Big Blue is making what could be considered its first public foray

into cryptocurrency. In the kind of unveiling that can only come before one of the biggest events in global finance, IBM is revealing today at Sibos 2017 the results of a partnership with blockchain startup Stellar in which it successfully settled real transactions using the company's custom cryptocurrency, lumens.

While currently limited to cross-border payments involving British pounds and Fijian dollars, the early-stage platform is nonetheless designed to scale to handle seven fiat currencies in the South Pacific – including the Australian dollar, the New Zealand dollar and the Tonga pa'anga.

Perhaps the platform's most distinguishing characteristic, however, is that the project showcases how private and public blockchain technologies are increasingly being used in tandem. While IBM's blockchain solutions are designed to complete much of the workflow around transaction clearing, the actual settlement will be conducted using Stellar's blockchain. In this case, Stellar's lumen serves to digitally connect fiat currencies, allowing for nearly instant exchange without the consumer or buyer ever touching the cryptocurrency itself.

Stellar founder Jed McCaleb told CoinDesk:

"When trading between multiple currencies, it helps to have a bridge currency to reduce the ledgers needed to maintain. Lumen provides that single ledger that can bridge currencies."

New orbit

Taken together, however, this partnership goes beyond just technical implications. Not only is the partnership an outside-the-box move for IBM, which has largely focused on its own blockchain platforms, it's a big win for Stellar, which having emerged from the Ripple founding team hasn't had quite the same growth, perhaps attributing in part to its focus on developing markets. The partnership is also evidence of the extent of collaboration between blockchain firms and the wider financial world. To make the project work, IBM had help from partners including National Australia Bank, TD Bank and Wizdraw (HK) of WorldCom Finance.

The payments themselves are conducted for the Advancement of Pacific Financial Infrastructure for Inclusion (APFII), an organization of member financial institutions founded by the United Nations and Swift, and operated by KlickEx, a privately-held direct clearing provider that specializes in cross-border digital remittances. According to IBM's vice president of global blockchain development, Jesse Lund, getting all these players to work together is just an extension of IBM's mission to collaborate with financial institutions to develop a blockchain ecosystem.

To that end, the platform is already integrated with IBM's Financial Transaction Manager, which itself is integrated with ACH, SEPA and other electronic transaction networks. Going forward, APFII's confirmation receipts are expected to be published as MT103 Swift messages directly to the blockchain. "This in many ways is just an extension of that, wherein we're providing, in collaboration with banks, and in the process developing this blockchain ecosystem," said Lund.

More support

For now, the new project is also a balancing act – at once both a small advancement of early-stage technology and an aspirational advance toward more lofty goals. While the trial with APFII has been ongoing since last week, the CEO of ClickEx, Robert Bell, said it's too early to provide any numbers about transaction volume. But still, he expects as much as 60 percent of the cross-border retail market in the region to be transacting on the platform once all seven currencies are added (the Australian dollar will be the next currency integrated).

"For the first time, blockchain is being used in production to facilitate cross-border payments in multiple integrated currency corridors," Bell said. IBM also sees the demo as one with implications for the digitization of central bank money – a concept that's gotten a significant amount of attention recently as central banks around the world grow more interested in figuring out how the technology could create efficiencies. "Our long game is to support multiple different types of digital assets,"

said Lund, adding:

"And I'm very confident that you will be seeing central banks coming forward with their own digital asset issuances that will be a much more formidable construct of this model."

Today, that future will be discussed in greater detail on stage at Sibos in Toronto, where a panel with representatives from IBM, TD Bank and CLS will discuss the project with the CEOs of both Stellar and KlickEx. "It's going to be a wild ride,"

Lund said, concluding:

"We've got the bankers and the renegades altogether."

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.
Interested or have Questions. Call me 559-474-4614

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

Once considered perhaps the largest middleman at risk

of being disrupted by blockchain, Swift took a notable step today toward becoming a disruptor. Revealed on the eve of its largest annual event, Sibos, the inter-bank platform, along with six banks including BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon and Wells Fargo, has deemed its flagship blockchain trial a success from both a technical and business perspective. First announced in January, the proof-of-concept tested whether moving funds stored in nostro-vostro accounts for international transactions to a blockchain could free up those funds to further investment.

