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Month: March 2019

Republican Leader Claims Blockchain Can Make US Government More Efficient

Republican Leader Claims Blockchain Can Make US Government More Efficient

                                 

Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the current Republican Minority Leader

in the United States House of Representatives, said on Tuesday, March 12, that blockchain can make the U.S. Congress a more efficient and transparent place. Speaking to the Select Committee for Modernization of Congress, McCarthy said that blockchain technology has changed the paradigm of security in the financial world: “Blockchain is changing and revolutionizing the security of the financial industry. Why would we wait around and why wouldn’t we institute blockchain on our own, to be able to check the technology but also the transparency of our own legislative process?”

The lawmaker also suggested that Congress use “21st century technology” to make the government more friendly, but at the same time more accountable. “We have an opportunity to take this window to make this place more effective, more efficient, and most importantly, more accountable," he concluded. McCarthy became a member of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2007, serving as House Majority Leader from 2014 to 2019, and as House Minority Leader since January 2019. The Select Committee for Modernization of Congress was established during the 116th Congress in early 2019. Democratic congressman Derek Kilmer chairs the committee, which forms recommendations for modernizing the legislative branch.

As Cointelegraph reported in October, U.S. Representatives Doris Matsui and Brett Guthrie proposed a new bill, dubbed the "Blockchain Promotional Act 2018," to the House of Representatives. The bill aimed to create a working group to study the potential impact of blockchain across the policy spectrum, and to establish a common definition of the technology. More recently, the state of Wyoming passed two blockchain-related bills. The first laid groundwork for storing so-called certificate tokens representing stocks on a blockchain “or other secure, auditable database,” and permitted their digital transfer. Another acknowledged the establishment of special purpose depository institutions to serve blockchain-related businesses, as they are often unable to receive services from federally-insured banks.

Article Produced By
Ana Berman

https://cointelegraph.com/news/republican-leader-claims-blockchain-can-make-us-government-more-efficient

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

Kakao Affiliate Dunamu Launches Blockchain Service Platform

Kakao Affiliate Dunamu Launches Blockchain Service Platform

                                  

Dunamu, the fintech arm of South Korea’s largest Internet corporation Kakao,

is reportedly launching a blockchain service platform designed to help companies start businesses using blockchain. Korea’s JoongAng Daily reported the news on March 19. The platform, which is called Luniverse and supervised by blockchain technology research lab Lambda256, is geared to help IT startups develop blockchain-based services. The platform reportedly has a high level of security and an automated scaling function, that can adjust blockchain sizes in accordance with the amount of data stored on it.

To implement the service, Dunamu reportedly collaborated with blockchain companies that provided various blockchain apps and products following clients’ business fields. Park Jae-hyun, CEO and former research head of Lambda256 said that “in the past, a lot of companies built their own blockchain, but an alternative is outsourcing the establishment of a blockchain in the form of a service offered on cloud systems.” Yesterday, Kakao announced the integration of its cryptocurrency wallet in its messaging app KakaoTalk, which will purportedly enable more than 44 million South Korean KakaoTalk users to send peer-to-peer transactions using Kakao’s crypto-powered wallet.

Also in March, Cointelegraph reported that Kakao will repeat its initial coin offering after netting $90 million from investors. Klaytn, the blockchain platform which is the responsibility of spin-off firm Ground X, will now seek to raise another $90 million. In December 2018, Kakao had first announced that it was planning to raise around $300 million through Ground X to develop its own token. As reported in February, in the fourth quarter of 2018 Kakao’s operating expenses related to new businesses, such as blockchain and artificial intelligence, was 65 billion won ($57.5 million), which reportedly led to a net loss for the whole period. Kakao’s consolidated operating income was 4.3 billion Korean won ($3.8 million).

