Bitcoin Ransomware Education – VMola

  

It is evident cyber criminals continue to explore the ransomware market for as long as they possibly can. VMola is one of the more recent strains of malicious software that asks its victims to make a Bitcoin payment. It does not appear to be one of the most sophisticated forms of malware, though. Then again, the developers may still make good money from this ransomware strain regardless.

It is good to know not every type of ransomware will cause a lot of damage. To be more specific, the VMola strain does encrypt computer files and displays a ransom message to its victims. However, it is not the biggest threat users will ever encounter, as the people responsible for this malicious tool have not put a lot of effort into creating this threat by any means.

To be more specific, the VMola ransomware makes no bones about what it expects its victims to do whatsoever. Once the tool infects a computer and encrypts all the files, it will display a very simple ransom message. In fact, there is no GUI associated with the message, nor are there links to click. Victims have to manually send 0.1 Bitcoin to the address provided in the note. Users will have to copy this address as well, as there is no payment button whatsoever.

Although the Bitcoin ransom in question is quite small compared to other types of ransomware, it should not be paid by victims in the first place. Considering how all victims who pay the money will need to include their email address along with the transaction ID, there is no reason to think victims will receive the decryption key. That is always one of the downsides when paying a ransom, as there is no guarantee of getting the decryption key whatsoever.

Luckily, it appears it is relatively easy to get rid of this ransomware without paying the Bitcoin demand. In fact, users can restore data from a previous backup. Most ransomware developers delete the shadow volume copy on the infected device right away, yet this malicious tool has no interest in doing this. That is another clear example of how this malicious tool is nothing more than an amateur attempt to make some quick money.

Given the fact that VMola has no fancy coding under the hood either, it will only be a matter of time until a free decryption tool is created. For now, such a tool does not exist, although using a proper anti-malware tool should get rid of the infection as well. Moreover, security experts believe VMola has only one decryption key for all victims, which should make it a lot easier to crack the encryption as well.

As we expect from ransomware these days, VMola is distributed through spam campaigns laden with malicious email attachments. This method of distribution has been quite successful over the past few months, and criminals have no reason to change a winning formula whatsoever. Never open an email from a sender you don’t know, and even if you do, make sure not to download the email attachment whatsoever. 

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about – TCC-Bitcoin.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Why the Netflix Model
is the Future for Enterprise Blockchain

What's a blockchain?

Why not use a distributed database? What's a smart contract? What the hell is chain code? Among blockchain industry participants, you'll get different answers and different views to all of these questions (and much more). Almost weekly, we read new blockchain white papers proposing new unique functionalities to solve a problem in a slightly better or different way. Of course, this amount of experimentation and research can only be good for the long-term growth and maturity of our industry, but it’s also made it extremely complicated for potential buyers to make determinations about what fits their needs best.

Although the term "blockchain" has generally been used as the umbrella name for a very broad collection of new technologies, it seems to me that our industry has not yet gone through the necessary objective scrutiny to separate the good, from the bad (and the ugly). Right or wrong, there seem to be some common themes among enterprise companies that became apparent over the course of 2016.

This is not a comprehensive list, but a few worth highlighting:

1. Companies are looking to build using permissioned blockchain networks (whether as an interim solution or a long-term outcome)
2. In many contexts, it will be important to maintain transaction privacy
3. Current transaction performance on the public bitcoin and ethereum networks is insufficient
4. Smart contracts provide an elegant framework to automate shared business processes.

Ethereum examined

In considering these challenges and how to solve them, a large number of companies have migrated their efforts to ethereum.It's by no means a perfect solution, but arguably because of its flexibility and because of the organic community of developers surrounding it, it remains unparalleled in the industry.

Rather than look at ethereum as one network, however, many consider it as a template to model, improve, customize and implement in difference contexts. Ethereum technology, therefore, has found its way into multiple networks serving multiple purposes, although imperfectly. To better achieve this outcome, I would argue that ethereum needs some rearchitecting to allow for multiple network implementations. In its current form, it was designed (and continues to be improved upon) as a protocol to power a single global network.

Incompatibility

Having come to the same realization, a number of companies have created versions of ethereum that fit their needs – in many cases with band-aid fixes that can only be described as temporary and imperfect. Among those companies, there are both startups and large organizations, most of which are primarily interested in one vertical problem set that impacts their industry and their business.