But in spite of the PoC achieving multiple objectives, Swift says there's still a long way to go before implementation, primarily since its 11,000 members will not benefit equally from the project In conversation, Swift's head of R&D Damien Vanderveken explained that some banks that have invested heavily in traditional, centralized solutions for nostro-vostro accounts are already experiencing efficiency gains, and as such might not be as keen to invest in a blockchain-based solution.

Vanderveken said:

"The PoC demonstrated that it can fulfill the requirements. The business value depends on the level of automation of the participants. We will need to make sure for the final solution that we take care of the different levels of investment."

As a result, instead of a one-size-fits-all solution, Vanderveken said each Swift member will eventually have to analyze the value offered by blockchain and weigh it against the costs of implementation.

Benefits of blockchain 

Built as part of Swift's Global Payments Innovation initiative (GPI) within its newly revealed DLT sandbox, the PoC uses the open-source Hyperledger Fabric platform to test two main applications. The first used real, anonymized production data from each of the banks to provide "the account owner and the account servicer a complete view of all the nostro-vostro accounts that they own or serve," Vanderveken said.

The second simulated back-office procedures, which gave the participants a node hosted in the cloud to test the benefits of moving funds from multiple accounts to a single distributed ledger. These two applications provided users not only increased visibility of and access to available funds, but also simplified the reconciliation process, which uses Swift's ISO 20022 standard. "The feedback from everybody is unanimous," said Vanderveken. "What we have built in terms of applications actually does meet the requirements."

Technical limitations

While the nostro-vostro blockchain PoC was deemed a success, Swift also noted several limitations. In particular, Vanderveken said Swift is concerned about the possibility that cryptographic security could be hacked with quantum computers. A technology still in the proverbial petri dish, the thought has pushed Swift to create a "hybrid architecture," where some transaction components were distributed on a blockchain, while others were "operated by a neutral third-party."

At the top of the list for the latter was the identification of participants, or as Swift described it earlier this month in a paper jointly written by BCG Financial, "a universally trusted global KYC registry." For businesses like Swift, which operate in permissioned systems, this is considered a crucial security feature.

Vanderveken said:

"If you want to ensure data confidentiality, and you don't want to rely solely on encryption — which is prone to failure in the long run as encryption becomes hacked by technology progress — you need to have solutions where data is then segregated."

Swell for Sibos?

This successful test of Swift's blockchain PoC is particularly notable leading up to the Sibos conference in Toronto, since the financial incumbent has stiff competition with distributed ledger startup Ripple hosting a competing event called Swell. Twice during Sibos, Swift will demo the PoC in front of a live audience. But while participants (of both events) perform their own cost-benefit analysis of blockchain, the second phase of Swift's POC will already be underway.

Since Sept. 27 financial institutions — including ABN Amro, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase — have been validating the PoC results, with a final decision expected by the end of year. But one thing is certain, Vanderveken said Swift only intends to move forward in implementing the new technology if its members benefit.

He said:

"We need to take care of the differences of the various banks to make sure such a solution is successful."

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.
Interested or have Questions. Call me 559-474-4614

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

Looking ahead to next week's annual Sibos conference,

Palatnick takes stock of blockchain technology's progress in transforming the plumbing of global markets, and explains why cooperation is critical for further advancement. While 2016 was referred to as the year of the blockchain proof-of-concept, 2017 has become the year of the blockchain pilot. While the progress has been remarkable, it's important to be mindful of the critical role that industry collaboration has played in accelerating development and advancement.

Shortly after the blockchain conversation started across the financial services industry in 2014, a number of participants began to realize the value that distributed ledger technology could bring to the financial markets. For DTCC, distributed ledger technology represents a generational opportunity to reimagine the post-trade infrastructure through its potential to harmonize and streamline the costly, burdensome reconciliation process the market currently operates in. By providing a single version of the truth to all parties, DLT can fundamentally alter how financial transactions are entered, stored and shared.

Just three years later, the industry has made significant strides in turning blockchain from a concept to reality. We've seen initiatives move from PoC to pilot, and a number of efforts are underway to operationalize the tech. Although still in the early stages of implementation, the industry has learned that collaboration is critical. The key to reaching the full potential of blockchain technology lies in fostering industry-wide collaboration and aligning the technology with the industry's longstanding core principles of mitigating risk, enhancing operational efficiencies and driving cost efficiencies.