Article Produced By
Ana Alexandre

Total change in her career took Anastasia into the world of analytics and business information as a researcher and translator in 2010. Some time later she got into FinTech, a dynamically developing segment at the intersection of the financial services and technology. Ana joined Cointelegraph in September 2017.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/silvergate-bank-onboarded-59-new-crypto-customers-in-q4-2018

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

Opinion: Europe Must Embrace Blockchain to Avoid “Cybercolonization”

Opinion: Europe Must Embrace Blockchain to Avoid “Cybercolonization”

                                

Expert Take

On September 27, the EU Competitiveness Council met in Brussels to discuss how to support Europe’s digitization, particularly with regard to artificial intelligence — an area that has tremendous potential, but also faces extreme global competition. AI, of course, runs on data. The unfortunate reality is that U.S. tech companies control and exploit large amounts of European data, in turn monopolizing our digital economy.

That’s why I, among 16 other executives, signed a letter to the council’s ministers—who engaged in a public policy debate and “competitiveness check-up” at Thursday’s meeting—urging a focus on these monopolies and the unfair business practices they get away with, from the exclusion of third parties to spontaneous changes to terms and conditions to unjustified interference, to name a few. There are alternatives to giving away the data, and thus, sovereignty,—something I emphasized as part of the National Digital Council in France and as the leader of numerous working groups focused on AI and privacy.

France, for one, has worked hard to attract major foreign investment in this space, opening AI hubs while seemingly ignoring the fact that Google, Apple, Facebook and the like don’t pay taxes in the country, yet still extract significant wealth from it. This hurts innovation and many local startups working hard to improve the region. London, Paris, Berlin, and Zug are popular tech destinations, yet they often get overshadowed or pushed out of the market because of the dominant U.S. players. Google, of course, dominates web search market, conducting 77% of all internet searches and processing 400,000 every second—gathering significant amounts of data in the process. Such dominance means, as AI specialist Cedric Villani aptly put it, that large foreign companies threaten Europe with “cybercolonization.”

Online platforms that mediate buying and selling account for a whopping 60% of the private consumption of digital goods and services. Europe cannot be lax and blindly open its market to foreign platforms who are only creating monopolies. Their goal is to lock both buyers and sellers into their ecosystem—to be the central point of the majority of digital transactions. This level of centralization has become synonymous with a dependency on tech oligopolies, and a lack of country sovereignty. Even the “local” companies we think we have working in AI are often very dependent on U.S. tech.

The good news is that every problem that exists with closed, proprietary marketplaces and platforms can be solved easily with blockchain. Through the GDPR, Europe and France have already been the first to regulate data privacy, protecting both individual rights and digital sovereignty from foreign tech giants. Blockchain—which in fact has developed faster in Europe than in Silicon Valley—can take this a step further, and can transform Europe in to the next Crypto Valley. Decentralized AI means that algorithms run directly on end-user devices, preventing sensitive data from being sent to the cloud at all.

Also, rather than having an intermediary between people buying and offering digital goods and services, blockchain allows peer-to-peer marketplaces. These marketplaces often have no fees, meaning all of the value can be captured by buyers and sellers. On the other hand, when U.S. tech giants hold a monopoly they can charge significant fees, force certain types of payments, and coerce end-users in a myriad of other ways. With a decentralized approach, no single person or company controls the content. The suppliers and buyers decide for themselves what should be included in the marketplace.

It can be tempting to want to make Europe attractive to some of the biggest names in tech and AI, but we must recognize what we are sacrificing by doing so. Many local startups can’t compete because having a monopoly means you can, more or less, do whatever you want—even if that means engaging in unfair business practices or doing things that are good for your bottom line but bad for actual users. One way to avoid such cybercolonization, though, is to embrace decentralized technologies. They’re the key to both innovation and sovereignty.

Article Produced By
Dr. Rand Hindi

Dr. Rand Hindi is an entrepreneur and data scientist. He is the CEO at Snips, the first decentralized, private by design voice assistant. Rand started coding at the age of 10, founded a Social Network at 14 and a web agency at 15 before getting into Machine Learning at 18 and starting a PhD at 21. He has been elected as a TR35 by the MIT Technology Review, as a "30 under 30" by Forbes, and is a lecturer at Sciences Po in Paris.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/opinion-europe-must-embrace-blockchain-to-avoid-cybercolonization

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

Report: Major South Korean Crypto Exchange Bithumb to Lay Off Up to 50% of Staff

Report: Major South Korean Crypto Exchange Bithumb to Lay Off Up to 50% of Staff

                                   

Major South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb

is reportedly cutting up to 50 percent of its workforce, a report from CoinDesk Korea stated on March 18. According to the report, an unnamed official has confirmed that the exchange will reduce its staff from 310 (at the start of March) to around 150, and is offering a voluntary redundancy plan and training

support to employees:

“Voluntary retirement is part of our support program for former employees and is intended to provide assistance and training for job placement. Apart from that, [Bithumb’s] trading volume has decreased compared to the previous year, [so] we are trying to provide internal measures. We will continue to add necessary personnel for various new businesses.”