This has led to unnecessary fragmentation and incompatible modifications being made to the ethereum protocol in all these various versions. Contrary to the initial vision of ethereum (of being a general purpose protocol), many of these implementations are being built as single-purpose solutions to power specific industry applications.

As companies get closer to production, this problem is becoming more evident to those involved. Drawing parallels from the web services ('cloud') industry, I’m convinced that we’ll see a new trend this year. Rather than end users building their own customized infrastructure, and essentially managing their "full stack", a small number of providers will focus on offering modular infrastructure that can be leveraged with little effort by the companies solving challenges at the application layer.

Action ahead

This reorganization of the industry (infrastructure vs app) will allow for specialization and better long-term improvements to the underlying software while maintaining standards of compatibility. In the same way that Netflix is built using Amazon Web Services, mature companies emerging in this space will partner with infrastructure providers to scale their businesses more efficiently.

Ideally, as we work towards this model, the resulting infrastructure frameworks will allow for deployments that are fully compatible with 'public ethereum', while also enabling deployments that include custom functionalities required by the user.One of the great benefits I foresee from this model is that new proposed ideas, which today end up as competing protocols, could become alternative modules compatible with a standardized framework. This will make it easier for companies to adopt improvements without having to rebuild from scratch. Luckily, this isn't wishful thinking. Some of us are already on our way to making this real.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about – TCC-Bitcoin.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Blockchain
The Invisible Technology That's Changing the World

Large swaths of your digital life will soon run atop a blockchain foundation just beneath the surface and you may not even realize it.

Blockchain isn't a household buzzword yet,

like the cloud or the Internet of Things. It's not an in-your-face innovation you can see and touch as easily as a smartphone or a package from Amazon. But when it comes to our digital lives—every digital transaction; exchange of value, goods, and services; or private data —blockchain is the answer to a question we've been asking since the dawn of the internet age: How can we collectively trust what happens online?

Every year we run more of our lives—more core functions of our governments, economies, and societies—on the internet. We do our banking online. We shop online. We log into apps and services that make up our digital selves and send information back and forth. Think of blockchain as a historical fabric underneath recording everything that happens exactly as it occurs. Then the chain stitches that data into encrypted blocks that can never be modified and scatters the pieces across a worldwide network.

Blockchain always has an immutable "ledger" that you can see, verify, and control. At the same time, it has no single point of failure from which records or digital assets can be hacked or tampered with. Because of its distributed-ledger technology, blockchain has applications across every kind of digital record and transaction. And in 2017 we'll begin to see them explode.

First up are the big banks and tech giants. Big business will always drive innovation, and the rise of blockchain-based smart contracts (read on for more explanation of them) turns blockchain into a middleman to execute all manner of complex business deals, legal agreements, and automated exchanges of data. Companies such as Microsoft and IBM are using their cloud infrastructure to build custom blockchains for customers and experiment with their own use cases. On the academic side, researchers are exploring blockchain applications for projects ranging from digital identity to medical and insurance records.

At the same time, dozens of startups are using the technology for everything from global payments to music sharing, from tracking diamond sales to the legal marijuana industry. That's why blockchain's potential is so vast: When it comes to digital assets and transactions, you can put absolutely anything on a blockchain. A host of economic, legal, regulatory, and technological hurdles must be scaled before we see widespread adoption of blockchain technology, but first movers are making incredible strides. Within the next handful of years, large swaths of your digital life may begin to run atop a blockchain foundation—and you may not even realize it.

Beyond Bitcoin

Blockchain is the data structure that allows bitcoin,

the market-proof cryptocurrency, to thrive through a combination of decentralized encryption, anonymity, immutability, and global scale. It's the not-so-secret weapon behind the cryptocurrency's rise, and to explain how blockchain came to be, we have to begin briefly with the legacy of bitcoin. On Oct. 31, 2008, bitcoin founder and still-mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto (a pseudonym) published his famous white paper introducing the concept of a peer-to-peer (P2P) electronic cash system he called bitcoin. The bitcoin blockchain launched a few months later on Jan. 3, 2009.