From realization to reality

After all, the underlying technology itself calls for collaboration. Interoperability and standardization in utilizing blockchain can only be achieved when the industry joins in support of a common goal and a single ledger. DTCC believes the core of any distributed ledger solution for the global financial industry must be based on open source, not owned by any single vendor and aligned around best practices and established standards. Until recently, there were no viable open-source models for distributed ledger technology. However, that is quickly changing due to the development we’ve seen this year from organizations like Hyperledger and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.

Hyperledger, the first enterprise-oriented open-source collaboration project created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies, recently gained support from 10 new members, including the Gibraltar Stock Exchange and DLT Labs, bringing its total membership to 18,765 members. The recent release of Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 is an example of what the industry can achieve through community effort, where 159 developers from 28 organizations joined together to incubate the project. The release marked a significant milestone in the evolution of distributed ledger technology, proving the critical need for collaboration.

Having been established just earlier this year, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance has quickly gained 120 members to its consortium, which has the mission of evolving ethereum into an enterprise-grade technology. The rapid growth in membership and support from major players such as State Street, JPMorgan Chase and BNY Mellon, as well as DTCC, shows the evolving acceptance and deployment of open-source distributed ledger technology in the global marketplace.

DTCC believes this is one of the many ways in which the industry has and will continue to benefit from collective contributions, and is why we're leveraging the Hyperledger network to provide a DLT framework to drive further improvements in derivatives post-trade lifecycle events. Through our work with IBM, Axoni and R3, we're rebuilding our trade information warehouse, which provides processing services for about 98 percent of all credit derivative transactions globally. The initiative is underway and, in 2018, nearly the entire global $11 trillion market for credit default swaps will run on a distributed ledger.

Are you in?

As the adoption of distributed ledger technology grows, as in any open market, many different innovations will be proposed and pursued. The challenge for the financial industry, and for an emergent technology like distributed ledger, is about creating networks that share information and technology, and the need for continued collaboration.

Without collaboration, DLT solutions will leverage proprietary, separate models that will ultimately recreate the many silos and disjointed systems that already exist today. In the financial industry, this could lead to bifurcated markets, reduced liquidity, greater risks and a suboptimal experience for the investing public. It is essential that we work together across industry organizations, technology providers, market participants and market structure providers to develop best practices and interoperability standards for this technology in order for DLT to truly live up to its potential.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.
Interested or have Questions. Call me 559-474-4614

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

Surreptitious cryptocurrency miners hide on Politifact and hundreds of other sites

Politifact is the latest and perhaps most high-profile website

to have hosted code that secretly hijacks visitors’ CPUs to mine cryptocurrency. Driven by a boom in cryptocoin value and a lack of protections against JavaScript routines like this one, this surprising form of audience monetization is now found on hundreds of sites.

(Update: Politifact has removed the code and is looking into how it got there.)

It’s not quite an ad, and it’s not quite malware, nor is it strictly speaking a virus or exploit. JavaScript is used for all kinds of things in the background of practically every major website, from tracking users to displaying custom fonts. Generally speaking, these apps are running code hosted on another server that the end user can’t inspect, and often doesn’t even realize their browser is executing.

In recent months, several JavaScript-based cryptocurrency miners have appeared. The idea, supposedly, is that instead of showing your visitors ads, you have their CPU run the calculations necessary to mine a currency like Bitcoin. As the administrator, you could control the CPU load and reap any resulting coins. CoinHive is a new business that offers this as a service. Predictably, this already questionable approach to monetization has already been repurposed by malicious actors. Injecting a bit of JavaScript into the front page of a website is often simpler to do than penetrate its databases or phish its admins; and once it’s in, it runs itself — all you have to do is give it a wallet to put the coins in.

That seems to be what happened at Politifact; my blocker registers a CoinHive instance on the main pages of the site, with new requests coming in multiple times a second. Inspecting the site’s JavaScript shows an enormous chunk of CoinHive miner code sitting amongst the ordinary scripts. It’s pretty hard to miss, and if not blocked it takes over the whole CPU until the tab is closed. With a few million users mining for a minute or two each while they check out the latest political shenanigans, those cycles add up quick.