To press time, Bithumb has not responded to Cointelegraph’s request for comment. Amid the crypto winter, Bithumb’s reported move to reduce its head count has been preceded by a host of other firms in the sector; mining giant Bitmain, blockchain software firm ConsenSys, decentralized social network Steemit and crypto exchanges Coinsquare and Huobi are among those to have made significant cuts in recent months.According to CoinMarketCap (CMC), Bithumb has seen roughly $1.3 billion in trades over the 24 hours before press time. The exchange was removed from CMC’s global exchange rankings in January 2018, due to the site’s concerns over reportedly “extreme divergence in prices from the rest of the world” on the platform and its fellow South Korean exchanges.

Article Produced By
Marie Huillet

Marie Huillet is an independent filmmaker, with a background in journalism and publishing. Nomadic by nature, she’s lived in five different countries this decade. She’s fascinated by Blockchain technologies’ potential to reshape all aspects of our lives.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/report-major-south-korean-crypto-exchange-bithumb-to-lay-off-up-to-50-of-staff

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

French Cybersecurity Agency Grants Security Certificate to Ledger Nano S Hardware Wallet

French Cybersecurity Agency Grants Security Certificate to Ledger Nano S Hardware Wallet

            

The Ledger Nano S from French crypto hardware wallet firm Ledger

has received a First Level Security Certificate (CPSN) from France’s national cybersecurity agency, ANSSI. The development was shared with Cointelegraph on March 18. The National Cybersecurity Agency of France (ANSSI) reports to the Secretariat-General for National Defence and Security (SGDSN) in order to assist the French Prime Minister in matters of defence and national security. According to their list of certified products, 122 out of 261 products that ANSSI has started evaluating since June 1, 2018, have been certified. Products aspiring to receive a CPSN certificate undergo a series of evaluations by an ANSSI lab, with testing for multiple attack scenarios that challenge the product’s security. Evaluations span “firewall, identification, authentication and access, secure communications, and embedded software.”

Claiming a crypto hardware wallet industry first, Ledger underscores the importance of receiving an independent third party certification to attest to the security of its offering, and says the CPSN for Ledger Nano S is the beginning of an overall effort to certify all of their products. The blog post outlines that Ledger also operates its own in-house security evaluation “Attack Lab,” dubbed Ledger Donjon, which tests products’ resilience for a variety of threat scenarios. The company has also reportedly developed a custom operating system, BOLOS (Blockchain Open Ledger Operating System), to couple software and hardware strategies that enhance security.  

According to the blog post, the CPSN certificate covers a gamut of core embedded security functions, including a true random number generator, which is created via hardware and then post-processed through BOLOS, in compliance with security guidelines established in France’s Security General Referential. Other CPSN-certified security functions include a root of trust — which ensures that a given Nano S is authentically issued by Ledger — end-user verification measures, such as mandatory PIN numbers for accessing services, and post-issuance capability, which occurs over a secure channel.

As Cointelegraph reported last December, researchers have claimed they were able to hack the Ledger Nano S, as well as crypto hardware wallet Trezor One, and Ledger’s most expensive hardware wallet offering, the Ledger Blue. The day after the report, Ledger argued that the reported vulnerabilities in its hardware wallets were not critical. This February, Ledger apologized for — and pledged to remedy —  issues with a recent firmware update for Nano S, which had inadvertently decreased the device’s storage capacity.