For Jeff Garzik, it started the way many a buzzy idea in the tech community has over the years: with a post on "news for nerds" and OG tech aggregator Slashdot.org. Garzik is the CEO and co-founder of enterprise blockchain startup Bloq but has spent years as a bitcoin core developer. He was also recently elected to the Board of Directors of The Linux Foundation (as the first member with a blockchain and cryptocurrency background).

In July 2010, Garzik was working on Linux at enterprise software company Red Hat when what he calls "The Great Slashdotting" occurred. One viral post introduced programmers, investors, and tech nerd-dom at large to the concept of Bitcoin, and by extension, to Blockchain. Garzik had always been fascinated with the goal of making seamless digital payments work on a global scale and across borders. When he realized how bitcoin's underlying technology worked, he said it "knocked him on his bum."

"I had already thought to myself about how someone might create a decentralized version of PayPal. When Elon [Musk] and Peter Thiel and the other founders created PayPal, they had this vision of a global ledger that could easily and cheaply add entries between users like a database entry. That vision met reality with banking laws and cross-border friction, with legal hurdles and regulations not only in the U.S. but around the world. It made that kind of decentralized global currency impossible, or so we thought.

"Bitcoin turned all of that on its head," Garzik went on. "From an engineering perspective, the proof of work was this very elegant way to elect a leader, the block creator, in this decentralized and potentially adversarial system. Bitcoin layered on top of that engineering a set of economic and game theory incentives that paid you in the script of the system itself, creating this virtuous cycle where it's in your best economic interest to follow the consensus rules and create the longest, strongest chain possible. I didn't realize until that post on that day how elegantly it could be done."

It's important to understand why bitcoin and blockchain are not the same thing. In Garzik's TEDx Talk, he described bitcoin as "an organism." It has layers, like other software. On top of the bitcoin blockchain is billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency, but beneath that is a ledger just like any other blockchain. The underlying ledger works without the currency and can be used to securely transfer any digital asset over the Internet. The currency, on the other hand, doesn't work without the ledger. Garzik said bitcoin was just the first demo application of what blockchain can do. In this case, it built a monetary revolution on the back of an all-seeing ledger, one that's everywhere and nowhere at once, and gave the cryptocurrency its power.

Chuck Reynolds
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Please click either Link to Learn more about – TCC-Bitcoin.

 

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Blockchain for Beginners

People often get bogged down in technological complexity

when trying to understand blockchain, but the basic concept is a simple and universal one. We have facts and information and we don't want access, copied, or tampered with, but on the internet, there's always a chance it could be hacked or modified. Blockchain gives us a constant—a bedrock we know won't change once we put something on it and where a transaction will be verified only if it follows the rules.

The Nakamoto white paper explains the basics of "mining" data into a block, then using a hash (a time-stamped link) to chain those blocks together across a decentralized network of "nodes" that verify each and every transaction. The other key innovation in the white paper is using what's known as the proof-of-work (PoW) model to create distributed "trustless" consensus and solve the double-spend problem (ensuring cryptocurrency isn't spent more than once).

A "trustless system" doesn't mean it's a system you can't trust. Quite the opposite. Because the blockchain verifies each transaction through PoW, this means no trust is required between participants in a transaction. Where does the proof-of-work come from? The miners. A P2P network of bitcoin "miners" generates PoW as they hash blocks together, verifying transactions that then go into the ledger. In the 2016 book Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World, authors Don and Alex Tapscott explain Nakamoto's Bitcoin model about as succinctly

as one can:

"Bitcoin or other digital currency isn't saved in a file somewhere; it's represented by transactions recorded in a blockchain—kind of like a global spreadsheet or ledger, which leverages the resources of a large P2P network to verify and approve each bitcoin transaction. Each blockchain, like the [bitcoin blockchain] is distributed: it runs on computers provided by volunteers around the world. There is no central database to hack. The blockchain is public: anyone can view it at any time because it resides on the network… and the blockchain is encrypted… it uses public and private keys (rather like a two-key system to access a safety deposit box) to maintain virtual security."