I’ve contacted the site’s team to ask what the story is; someone there told The Register that they’re looking into it, but I’ll update if I hear back with more details. The site is far from alone: a study by ad blocker company AdGuard showed that hundreds of sites, most of them on the shady site (porn and torrent sites, for instance) are running CoinHive code, or some other JavaScript-based miner.

What can you do? Well, this is a great reason to install an ad blocker, if you haven’t already: in addition to getting rid of intrusive ads and trackers, some of them block unknown scripts or have a blacklist of known malicious ones. I use uBlock Origin, which also makes it easy to whitelist sites (like this one) that only feature organic, free-range advertisements. But you could also use NoScript, AdBlock or any one of the many out there, depending on your platform and browser.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.
Interested or have Questions. Call me 559-474-4614

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

China may not recognize bitcoin as a legal currency,

but it seems to have a clear vision for a state-issued alternative. At a meeting hosted by the International Telecommunication Union this week, Yao Qian, the Director of the Digital Currency Research Institute under the People's Bank of China, reportedly boasted about the potential of a state-owned digital currency, while suggesting that there is an inherent lack of value anchoring public cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.

According to a report by Yicai, Yao also framed a state-issued digital currency as a way to stabilize domestic fiat currency, while better securing country's financial status. Although the publication made clear Yao's comments reflected his own opinions, the remarks nonetheless reveal how the country may choose to direct the future development of digital currency.

Yao told attendees:

"The value of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin primarily comes from the market speculation. It will be a disaster to recoganize it as a real currency. And the lack of a value anchroing inherently determines that bitcoin can never be a real one."

Launched by China's central bank in June this year, the Digital Currency Research Institute focuses on R&D related to blockchain-based digital currency. Currently head of the institute, Yao also served as the deputy director of PBoC's technology department.

Pointed barbs

Elsewhere, Qian had more criticism for public cryptocurrencies. In yet another statement, he was quoted as saying that the deflationary nature of economic systems utilizing the technology could be a hinderance to their success. "A total cap of 21 million like bitcoin whose current supply also halves every four years is actually driving backward along the currency evolution," he said. Yao went on to argue that a state-owned digital currency, however, creates tangible economic values and helps stabilize the market position of fiat currencies.

"The nature of a state-owned digital currency is a government liability issued to the public," he said. "And it's backed by the sovereign credibility." Yet, Yao takes a different approach from current trials of other central banks' cryptocurrency projects that focus on the distributed ledger technology. Citing the RSCoin design concept by the Bank of England as a promising example, Yao argued that such state-owned digital currency should not be confined by the ideology of the blockchain and DLT. "RSCoin pictures a system that is controlled by the central bank," he said. "The role of central banks may not just be deciding how much to supply but also designing the rule of the supplying algorithm."

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.
Interested or have Questions. Call me 559-474-4614

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

 

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.
Interested or have Questions. Call me 559-474-4614

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

Things Ray Dalio Hasn't Learned About Crypto Yet

• It's not new money—don't bring the biases you have tied to government-issued currency—it's something far more powerful.
• Remember: it's still extremely early. In Internet terms, recall the days of the 14.4 KB/s modem. We can squint and begin to imagine Netflix playing on a iPhone, but we are still very far away.
• No one knows where this leads (this author included) — but it's important to understand why this is like nothing before.

What the internet is for information, blockchain tech is for transactions.

This is important. The Internet is, at it’s core, a series of protocols that allow people—who have no prior relationship—to move data back and forth. This goes from low-level things like semi-structured text all the way to streaming 360-degree video. But as soon as the smallest snippet of text was transferred, everything else could follow. What the internet also did—that wasn’t really possible in the previous world of proprietary machine data connections—was provide smart linkage between content. Example primitives here include embedding a photo and linking to a different web page.

How does this apply to transactions?

Bitcoin’s key “academic” revelation was the first practical solution to a long-standing (since 1982) problem—called the Byzantine Generals Problem.

This problem is as follows:

Several armies surround a castle they are going to attack. Each army faction is led by a general. However, they must all attack simultaneously to ensure success. It doesn’t matter what time they attack, so long as they agree. Since they are spread out, it makes communication unreliable. If two attack times were proposed, some generals might hear a different one first. And worse, some of the generals are traitors, and may relay an incorrect message (wrong attack time or similar) to the other generals. So how can the generals ensure a coordinated attack?