Article Produced By
Marie Huillet

Marie Huillet is an independent filmmaker, with a background in journalism and publishing. Nomadic by nature, she’s lived in five different countries this decade. She’s fascinated by Blockchain technologies’ potential to reshape all aspects of our lives.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/french-cybersecurity-agency-grants-security-certificate-to-ledger-nano-s-hardware-wallet

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

Coinbase Pro Increases Fees, Updates Market Structure ‘to Increase Liquidity’

Coinbase Pro Increases Fees, Updates Market Structure ‘to Increase Liquidity’

            

Major United States-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase

announced a new market structure for its professional trading platform, Coinbase Pro, in a blog post published on March 15. Per the announcement, the changes aim to increase liquidity, enhance price discovery and ensure smoother price movements. The changes include a new fee structure, reportedly designed to increase liquidity, updated order maximums, new order increment sizes, the turning off of stop market orders and added market order protection points.

According to the post, Coinbase Pro and Coinbase Prime — the firm’s institutional trading platform — will cease their support for stop market orders. The announcement further explains that all stop orders must now be submitted as limit orders and include a limit price. On the other hand, the market protection points that will be introduced both to Coinbase Prime and Coinbase Pro users will amount to 10 percent for all market orders. The statement explains that market orders that move the price more than 10 percent will stop executing and return a partial fill.

Lastly, the post warns the exchange’s user base that the platform will be offline on March 22 from 6:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. PDT. The changes were met with some skepticism and negativity from the crypto community on social media. Economist and trader Alex Krüger complained on Twitter about “Coinbase Pro raising fees for smaller clients by 33% while lowering fees for larger clients.” The same user also further commented that “in a rational world, most Coinbase users would now move to Binance.”

In the same Twitter thread, Krüger also questioned Coinbase’s decision to disable stop market orders, claiming that stop-limit orders sometimes fail to execute because of slippage, suggesting using far off limits on limit orders as a workaround. Still, Krüger also admitted that those changes should lead to increased liquidity and trading activity. Another crypto trader on Twitter suggested that the new fee structure is seemingly targeting new users entering the cryptocurrency space,

concluding:

“Pretty random day to hike all the fees up, Coinbase anticipating a new bull run perhaps?”

As Cointelegraph recently reported, Coinbase Pro announced support for altcoin Stellar Lumens (XLM). Just yesterday news broke that publicly traded U.S.-based company Riot Blockchain has filed with the Securities and Exchanges Commission to launch a new regulated cryptocurrency exchange, called RiotX, in the U.S. by the end of Q2 2019.

Article Produced By
Adrian Zmudzinski

Adrian is a newswriter based out of Pisa, Italy. He's passionate about cryptocurrency, digital rights, IT, tech and futurology and likes to think about the future in a positive way.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/coinbase-pro-increases-fees-updates-market-structure-to-increase-liquidity

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

Why Market Players Are Enthusiastic About Investing in “New Economy’: Expert Blog

Why Market Players Are Enthusiastic About Investing in “New Economy’: Expert Blog

            

ICO fundraising is still strong despite increased attention

on the part of regulating bodies and saturation of the market. Still, compared to an average seed round venture investment (even considering bias we get due to our dataset’s nature), amount raised stands quite high. This could easily be explained. Not only a bulk of investors are coming from the crypto world, with their understanding of it (or self-confidence) deep enough to invest in Blockchain-related projects more eagerly, but with “it is new Ethereum/Bitcoin” being a recurring theme in projects’ pitches.

All of the market participants were more enthusiastic about investing into “new economy” projects rather than into projects we could label as “traditional,” often with no apparent need for cryptocurrencies/Blockchain technology at all. As for fintech projects, this area has become quite naturally the first field for testing of Blockchain capability for real-world problems. According to research by The BB Fund, based on the data tokendata.io, more than $5.3 bln was raised via ICO in 2017 with $5.1 bln attracted for the last nine months.  There were 1,331 analyzed and only projects raising over $1 mln were considered. According to the research, 60 percent of ICOs have been profitable so far: median return is 2x.

The categorization is quite subjective and is organized as follows:

“Blockchain” category represents all Blockchain infrastructure-related projects. “Cards & Payments” stands for a very broad category of projects, from merchant-serving payment processors to crypto wallets with built-in p2p transfers and other functions. “Decentralized Market” consists of projects, which usually relied in their description on familiar cliché “Decentralized XYZ” – ranging from services’ markets (shipment, logistics, taxi drives) to goods markets (real estate, electricity) and universal markets, aiming any type of good/service imaginable.