Note that nothing is completely unhackable, particularly when you don't use it as intended. Blockchain's security works not only because it's encrypted but also because it's also decentralized. Victims of the biggest blockchain breaches and cryptocurrency heists (Mt. Gox in 2014 and Bitfinex in 2016) were targeted and pilfered clean because they tried to centralize a decentralized system. Another recent blockchain security incident, the DAO hack, came down to exploited loopholes in smart contracts written atop an established blockchain, Ethereum, not within the blockchain itself. Blockchain's underlying security and encryption model is a sound one. How that security is executed is a story for another feature.

So we've explained how the network functions and how security works, but how do the blocks actually connect to one another? Why does a blockchain get stronger the longer it gets? Where does the immutability come in? The Tapscotts' explanation continues:

"Every ten minutes, like the heartbeat of the bitcoin network, all the transactions conducted are verified, cleared, and stored in a block which is linked to the preceding block, thereby creating a chain. Each block must refer to the preceding block to be valid. The structure permanently time-stamps and stores exchanges of value, preventing anyone from altering the ledger… so the blockchain is a distributed ledger representing a network consensus of every transaction that has ever occurred. Like the World Wide Web of information, it's the World Wide Ledger of value… This new digital ledger can be programmed to record virtually everything of value and importance to humankind: birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, deeds and titles of ownership, educational degrees, financial accounts, medical procedures, insurance claims, votes, provenance of food, or anything else that can be expressed in code."

The concept of immutability is maybe the most crucial to understand when trying to wrap your head around blockchain and why it's important. An object that once created can never be changed has infinite value in our editable, ephemeral digital world. Harking back to the "strength in numbers" principle, the more nodes a blockchain is distributed over, the more stronger and more trusted it becomes. It's verification on top of verification to infinity. Bloq's Garzik talked about how the network effect of blockchain is key to its immutability, and why it's the reason the public bitcoin blockchain is still the most popular and trusted blockchain out there:

"The immutability factor is very much dependent on the network effect," said Garzik. "You see that with bitcoin very specifically. The cost of creating a new digital asset is essentially zero. Therefore you have to demonstrate an overwhelming amount of value in overcoming that network effect if you want to convince someone to switch away from the bitcoin blockchain, which not only has a good track record but high-security from a technical perspective. Security and immutability are a direct function of the economics—how much investment there is in the ecosystem, and how many people are using it."

Public vs. Private Blockchains

People within the industry talk a lot about public versus private blockchains. On a basic level, public blockchains are cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, enabling peer-to-peer transactions and, therefore, a revolution in seamless global payments. Private blockchains (those being built by distributed ledger consortium R3, for example) use blockchain-based application development platforms such as Ethereum or blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) platforms such as those offered by Microsoft and IBM, running on private cloud infrastructure.

Brian Forde, Director of Digital Currency at the MIT Media Lab, likens public versus private blockchains to the relationship between an open-source technology, such as Linux, and companies like Red Hat that build on that tech for enterprise use. Public blockchains like bitcoin were the open-source movement that started it all, and private blockchains such as R3 are taking that technology and commercializing it for businesses.

"A private blockchain is an intranet, and a public blockchain is the Internet. The world was changed by the Internet, not a bunch of intranets. Where companies will be disrupted the most is not by private blockchains but public ones," said Forde.

Bloq's Garzik echoed a similar thought when explaining the difference between public and private blockchains, but he uses the open-source analogy a bit differently. Bloq bills itself as a "Red Hat for blockchain" of sorts, but its platform is built atop the bitcoin blockchain rather than a private or "permissioned" one. (Permissioned blockchains include an access control layer governing who can participate in the network.) Garzik's biggest question when looking at cloud providers and others building private blockchains and BaaS offerings is: Who's running that network?

"On the private and permissioned side, it's very much a question of who the referees are. I use that term specifically because what blockchains really provide is a neutral, level playing field for the execution of rules," said Garzik. "Those rules are applied to transactions that the actors create from that network. For bitcoin, it's rules like the monetary supply; the number of transactions that can fit into a block. All of that forms the economic incentives and ultimately consensus rules that everyone in the network complies with and cross-checks to create this system of checks and balances.

"Some of the other blockchain networks, whether it's [open-source project] Hyperledger, Ethereum, or a bank chain [such as R3] are opening the question of trust and trust shifting," Garzik went on. "It's less about the technology, and much more about a rapid, near real-time adjudication of rules between actors on a network. That's what blockchains do."