In Satoshi's (the pseudonymous founder of Bitcoin) own words:

They use a proof-of-work chain to solve the problem. Once each general receives whatever attack time he hears first, he sets his computer to solve an extremely difficult proof-of-work problem that includes the attack time in its hash. The proof-of-work is so difficult, it's expected to take 10 minutes of them all working at once before one of them finds a solution. Once one of the generals finds a proof-of-work, he broadcasts it to the network, and everyone changes their current proof-of-work computation to include that proof-of-work in the hash they're working on. If anyone was working on a different attack time, they switch to this one, because its proof-of-work chain is now longer.

After two hours, one attack time should be hashed by a chain of 12 proofs-of-work. Every general, just by verifying the difficulty of the proof-of-work chain, can estimate how much parallel CPU power per hour was expended on it and see that it must have required the majority of the computers to produce that much proof-of-work in the allotted time. They had to all have seen it because the proof-of-work is proof that they worked on it. If the CPU power exhibited by the proof-of-work chain is sufficient to crack the password, they can safely attack at the agreed time.

If you are new to crypto: a “hash” is basically a fingerprint—a secure, repeatable reduction of information. Imagine I send you a file via an insecure channel. Someone could tamper with the file. But if I’ve told you (offline, or another secure channel) what the “hash” is, then you can check to make sure the file arrived without tampering. With the solution for the Byzantine Generals in hand, “Money” as we know it is the easy demonstration app to build—akin to transferring plain text between computers in Internet terms. Bitcoin may not be the platform that captures much of the innovation yet to come, but it’s clearly benefitting from the network effects of being the first real-world deployment that demonstrates the power of this technology.

Never before could anyone build a monetary “country.”

Our locally-issued currency (“fiat” for short) is a relatively fragile, modern invention. We don't have to look very far into history to see how this method may well be ill suited for our future. Consider the Bretton Woods Agreement — named for international conference held in a New Hampshire town of the same name in 1944, at the end of WWII. In short, the agreement was that countries may set their own interest rates, so long as they artificially constrained and fixed exchange rates between each country.

Why? The goal was for countries to have sufficient yield in capital to rebuild war-torn Europe. If currencies were to be fluid, all the capital would go to the economy with the highest real yields (and likely be unavailable for lower-return, but still necessary projects.) The IMF and World Bank were established to finance shortfalls across member countries. But differences in inflation rates went on to rip this agreement apart by the beginning of the 1970s. Even at the size of nations, it's hard to keep anything static in markets. Even after further recalibration, the subsequent floating exchange rates put in place led to rampant inflation in the ‘70s.

In our modern age—with unlimited information and entirely geographically dispersed organizations—why would any organization tie themselves to their geographically-proximate neighbors? Ask anyone who has managed payrolls across currencies: it's an entirely different risk. Now with Crypto, anyone—whether a company, a protocol, a network (think EBay buyers and sellers)—can create their own monetary country. This new country's value, relative to more-commonly-traded-counterparts, may experience significant amounts of volatility.

It doesn't matter that Bitcoin's transactions aren't scalable: you don't have to carry only one physical currency to the global markets. It doesn't matter that it's highly volatile, relative to fiat currency: you will seamlessly be able to convert value to the economic “country” where you need to spend it. Some of these countries (maybe even Bitcoin itself) will eventually become incredibly stable. (Or maybe a monetary country will emerge that provides a simple future yield contract, with desired stability characteristics.)

Some of these “new countries” may badly draw their own borders and be unsustainable or disastrous. Existing nations may be hostile—and attempt to seize or shut down smaller crypto countries. As the Bitcoin project itself has shown—internal politics and inability to move quickly might be huge challenges within these projects. Regardless of an individual ecosystem’s success or failure, this is a new power we've never seen or experienced at scale.

It's a currency. It's access to the network. And it's equity in the project.