While the majority of these projects do not benefit from Blockchain, implement things already implemented and suffer from lack of resources, some of them seem interesting and could be able to survive and prosper. “Crypto Market” category includes any type of exchange or exchange-like vehicles dedicated to crypto. “ICO platform” may refer not only to such platforms but also to accelerators, startup clubs and any sort of a project, which claims it is developing an ecosystem of investors, teams and crypto enthusiasts.

“Identity Verification” and “Advertising” are broad categories, too, with the first one including projects with an emphasis on verification – from people’s identity to identity of food products and content. The second segment includes everything advertising-like – lead generation, promotion, brand influencers’ network. Among other categories we would like to specifically mention businesses referred to as being “commodity”-backed. This term, again, doesn’t always stand for a commodity in common sense (gold or zinc oxide), but also for any tangible real-world asset, which either used as a sort of collateral or may be handled as such.

This distribution not only reflects bigger interest toward Blockchain infrastructure/fintech projects but also higher costs of development of them due to bigger development workload (Blockchain), license and integration-attributed costs (fintech). While valuations and investment attracted are rarely substantiated, investors more willingly allocated larger amounts of money to projects with high capital costs. Also, we could observe sorrowful tendency of poorer-quality projects to originate in Decentralized Market/Betting segments, with seemingly no diversification and original ideas behind them in many cases.

ICO market may be hard to predict at times

A system of simultaneous linear equations describes price dynamics of crypto assets, whether they are more “traditional” coins or ICO-related newly issued tokens, pretty well. While overall demand for crypto assets is defined by endogenous factors (mostly news, investor sentiment and manipulation of “whales”), this being the main factor, defining the value of all crypto markets.

Even if you are not quite familiar with a concept of correlation, you could have already noted that most of the assets usually move in the same direction, every time with exception of a few. This is a phenomenon very familiar for stock market investors too, especially for those involved in trading assets on markets with a high level of political turbulence, for example. You could easily find dependency between the volume of ICO money raised in a given month and ETH price (which are assets mutually influencing each other)- for Bitcoin and Ethereum interdependence in prices is also very characteristic.

However, in the case of ICOs, it is difficult now to attract long-term investors by promising them return some moment in the future– there should be a plan on the startup side how to get to this future as fast as possible at a steady pace. While Blockchain, ICOs, tokenized economy brings completely new technologies and business models to the world, investment principles and basics remain the same: long-term play, serving the real market demand, addressing pains and wishes of people.

Recently Vitalik Buterin wrote:

“All crypto communities […] need to differentiate between getting hundreds of billions of dollars of digital paper wealth sloshing around and actually achieving something meaningful for society.”

ICO market gives a lot of opportunities for speculations and quick profits, especially due to early-stage “pre-sale” discounts and premiums, and only a few players are ready to play in a long-run. Your investment philosophy should be based specifically on a long-term strategy. The strategy being the development of technologies on the emerging and unbanked markets (Asia, Africa, LatAm), infrastructural implementations to enable and/or disrupt the traditional systems (including bank-as-a-service models and open banking principles) and convergence of crypto and traditional financial worlds, including Blockchain implementation by government bodies.

ICO market as a way of fundraising- promising projects as well as scammers

So far, we could observe several moves on the side of the industry, its main players incentivized and welcomed. They could allow for Blockchain-related technologies and companies to make a breakthrough and for investors to profit. Not only commodity sector, but also some advertising, payments and lending companies make their way into respective industries with the leverage of an ICO. Such as ETHLend (lending), Ripio (micro-lending), UTRUST (crypto payment gateway), BitClave (smart advertising and promotion) and NVB (native video advertising via vlogs and content discovery platform), to name a few recent examples.

For many of these companies, smart contracts and tokens are the only nuisance and it is highly doubtful they would make any use of Blockchain technology (or would be happy with something absolutely decentralized). Venture fund investors, family funds, banks and investment companies start to invest in Blockchain-related projects or Bitcoin funds. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, actually, as liquidity flows blazingly fast in comparison with many other ecosystems. USV, Y Combinator, Foundation Capital, Lux Capital, Winklevoss Capital, Jefferson River Capital LLC and Forsters LLP, Citi, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Thomson Reuters, BoA, HSBC, Temasek Holdings etc. – it is hard to name all the family offices, venture funds and banks, which invested in companies developing Blockchain technologies and crypto.