Once you understand what a blockchain is and how it works, the next question an everyday tech user would have is how it'll affect them. If you're not a business that's building a blockchain-based product or service, why should you care? As Don Tapscott explained it in Blockchain Revolution and in a 2016 TED Talk of his own, it's because blockchain brings us from the Internet of information into the "Internet of value." From his TED talk:

"For the past few decades, we've had the Internet of information," says Tapscott. "When I send you an email or a PowerPoint file, I'm actually not sending you the original; I'm sending you a copy. That's great, and it has democratized information. But when it comes to assets; things like money, financial assets like stocks and bonds, loyalty points, intellectual property, music, art, a vote… sending you a copy is a really bad idea. If I send you $100, it's really important that I don't have the money afterward.

"Today, we rely entirely on big intermediaries; middlemen like banks, government, big social media companies, credit companies, and so on to establish trust in our economy," Tapscott continued. "These intermediaries perform all the business and transaction logic of every kind of commerce, from identification and authentication of people through to clearing, settling, and record-keeping… they capture our data, which means we can't monetize or use it to better manage our lives, and our privacy is being undermined… so what if there were not only an Internet of information, but an Internet of value. Some kind of vast, global, distributed ledger running on millions of computers and available to everybody, and where every kind of asset from money to music could be stored, moved, transacted, exchanged, and managed, all without powerful intermediaries."

That, in a nutshell, is blockchain.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about – TCC-Bitcoin.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

India Local Politicians Criticize Government’s War On Cash, Bitcoin

  

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Bitcoin correction sees nearly $4 billion wiped off value of the cryptocurrency as price falls 19%

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Bitcoin Exchange Woes See Almost $50 Mln Pass Through LocalBitcoins

  

LocalBitcoins set a new all-time trading high of $45.7 mln
last week as Bitcoin almost hit $3,000.

Data compiled by Coin Dance confirms the week ending May 27 was the P2P marketplace’s busiest ever with $45,710,741 changing hands. Unlike previous records, the latest high was the result of a broad trend across all LocalBitcoins markets as traders rushed to cash in on Bitcoin’s steep climb. While not yet shown by the statistics, trading likely tailed off equally as steeply through Saturday as prices corrected below $2,000.

An additional factor accounting for steep rises in “banked” countries could well have been exchanging slowdowns, especially the problems faced by Coinbase, driving traders to less lucrative but considerably faster options such as marketplaces. Depending upon the country, LocalBitcoins traders will have faced rates of over $3,000 per coin or even higher. Last week, Cointelegraph reported that in South Korea, even official exchanges were quoting up to $4,500 for one Bitcoin. LocalBitcoins, meanwhile, also appeared to be suffering technical difficulties on Sunday, resolving them without giving specific details to users.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about – TCC-Bitcoin.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Citi Launches Blockchain-
Based Payments Service with Nasdaq for Private Equity

A major U.S. bank and financial exchange have married two blockchain-based systems

to enable clients who are raising funds or swapping private shares through Nasdaq to take advantage of payment services provided by Citi. The Citi-Nasdaq partnership is one of the first examples of an enterprise blockchain system to enter production. Citi says the project went live on Monday in an announcement at the annual Consensus conference in New York City. Over the past year, many banks and financial institutions have completed proofs of concept for projects that rely on blockchain or distributed ledger technology. But so far, few of those projects have graduated into functioning systems.

Nasdaq launched a blockchain-based platform called Linq in 2015 designed for private equity, but the system lacks the ability to process payments—it is mainly used to record ownership of shares. Investors or issuers had to leave the system and initiate a wire transfer to pay for shares once they were traded on Linq. With Monday’s announcement, Nasdaq integrated Linq with Citi’s WorldLink Payment Services through a new offering that Citi c CitiConnect for Blockchain. The offering allows Nasdaq to transfer a payment request from Linq to Citi as soon as a share is bought or sold. The bank then automatically processes that request through WorldLink, which Citi clients primarily use to make payments that require foreign currency exchange.

To make the integration work, Citi and Nasdaq developers had to create several new features, including a way for Linq to automatically retrieve an exchange rate request from Citi in a customer’s local currency, share that rate with the customer, allow the customer to accept the rate, and share the customer’s wiring instructions with Citi. (Individual investors need not hold a Citi bank account in order to participate.)