With the “real” rates (interest minus inflation) stuck at nearly zero for so long, there's just too much money seeking return. I've written before about the ICO phenomenon and the incredible volume (relative to VC as a whole) that is rushing into the system. At the core: the flexibility of the token system is allowing market demand for non-zero interest returns to seep into new technology projects. So what’s an ICO? Answer: it totally depends.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.
Interested or have Questions. Call me 559-474-4614

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

TriForce Tokens Blockchain Gaming Supported by Coventry University Enterprise Ltd,
Going Through IP Audit Process With Innovate UK

Gaming solutions company TriForce Tokens confirms support

from Coventry University Enterprises Ltd and an ongoing IP audit with the U.K. government's innovation agency Innovate UK. Pre ICO scheduled for Oct. 14th. Blockchain gaming solutions start-up TriForce Tokens continues to build momentum, partnering with Coventry University Enterprises Ltd for corporate and business cooperation, while initiating an IP audit with the U.K. government's Innovate UK for its technology and brand. For more information on TriForce Tokens's vision and development objectives, visit the TriForce Tokens website and read the official whitepaper. TriForce Tokens Steam-like blockchain-based gaming platform is in Early Alpha and can be accessed for players and for developers.

Taking the booming online games industry into the blockchain era

More than 2 billion people – almost a third of the entire planet — will be playing games online by the end of 2017, generating revenues in excess of $100 billion*. This number is set to increase by more than six percent annually, as mobile users join a growing legion of console and PC gamers. TriForce Tokens seeks to shake up the multi-billion dollar online games industry with a decentralized platform that will enhance game development and improve player experiences.

The TriForce Tokens revolution: decentralized gaming for new revenue models

TriForce Tokens' chief objective will be to address the main issues that prevent independent developers from producing successful titles, acknowledging that they work with smaller budgets, limited resources and tight deadlines. A decentralized platform promises a way to rapidly deploy common features such as tournaments, P2P trading and peer ranking, across games and platforms.

Players on separate games and platforms will not be forced to abandon their digital empires, as TriForce Tokens will look to harmonize all existing digital assets into a single ecosystem of digital wealth. Using a tokenized system, players can trader with others, earn rewards from competitive events. Developers can use the same tokens to compensate users for tasks and charge custom fees for P2P transactions.

Blockchain transparency is a feature of TriForce Tokens, encouraging communities that foster happiness, safety and ethical conduct. Helpful players who contribute to collaboration are recognized by a unique and transparent honor system, rooting out fraud and negative elements such as "toxic communities" harmful to player retention.

To mitigate player attrition, developers can benefit from TriForce Tokens' big data algorithms and behavioural analysis, learning deep player insights that will greatly assist in creating novel gaming experiences. TriForce Tokens features another blockchain innovation in its authentication network, that hopes to assist developers in copyright and piracy protection. It will also provide alternative methods for developers to still extract some revenue from already pirated content.

Strengthening its position through strategic partnerships

TriForce Tokens recognizes that a multi-faceted approach must be taken to position themselves as a serious leader in online gaming, with sound business, compliance and corporate structures as vital as technology development. TriForce Tokens now has the pleasure to announce that it has initiated an IP audit process with the U.K. government's innovation agency, Innovate UK. The audit will assess TriForce Tokens' technology and brand, helping to provide a stronger business focus to ensure they deliver maximum value. Innovate UK will work with TriForce Tokens to connect them with relevant partners through its innovation networks.

TriForce Tokens will also receive business support from Coventry University Enterprises Limited.  Coventry University Enterprises Ltd's award-winning Technology Park is a prestigious location that hosts some of the region's most innovative businesses and is home to the Serious Games Institute. It already benefits from the synergy of membership with two of the industry's foremost advocates: TIGA, a games and publisher network, and trade association with proven political clout in the U.K., and Swiss-based Crypto Valley Association, a collective of the world's leading blockchain and cryptographic tech initiatives.

TriForce Tokens and Crowdsale

TriForce Tokens (TFT) will be the currency powering payments and rewards on the decentralized gaming ecosystem. They will also be available to trade on external platforms, driving significant appreciation of value as the project grows in strength. TriForce Tokens Steam-like blockchain-based gaming platform is now available for testing. The Early Alpha can be accessed  for developers. As part of a fundraising exercise to support the development of its platform, TriForce Tokens will conduct a public crowdsale of tokens via an Initial Coin Offering (ICO).