While for those, who raised small and easily convertible sums via ICO fraudulent behavior and negligence it may seem a viable (even punishable by law) way, big players are forced to look for new ways of monetization, products and models, which could pay for all this (rather expensive) story. The biggest ones could probably become investors themselves (which would be bad for current token holders, but not so bad for the ecosystem as a whole), looking for projects to outsource the task of profit-making. This may seem crazy, but with so much money at stake and their future earning often tied to the buying power of their own tokens, companies are forced to look for ways of wealth creation like never before.

Article Produced By
Vladislav Solodkiy

Vladislav Solodkiy is a managing partner at Life.SREDA, Singapore-based fintech-VC, author of The First Fintech Bank’s Arrival book.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/why-market-players-are-enthusiastic-about-investing-in-new-economy-expert-blog

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

Amazon Shares Drop 2.6 Percent As Centralization Alienates Suppliers

Amazon Shares Drop 2.6 Percent As Centralization Alienates Suppliers

Amazon suppliers received a lesson in centralization on March 7 after the e-commerce giant abruptly began canceling huge numbers of orders in a profits push. Amazon: We ‘Saw Opportunity’

As Bloomberg reported, quoting a statement from Amazon, the company wants to increase returns at the heart of its e-commerce operations. This has involved fundamentally altering the supply line, forcing even long-time sellers to sell products directly on its marketplace instead of using Amazon as a middleman. This, reports say, results in reduced costs, as suppliers themselves foot the bill for issues such as storage and shipping. Amazon also takes a commission from each transaction. “We regularly review our selling partner relationships and may make changes when we see an opportunity to provide customers with improved selection, value and convenience,” the statement reads.

The knock-on effect for suppliers, perhaps predictably, has already touched a nerve. As Bloomberg notes, given purchase orders agreed months in advance, seismic changes from Amazon can easily trigger chaos. “If you’re heavily reliant on Amazon, which a lot of these vendors are, you’re in a lot of trouble. If this goes on, it can put people out of business,” the publication quoted Dan Brownsher, CEO of a consultancy counting around 50 Amazon vendors among its clients, as saying.

At press time,
Amazon’s share price was down by close to three percent on the day.

                                amazon

Can Decentralization Tackle Monopolies?

As Amazon has grown to achieve a practically worldwide monopoly, the perils of relying on a giant centralized partner will ring true for those businesses which have adopted an alternative ethos. Nonetheless, decentralized marketplaces have yet to achieve widespread popularity. Efforts to take on the e-commerce giants have so far seen little progress, with highly-anticipated offerings such as OpenBazaar failing to dent consumer habits. “You should be able to buy and sell using cryptocurrency… if you get crypto, you should be able to spend it… you and buy whatever you need for your daily activity,” the platform’s founder, Washington Sanchez, told cryptocurrency advocate Tatiana Moroz’s podcast the Tatiana Show in January. Sanchez is overseeing a diversification of OpenBazaar’s core offering, branching out into related software as part of parent company OB1.io.

Article Produced By
Esther Kim

Esther Kim

https://bitcoinist.com/amazon-shares-drop-2-6-percent-as-centralization-alienates-suppliers/

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

Ripple CEO Says JPM Coin Lacks Interoperability: ‘Just Use the Dollar, I Don’t Get It!’

Ripple CEO Says JPM Coin Lacks Interoperability: ‘Just Use the Dollar, I Don’t Get It!’

