Articles about Blockchain

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in ten people in the US falls ill each year from contaminated food. The source of such problems can be hard to identify due to a lack of traceability.

Blockchain is an ideal technology to help address these challenges because it establishes a trusted environment for all transactions and IBM is launching a collaboration with major industry players to strengthen consumer confidence in the global food system.

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Microsoft has today announced Coco Framework, a means of simplifying the adoption of blockchain protocol technology. The aim is to speed up the adoption of blockchain-based systems in the enterprise, whilst simultaneously increasing privacy.

Coco -- short for Confidential Consortium -- will be available in 2018, and Microsoft will be making the technology open source to help increase uptake. Intel is working with Microsoft as a hardware and software partner, and Coco Framework features Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) to improve transaction speed at scale.

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Blockchain technology is perceived as "critical" for the future of financial services companies, a new report by Cognizant has shown.

A poll of more than 1,500 financial services executives from more than 500 companies worldwide found that 91 percent saw implementation of blockchain technology to be critical for the firm’s future.

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London's Stock Exchange is set to start using blockchain to improve transparency for shareholding information among unlisted businesses.

According to a news report by CityAM, the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) will use Hyperledger Fabric, one of the open source blockchain frameworks hosted by The Linux Foundation to make info on private SMEs digital. The end goal is to draw more mature investors.

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Dark web users fear that AlphaBay Market may have disappeared for good after an unexplained period of downtime. The site -- described as a successor to Silk Road -- is a marketplace for a myriad of illegal wares including drugs and guns, and speculation is rife that the admins may have made off with users' money.

While maintenance-related downtime is not unusual, this time around there has been no word from admins, and suspicions have been further raised after Bitcoin worth around $3.8 million was withdrawn from numerous accounts. Some users are worried that admins may have "pulled an exit scam."

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So far, it's safe to say that the predominant trend in 21st-century business has been digitalization. Every industry, organization and individual has been touched by it one way or another.

As we head towards 2020, we are moving to the next level of digitalization. Now, what has already been digitalized will increasingly be automated -- whether it's the way we work, trade or connect with each other. Automation is becoming increasingly prevalent as computers gain in processing speed and power, and as the amount of data available for computation continues to grow exponentially. At the start of the Internet age, very few things were connected and available for analysis. But with the rise of the Internet of Things and the implantation of computers into all walks of life, from driving to warehousing, more and more facets of our world can now be mapped from within dedicated software.

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It was a big day for IBM today, as it unveiled its first Blockchain-as-a-service. Unveiled at the Interconnect conference, this commercial blockchain service is based on the open-source Hyperledger Fabric 1.0, built by The Linux Foundation.

In a nutshell, IBM Blockchain allows customers to build their own secure blockchain networks. It took the company a year to bring it from the initial announcement to a finished product.

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The technology industry is full of jargon and buzzwords, which, if you’re not in the club, can often feel like a foreign language. When it comes to communicating new technologies and processes to other parts of the business, IT professionals need to be careful when translating these buzzwords into human-speak if they want to avoid a confused, blank look. It’s this confusion that results in a data breach, shadow IT activity, or missing out on investment in new IT equipment.

Whether it’s to educate yourself or others, we’ve de-coded the buzzwords. Now the next time someone asks you "what the blockchain you’re on about," rather than giving them SaaS, you can breakdown the meaning, benefit, and importance.

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With so much expectation placed on the impact of Blockchain technology, which platform is going to help the industry deliver on those expectations?

If you find that question surprising it is because you’ve only ever heard of Bitcoin when it comes to Blockchain technology, then you won’t be alone.

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For all the recent buzz surrounding the cloud and big data, it remains a fact that at the heart of much business computing there is still some form of database. In particular the operation of digital currencies like Bitcoin relies on databases that are able to track large volumes of transactions and keep them secure.

The solution used by digital currencies -- though it’s increasingly finding other applications too -- is the blockchain. First implemented in 2009, blockchain technology consists of blocks that hold batches of timestamped transactions, each block is linked to the previous one, thus forming a chain.

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Blockchain and bitcoin start-ups have raised almost $300 million in funding in the first half of 2016, Juniper Research claims. This goes to show just how important the new way of doing business and paying for goods and services is.

There are more than 30 startups in the world which Juniper looked at for this research.

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While many companies have been hesitant to adopt the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, the blockchain technology that made it possible is now being sought after by a number of companies due to the way it acts as a decentralized ledger that can be used to store data and keep track of how assets are exchanged.

Microsoft has just released the first details into how it will use blockchain in its upcoming Project Bletchley, which will add the technology into Azure services through some new middleware.

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Leveraging on possible opportunities on identity systems, Microsoft is looking into building a blockchain-based identity system and it has recently sealed a partnership to further this goal.

The tech giant has made an open source collaboration with companies Blockstack Labs and ConsenSys for their current Bitcoin and Ethereum-based identity solutions, together with various developers globally.

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Blockchain is the most important innovation since the creation of the internet, almost two thirds (60 percent) of global financial services retailers with some knowledge of the technology said.

That’s a bold claim.

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The UK government is exploring the potential use of blockchain technology to aid it in dealing with the managing and distribution of grants.

This technology first gained notoriety through its use in the bitcoin currency. Now many governments and financial institutions are interested in using blockchain as a decentralized ledger which can be verified and shared by a network of computers. It can also be used to store data and can keep track of how assets are exchanged.

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