A pre-ICO will open on Oct. 14, 2017 (1.30pm GMT) for 48 hours only. Participants in the pre-ICO are able to buy tokens with a 60% discount on top of the standard rate of 1 TFT at $0.20. In addition, 50 random pre-ICO participants will be chosen to receive a free Ledger Nano S hardware wallet. Following this, TriForce Tokens will launch its main ICO event from Nov. 12, 2017 to Nov. 25 (1.30 p.m. GMT), 2017. TriForce Tokens also has ambitions to become the first fully-compliant U.K. ICO, and is working on ISO27001 certification and General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) compliance.

The Team

TriForce Tokens is backed by an ensemble of experts from a range of sectors, including corporate management, online gaming, computer security and blockchain development.

Some of its key team members include:

Pete Mardell, CEO

Mardell established himself as a strong engineering professional with his work on a range of technical web applications when he was Head of Development for a recruitment agency in the UK. An avid gamer, Mardell is also a long-time cryptocurrency enthusiast.

Raza Ahmed, CTO

Ahmed has vast experience as a Senior Full Stack Web Developer and qualified blockchain developer, with expertise in Solidity (Ethereum), Javascript, SQL, Node.js, and AngularJS, among others. An MSc holder in Software Development, Ahmed has developed web applications for almost eight years. An associate professor at Coventry University's Faculty Research Centre for Manufacturing and Materials Engineering, Dr. Shah currently lectures in Ethical Hacking and Computer Security.

Jakub Kafarski, Front-end Engineer

Kafarski has worked on front-end engineering for the likes of Noveo, Madkom and Ericsson across Poland, U.K., and Sweden. He works as a front-end software engineer at CycloMedia Technology, a leader in its field. He is skilled at JavaScript, React, Redux and Node.js and is a member of Mensa.

Sorina Rusu, System Developer

Rusu is a passionate developer with extensive experience in PHP and Node.js. Her good organization skills and dedication has been key to her successes with consulting and tech firms in Romania as well in the U.K.

Haider Malik, Senior Full Stack Developer

A Javascript expert, Malik also doubles as an instructor at learning academies Udemy and Fullstackhour.

Simona Patrut, Marketing

Patrut has a strong marketing background, including a management role at Romania's Hilmi Medical Center, where she has managed entire product marketing cycles. She is an expert at building new partnerships for strong brand awareness.

Mihai Bratoi, Brand Designer

Bratoi is a Platinum Designer at U.K. designing firm 99designs. His work focuses on creating unique, memorable designs that respond well to customer needs for corporate needs and social media. TriForce Tokens is the source of this content. Virtual currency is not legal tender, is not backed by the government, and accounts and value balances are not subject to consumer protections.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.
Interested or have Questions. Call me 559-474-4614

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

Sweden Use Crypto Tech To Become Cashless Pioneers

 

Sweden, the Scandinavian nation famous for ABBA, Björn Borg, and Volvo,

is leading the way when it comes to becoming the world's first cashless country – and the technology behind Bitcoin, and the cryptocurrencies it has spawned, is catalysing the process. Two years ago, in October 2015, Niklas Arvidsson, a researcher in industrial economics and management at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, helped to produce a study that predicted his country would be the first to introduce a cashless society. "Cash is still an important means of payment in many countries' markets, but that no longer applies here in Sweden," he said.

The progressive Swedes are on course to achieving their lofty aim, and other Scandinavian nations are following suit. Consider that reports indicate that 56.3 per cent of the country's 1,600 bank branches – 900 of 1,600 – neither hold cash nor accept cash deposits any longer. Further, circulation of the country's traditional currency, the Swedish krona, has been falling for some time; in 2009 the figure was SEK106 billion whereas last year it was just SEK60bn.

Why is this happening?

According to data obtained from Visa, Swedes use bank cards three times more often than the average European. And a Riksbank report, published in December 2016, showed that 97 per cent of the country has access to cards, compared with 85 per cent cash.

There are many additional benefits to living in a society that does not need to use cash – not least when it comes to personal safety. People are less likely to be robbed, and also thieves will not as easily be able to sell on their stolen items. Another key factor is the rise in popularity of Swish, an app owned by six Swedish banks (Danske Bank, Handelsbanken, Länsförsäkringar, Nordea, SEB and Swedbank). It allows anyone with a smartphone to transfer money from one bank account to another, in real time. All that is required is the sender and receiver's phone numbers.