                                 

Ripple (XRP) CEO Brad Garlinghouse says the recently-announced

digital asset from United States banking giant JPMorgan Chase lacks the interoperability that would make it a significant innovation. Garlinghouse made his remarks during an interview at the 4th Annual DC Blockchain Summit in Washington D.C. on March 6. As Cointelegraph has reported, JPMorgan Chase announced the forthcoming launch of its new blockchain settlement offering in mid-February: a stablecoin dubbed JPM Coin, to be backed 1:1 by the bank’s USD reserves. Alluding to multiple industry commentators’ suggestions that the bank’s coin could be a direct competitor to Ripple’s XRP, Garlinghouse dismissed the coin’s usefulness due to the fact that it remains a proprietary in-house asset, and that its exclusivity is likely to lead each major bank to issuing its own coin. This, according to him, will lead to the exact same fragmentation that characterizes the

financial services industry today:

“This guy from Morgan Stanley was interviewing me last week, and I asked him, so is Morgan Stanley going to use the JPM Coin? Probably not. Will Citi use it? […] Will PNC? And the answer is no. So we’re going to have all these different coins, and we’re back to where we are: there’s a lack of interoperability.”

Garlinghouse further weighed in on JPM Coin’s apparent exclusivity, quipping that:

“Let’s think about this. [JPM] announced the JPM Coin for institutional customers. If you give them a dollar as deposit, they’ll give you a JPM Coin, that you then can move in the JPM ledger. Wait a minute, just use the dollar! I really don’t understand […] what problem that solves.”

Throughout the interview, the sole thing that Garlinghouse conceded to JPM Coin was the potentially positive effect “for the blockchain and crypto industry to have players such as JPM leaning in.” “That’s the one good thing I’ll say about this,” he joked. As previously reported, the research arm of top crypto exchange Binance has similarly judged that as a proprietary and centralized network, JPM Coin is unlikely to be tapped by competitors in the banking sector, who may well choose to release their own native digital tokens in future.

In terms of inter-bank settlement, Binance Research further argued that as a closed network solution, JPM Coin is for now unlikely to directly compete with XRP — given the latter’s ambition to serve as a multi-bank “mediator currency between both fiat/crypto currencies and any fiduciary product.” Binance nonetheless stated that internally, JPM Coin could have a significant material impact in improving the cost and time efficiency of traditional financial services. Garlinghouse has previously stated that JPM Coin “misses the point” of crypto, arguing that introducing a closed network today is like launching AOL after Netscape’s IPO.

Article Produced By
Marie Huillet

Marie Huillet is an independent filmmaker, with a background in journalism and publishing. Nomadic by nature, she’s lived in five different countries this decade. She’s fascinated by Blockchain technologies’ potential to reshape all aspects of our lives.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/ripple-ceo-says-jpm-coin-lacks-interoperability-just-use-the-dollar-i-dont-get-it

 

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

How Brands Use Instagram Stories To Boost Business

How Brands Use Instagram Stories To Boost Business

                                 

The Instagram Stories feature rolled out in August 2016

as Instagram’s answer to Snapchat. It allows users to create or upload temporary publications which are viewable for 24 hours, before being archived. Instagram Stories is a powerful feature which has given brands a space to share with perceived authenticity, while the temporary element allows for a more varied, somewhat relaxed approach to content sharing. Furthermore, archived content can be recycled through sharing again, adding to a highlight, or through the relatively new ‘Memories’ option (similar to Facebook Memories).

Since its birth, Instagram Stories has been developed to roll out several features for content customisation. Brands now have the option to include music, hashtags, mentions, geotags, polls, questions, stickers, feature products, add external links and more. Much like the social media platforms themselves, brands are finding more and more inventive ways of keeping the attention of their customers. With so many ways to vary Instagram Stories content, how are brands using Instagram Stories to their advantage?

We have compiled some of the clever ways brands are using Instagram Stories, so that you can apply your favourites to your own brand’s social media strategy.

Market Research

Market research is the act of gathering information about consumer needs and preferences. Instagram Stories is a brilliant tool for gaining customer feedback, queries and opinions. Creating polls or posing questions gives your brand direct conversation with followers, allowing them to feel heard. Responding to polls and questions also gives your brand an opportunity to share expertise, build community and trust, humanise your brand, and gain information about product preferences and frequently asked questions. NYX Cosmetics took the opportunity of a photoshoot with Nam Vo to do an Instagram takeover. This is when an influencer or public figure is invited to ‘take the floor’ as it were and speak to your followers. They used the questions feature in Instagram Stories, which allowed them to feature their own products while answering viewer questions.

