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FACEBOOK CHAT: Facebook has started a discussion with the U.S. Commodity and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) over the social media giant’s crypto stablecoin initiative. According to a report from the FT, CFTC chairman Christopher Giancarlo said the agency held “very early stages of conversations” with Facebook to better understand if the firm’s in-development GlobalCoin cryptocurrency could potentially fall under the regulator’s remit. “We’re very interested in understanding it better,” Giancarlo said. “We can only act on an application, we don’t have anything in front of us.” Full story
THE ANTI-FACEBOOK? While Facebook pursues crypto, crypto is pursuing social media. Block.one – the multibillion-dollar startup that built the EOSIO platform – announced Saturday that it’s launching a new social media platform called Voice. Block.one says Voice will run on the EOS blockchain and will incentivize users with a new token. CEO Brendan Blumer pledged that Block.one’s new social media product would not let algorithms decide what dominates. “Everyone – the user, the platform, the contributor – plays by the same rules,” he said. Full story
FASTER DRINKS? A bar in Japan is teaming up with local lightning startup Nayuta to let customers pay for sparkling wine and soft drinks using the payments network for a month-long “field test.” The lightning network is seen by its supporters as the best way to scale bitcoin so that more people can use the payment system at once, but the technology is still rather experimental and even risky to use. To that end, Nayuta sees this project as a way to further analyze how the technology works in the real world and to find out what still needs to be done to make it more user friendly. Full story
BTC BOOST? A newly proposed relay protocol could reduce the “transaction bandwidth” used up by bitcoin nodes by up to 75 percent. Called Erlay, the proposal alters the way transactions are relayed so that they use significantly less bandwidth, an important resource for the nodes that make up the network. Its authors include University of British Columbia researcher Gleb Naumenko, as well as two bitcoin development heavy-weights: Greg Maxwell and Pieter Wuille. Another important result of the new protocol, the researchers argue, would be that by reducing used bandwidth, the number of connections between nodes can be increased. Full story
WALMART WORK: Big-box retail giant Walmart has joined MediLedger, a consortium building a blockchain for tracking the provenance of pharmaceuticals. A spokeswoman for the Bentonville, Arkansas-based company confirmed Walmart’s participation to CoinDesk, but had no further comment. The move represents a deepening of Walmart’s involvement with blockchain technology. Separately, the retailer is a key participant in IBM’s Food Trust, a system for tracking fresh produce through the supply chain that’s built on the Hyperledger Fabric platform. Full story |
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BULLS OVERSTRETCHED? With longer-term signs of bullish exhaustion emerging on the weekly chart in the form of a doji candle, BTC looks increasingly vulnerable to price pullbacks below $8,000. The short-term outlook, however, would turn bearish only if any correction ends up passing the 30-day moving average at $7,643. That may be a tough call for the bears, as the average has a penchant for reversing corrections. Full story |
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SHORT SHELF-LIFE: Gartner forecasts that 90 percent of the world’s enterprise blockchain systems will need to be replaced by 2021 if they are to avoid becoming obsolete, as well as to stay secure and “cooperative.” As reported by ITPro, Adrian Lee, a senior research director at Gartner said: “Blockchain platforms are emerging platforms and, at this point, nearly indistinguishable in some cases from core blockchain technology. Many CIOs overestimate the capabilities and short-term benefits of blockchain as a technology to help them achieve their business goals, thus creating unrealistic expectations when assessing offerings from blockchain platform vendors and service providers.” Blockchain platform vendors may be making the situation worse with confusing messages, the research firm added. |
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