Swish was launched in 2012 and by the end of 2015 it had attracted 3.6 million users, which is more than a third of Sweden's 9.9 million population. Also that year some $515 million was transferred using the app. Those eye-opening numbers have increased significantly since, and now even churches have started to reveal their telephone numbers at the end of each service to make it easier for parishioners to boost their coffers.

This trend has forced Sweden's central banks to consider introducing a digital form of government-backed money, and the technology behind Bitcoin, the pioneering cryptocurrency launched eight years ago, is being promoted as a leading option. A major concern about going cashless in Sweden is that it could exclude the 'unbankables' – that is people without a bank account – and those who do not own a smartphone. Bitcoin, however, has the ability to solve those problems through technology. Users do not require a bank account, and they can, in effect, spend their money anonymously.

Bitcoins and other top cryptocurrencies – Ethereum, Ripple, Dash, Litecoin, and Ethereum Classic – can be purchased outright, and in a straightforward manner, from investment platform eToro, for instance. It has six million members across 140 countries and the company's motto is "crypto needn't be cryptic". Trading on eToro is attractive because it has a fast online verification process, global offices (including in the United Kingdom), and members can use the CopyTrader tool to match the strategies of top-performing traders. Many in the FinTech space believe the Blockchain, a decentralised ledger which is the backbone of cryptocurrencies, is the real game-changing innovation. In Sweden, and elsewhere, they have already toyed with ways in which it can be used in their public services. And sooner rather than later it could well underpin the world's first cashless society.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.
Interested or have Questions. Call me 559-474-4614

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

What this business might look like

So what will be the first "blockchain-only" native business? Dixon and Ehrsam don't have any predictions of what that business will be or when it will arrive. But it's helpful to think about what such a business could look like, if you're an investor like me and interested in keeping your eyes open to find out what to look for.

To me, what's most interesting about the whole advent of cryptocurrencies in the past year is Etheruem and how it allows for "smart contracts" to program the relationship of money between parties. The basic idea is that, if something happens, then someone should get paid automatically. You can imagine intricate conditional patterns that allow for people to be generate value for themselves automatically while stripping out a bunch of intermediaries which have existed up until now taking out a toll at every step along the way. The businesses that can pop up, go after big markets, and put these old intermediaries out of business should have a big leg up on future competition.

Here are some ideas of possible businesses to look for in the years ahead (and invest in if you're lucky):

• The first all-blockchain insurance company that only issues policies in smart contract form.
• Human futures. On my recent podcast with Balaji Srinivasan, he spoke about the company Upstart. It was founded a few years ago with the idea of actually allowing you to invest in an individual's potential future income stream. You could decide to lend to them based on their background and ask for a share in their upside career (almost like an agent). Smart contracts would make that business model feasible. Upstart pivoted away from that model a few years ago but it will be possible in the future.
• We already have have online law firms like LegalZoom which allow you to more easily incorporate your business for example. What about a law service only focused on creating smart contracts without a lot of expensive overhead of top laywers running around billing by the hour?
• Why not a LinkedIn career service focused on matching short-term gigs that tap in to your specific expertise and pay you in some cryptocurrency?
• The first institutional investment bank allowing only blockchain-based trading of securities with immediate settlement. They could also finally crack the IPO code for the perfect "dutch auction" of new issues with a perfect matching of buyers and sellers to the optimal amount of money raised goes to the issuer, instead of the investment banking clients.
• The first blockchain-based rewards system that rewards participants with special offers if they allow advertisers see when they perform certain tasks or reach certain levels.
• The first blockchain-based mortgage lender or credit card issuer.
• With the whole Equifax scandal of the past few weeks, why not a blockchain-based (hyper secure) credit bureau to replace the status quo credit bureaus of today with a promise of better confidentiality and better credit information?

We need to get beyond the Jamie Dimon type of discussion about bitcoin being a fraud or the speculative bubble around cryptocurrencies. Instead, we need to look at the underlying technology around these currencies, especially smart contracts that are programmable and enforceable. These contracts will allow for many new disruptive businesses to be formed on top of them. If you find the first new "native app" to be built on top of the blockchain in a big product category, it's likely that you'll find an attractive long-term investment.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.
Interested or have Questions. Call me 559-474-4614

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden