considered by some as. The risk seems worth it though so let’s do this!
The below video and continued text go into why many of our trusted systems no longer function properly. I don’t know who built the pyramids but they certainly had their measurement system right for it to be possible and sustainable. The damage done by tech advancements are not yet visible in society on a large scale. We hear of declining sales in music, the press, deteriorating health care budgets, automated factories, AI in commerce and about self-driving cars. The heads of many old systems have already been cut, are bleeding heavily and lashing out aimlessly as the body of the octopus still moves. To make some sense of this, the topics include crypto, capitalism, communism, genetics, competition, media, competence, fairness, cultural revolutions and our shared decentralized future.
Continue reading… “Why the Crypto market will be trillions”
At this point, mining Bitcoin requires such intensive, specific hardware that the only way for most people to get in on the crypto game is to simply purchase the coin via an exchange. But that doesn’t mean mining has slowed down. Rather, the opposite has been happening, giving environmentalists (and anyone but the most adamant cryptobros) cause for concern.
Between cooling fans, manufacturing hardware, and the outrageous, ever-rising energy costs needed to operate a bitcoin mining rig, the world’s Bitcoin network is expected to use as much as 7.67 gigawatts of power by the end of 2018, according to new research and models. That’s one two-hundredth of all the electricity used on the planet. And that’s terrible.
Continue reading… “Bitcoin is going to use as much electricity as Austria by the year’s end”
The cryptocurrency market, which trades various digital-based coins, can look exciting, scary, and mysterious all at once to the casual observer. Its pioneer, Bitcoin, dramatically surged in value and steeply dropped (before picking back up) in recent months. ICOs (initial coin offerings for new cryptocurrencies), meanwhile, are emerging at a head-spinning rate.
It could transform how we track nearly every transaction.
You may have heard the term “blockchain” used when people talk about cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. If you’re unsure of what it means, think of blockchains as ledgers that keep track of transactions. In the case of bitcoin, the blockchain is a record of financial transactions between parties. The blockchain is decentralized, meaning that no one is in charge of it, and the data isn’t owned or stored by any one company, but rather dispersed across many computers.
Continue reading… “7 facts you didn’t know about blockchain”
Venezuela launched the presale of its own cryptocurrency, the petro, today. There are currently 82 million tokens available, which the government plans to follow with an initial coin offering (ICO) launch in a month. It’s the world’s first sovereign cryptocurrency, built on the Ethereum blockchain and intended in part to save the country from wild inflation. The bolivar has reached quadruple-figure inflation recently, and one bolivar is currently worth 0.00004 USD.
Continue reading… “Venezuela’s own oil-backed cryptocurrency is available for presale today”
Bitcoin futures debut with 26% rally, trigger Cboe trading halts.
Continue reading… “Bitcoin futures trading opens,bringing crypto to Wallstreet”
Square’s Cash app has added new features that allow users to buy and sell bitcoin. Currently, the features are in beta and available to a small number of users, but future updates may add support for easy bitcoin transactions between friends and family members.
Continue reading… “A popular payment app now lets users buy and sell bitcoin”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
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