Humanise Your Brand

The expiration of Instagram Stories encourages brands to be a little less formal, which builds trust through authenticity. Using fun additions such as stickers, gifs, music and countdowns can develop a deeper level of connection between the brand and consumer. Brands also use Instagram Stories to give names, faces and character to otherwise ‘faceless’ corporate business profiles. Here is an example of Loreal Pro using Instagram Stories in an informal fashion. Choosing to document an event as it happens shows authenticity, while using mentions and hashtags across several Instagram Stories posts can boost reach and increase sharing opportunities.

Here are some of the ways you can humanise your brand:

  • Sharing footage of events as they occur
  • Sharing behind the scenes content
  • Storytelling
  • Interviewing colleagues

Promote Products

Instagram Stories allows brands to attach a direct link to an external web page. This makes it the perfect place to promote products or services and share new lines. If you have a business account with over 10,000 followers, or have created an advert through Facebook’s Ad Manager to be displayed on Instagram Stories, you can attach a link to your Instagram Stories post. This gives the viewer the to option to ‘Swipe Up’ which will open a link of your choice.

The clothing and lifestyle brand P&Co have cleverly crafted a cohesive product promotion strategy across their Instagram Stories and their main account content, tying it all together neatly with a competition.Notice how P&Co used a competition to grow their followers, reach and brand awareness. They also added the ‘Swipe Up’ link to drive traffic to their website, and were still able to shout about their product in a professional and effective way. In addition to this, P&Co tied everything together with a post on their page, which has their product featured. Using Instagram Stories in conjunction with feed posts is an effective way to increase the likelihood of sales and brand awareness.Another way to promote products in Instagram Stories is to create an advert. This should be done in Facebook Ads Manager and it allows you to reach a targeted audience.

Share Your Brand Through Usable Imagery

Creating interactive, shareable or useable content is an inventive way to connect with your followers, grow interest around your brand and stay in the consumer’s mind a lot longer. Some brands opt for creating fun, fillable questionnaires or ‘would you rather’ tick box templates for followers to add stickers to and share on their own Instagram Stories. With these being easy to copy, fun to complete, and usually featuring the Instagram handle of the brand, this approach encourages the creation of shareable user-generated content, which is an effective way to get a lot from a humble Stories post.

Another example of usable imagery is the creation of stunning phone wallpaper imagery. While some opt for adding branding to the images, others (like the example below) simply share beautiful imagery which the viewer will want to use as their phone wallpaper. Then every time the viewer uses their phone, they are reminded of the brand. Additionally, when the user gets complimented on their phone wallpaper, they have an opportunity to talk about and share the brand.

Announcements

Due to the expiration of Stories posts, this is the perfect place for brands to share announcements which will also expire, such as livestreams or 24 hour offers/deals. Nintendo gives us a great example of how Instagram Stories can provide a place to upload a poster, with all the relevant information, and a direct link to the web page viewers are being pointed to.

Give A Voice To Your Followers

Let’s face it?—?who doesn’t like to be acknowledged by a big company when they’re sharing a photo of a product they love from a brand they rate?! Instagram Stories is the perfect place to share user-generated content of your products, through encouraging the use of a hashtag, so that you can find shareable content easily and show some love to your Instagram community. This is exactly what McDonald’s did with their limited edition Shamrock Shake. Using the hashtag #ShamrockShakeSZN and reinforcing the hashtag use through every Stories post, McDonald’s developed a great string of user-generated content, while strengthening their community and growing excitement around the product.

Think about encouraging conversation through inviting viewers to actively engage.

As you can see through the examples above, brands regularly combine a few of these techniques, either in the same Stories post or across a string of Stories posts with the same message. This is an effective way to reinforce themes and awareness, while making use of the features available. We hope these examples have sparked your creativity with lots of interesting ways you can implement Instagram Stories into your social media marketing strategy. You can track your Instagram Stories, their reach rates, completion rates, full view rates and view the best times to post your Stories with Minter.io – the handy analytics tool that helps you get the most out of your brand on Instagram.

Article Produced By
Sarah Pike

Writer for Minter.io

https://medium.com/minter-io/how-brands-use-instagram-stories-to-boost-business-14ecc12c1877

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