New Florence. New Renaissance.

The Libra cryptocurrency

The cryptocurrency, called Libra, will be a secure blockchain-based payment system backed by hard assets and designed for ordinary users, making it among the boldest efforts yet to bring digital currencies into the mainstream.

Facing continuing scrutiny of its privacy practices, Facebook introduced Libra in a manner that seemed intended in part to head off potential regulatory concerns. It said it is creating a subsidiary, called Calibra, that would be governed with the help of external partners, to ensure “the separation between social and financial data.” Calibra will offer a crypto wallet—a digital app that can be used to pay for items online and send money—using Libra.

WSJ

Here's a white paper on the concept

 

 

Blockchain with impact

Newsweek has an issue which highlights a wide range of blockchain applications. An example is Chronicled which is developing a blockchain based solution to supply chain management, recording all of the transactions that take place as pharmaceuticals travel from factory to container to shelf.

 

Another is Bitlumens which is focused on adoption of clean energy - video below

 

"Blockchain" farming

Your future chicken dinner is about to get its very own Fitbit-like device. Chinese online insurance company ZhongAn Online has developed a new GPS tracker for poultry called GoGo Chicken, according to the Wall Street Journal. The device fits around the animal’s leg while sensors monitor information like the chicken’s environment, what it eats, and how much exercise it gets.

ZhongAn refers to the product as “blockchain farming” because it utilizes the real-time public record technology popularized by cryptocurrency to store its data on the chickens.

The information GoGo Chicken collects isn’t just for those tending to the fowl. Consumers will be able to monitor the chicken’s day-to-day life via a mobile app as well.

Mashable

Photo Credit

 

 

More eye candy

Visual Capitalist does a nice job posting powerful visuals and data-driven content on an almost-daily basis.  Here is their best infographics of 2018 including one on the Business Value of the Blockchain.

The future of insurance

One of the most profitable in the world, the insurance industry exceeded $1.2 trillion in annual revenue since 2011 in the U.S. alone.

But risk is becoming predictable. And insurance is getting disrupted fast.

By 2025, we’ll be living in a trillion-sensor economy, projected to generate bronto-bytes (1000 trillion trillion) of data, as explained by TSensors Summit co-founder Janusz Bryzek. And as we enter a world where everything is measured all the time, we’ll start to transition from protecting against damages to preventing them in the first place.

But what happens to health insurance when Big Brother is always watching? Do rates go up when you sneak a cigarette? Do they go down when you eat your vegetables?

And what happens to auto insurance when most cars are autonomous? Or life insurance when the human lifespan doubles?

For that matter, what happens to insurance brokers when blockchain makes them irrelevant?

Read about in in Peter Diamandis’ blog post

Video below has another perspective on the industry

 

Blockchain in logistics

IBM and Danish shipping giant Maersk are teaming up to form a new company whose aim is to commercialize blockchain technology—the nifty, shared accounting ledgers first made famous by the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

The as-yet unnamed, New York-based venture is set to be owned 51% by Maersk and 49% by IBM, the companies said. The concern intends to help shippers, ports, customs offices, banks, and other stakeholders in global supply chains track freight as well as replace related paperwork with tamper-resistant digital records.

IBM and Maersk first partnered on a blockchain trial in summer 2016. Michael J. White, the new company’s CEO, said this pilot, which traced a container of flowers that sailed from Mombasa, Kenya to Rotterdam in the Netherlands, plus several followups convinced Maersk of the system’s potential.

Fortune

 

Blockchains and International Aid

Organizations working in international relief can lose up to 3.5% of each aid transaction to various fees and costs. What’s more, across the industry, an estimated 30% of all development funds don’t reach their intended recipients because of third-party theft or mismanagement. In Jordan, the WFP can use Building Blocks to audit each beneficiary’s spending in near-real time. And by paying vendors directly, Building Blocks has reduced money-management costs by 98%, according to Haddad. For an aid organization spending $6 billion annually across 80 countries, that adds up to tens of millions of dollars in savings. Bernhard Kowatsch, who heads the WFP’s Innovation Accelerator, which incubated Building Blocks, sees more value: “[Building Blocks] provides even higher assurance to individual donors that if you give to the World Food Programme, that money actually reaches the people it’s intended for.”

FastCompany

 

 

Blockchain in 2 minutes

Saving the planet, fixing healthcare, replacing conventional currency—there is apparently nothing that the shared-database technology known as blockchains can’t fix. At least, that’s the impression given by the horde of governments, banks, entrepreneurs, and tech companiesworking on the technology. But what is a blockchain and why the excitement? If you’ve got 2 minutes, WIRED can explain.

 

Blockchain for Digital IDs

Accenture Plc and Microsoft Corp are teaming up to build a digital ID network using blockchain technology, as part of a United Nations-supported project to provide legal identification to 1.1 billion people worldwide with no official documents.

The companies unveiled a prototype of the network on Monday at the UN headquarters in New York during the second summit of ID2020, a public-private consortium promoting the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goal of providing legal identity for everyone on the planet.

The project aims to help individuals such as refugees prove who they are in order to gain access to basic services such as education and healthcare.

Blockchain, first developed as a public ledger of all transactions in the digital currency bitcoin, is increasingly being used to securely track data in other fields.

Reuters

 

The Fintech Revolution at Citi

Today the skunkworks operation that Bird created, known as Citi FinTech, is made up of about 40 employees handpicked from various parts of Citi and poached from tech companies such as Amazon andPayPal. In keeping with the outsider mentality Bird wants, the operation is based not in Citigroup’s Manhattan headquarters but across the East River in Queens, on the 10th floor of a Citi building that also houses the credit card business. On one wall there’s a five-by-10-foot chart listing all of Citi’s new fintech competitors and which of the megabank’s business lines each startup puts in jeopardy—from payments to commercial lending to wealth management. Not far away is the requisite appurtenance of every startup: a foosball table.

Fortune