At first, the Citi-Nasdaq collaboration will focus on structured liquidity programs. The popularity of these programs has grown in step with a broader trend: Increasingly, U.S. companies are staying private for longer. As a result, early investors and employees who hold equity in a company must also wait longer to access the cash that their shares represent. Structured liquidity programs allow a group of early investors or employees to sell their shares for cash to new investors long before the company goes public.

Within Linq, a record of those shares will be preserved on a distributed ledger to which only the parties involved in the trade have access. Similarly, through CitiConnect for Blockchain, a record of payment is also added to the same ledger as soon as it is processed. On both sides of the system, this creates a “golden record” of the transaction and payment that either party can refer back to in case of disputes. The Citi and Nasdaq systems are built on a unified code base called Chain Core provided by Chain, a company that specializes in applying blockchain technology to financial services. Chain Core includes application program interfaces and software development kits to allow customers to adapt it for their own purposes. Nasdaq and Citi Venture have both invested in Chain.

“Nasdaq Linq, which we built on top of Chain Core, is completely different from the CitiConnect for Blockchain product,” says Adam Ludwig, CEO of Chain. “Both connect to a Chain Core underneath, those Chain Cores talk to each other on a shared ledger, they form a network, but they have their own separate IP.”  Chain, Citi, and Nasdaq began working on the project in April of 2016. Private equity has become a popular focus area for those interested in finance and blockchain technology because it has a low volume of trades. Fund managers and entrepreneurs may spend weeks or months completing a single deal.

Some blockchains have shown a limited ability to scale, which raises concerns about the technology’s ability to handle much larger volumes of transactions within seconds. To stress test Chain’s technology, Nasdaq required the company to run an entire day’s worth of trades from the public exchange through their system—which Ludwin says consists of more transactions than the Bitcoin blockchain handles in a year. “Nasdaq knew there’s no way you bring this type of infrastructure to run the public equities business first,” Ludwin says. “You don’t start there. You start in an area where you have more control over the end-to-end process.”

For decades, Nasdaq has provided a central clearinghouse for investors to trade shares of public companies through the Nasdaq Stock Exchange. Nasdaq’s Private Market, launched just four years ago, was Nasdaq’s attempt to allow private funds and companies to exchange options and shares with investors and employees. With its 2015 debut, Linq provided private parties operating in Nasdaq’s Private Market with the ability to issue or receive a digital record of ownership linked to a blockchain. For a private company, these digital records could theoretically replace paper stock certificates. With the new payment service integration, a company or fund manager could potentially raise a round of investments entirely through Linq.

Since its launch, it’s not clear how many of Nasdaq’s clients have opted to use Linq. Neither Nasdaq nor Citi were willing to share projections for the volume of trades they expect to pass from Nasdaq to CitiConnect for Blockchain in the project’s first year. At the height of activity, there could be hundreds to thousands of transactions flowing through Linq, according to someone familiar with the platform who wished to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak about it publicly. Nelson Griggs of Nasdaq said during the announcement on Monday at Consensus that a small transaction on the broader Nasdaq Private Market would hold a value of $50 million, and a large one would consist of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about – TCC-Bitcoin.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Why The Need?

While the Internet has unleashed a wealth of opportunities for creative work, protecting content has posed a big challenge, especially for independent producers of digital art, literature and even computer software. Nathan Lands, the company CEO, told CCN in July he planned to develop artificial intelligence to create unique fingerprints for all copyrighted works to protect copyrights and make sure artists get paid. He compared it to Youtube’s Content ID system for the entire Internet.

Funding Now Totals $1.5 Million

The new $950,000 in funding raises Binded’s funding to $1.5 million. The new investors include Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper; Mistletoe, which is led by Taizo Son, the founder of GungHo, a gaming company; M&Y Growth Partners; Tokyo Founders Fund; Vectr Ventures; and Social Starts. Lands said bringing on Japanese investors will help make the copyright the global standard. Such a standard is needed given the fact that in the U.S., to file a copyright infringement lawsuit it is necessary to register a new copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office.

Lands see Binded’s platform as an intermediate step, one that is less costly and time-consuming than registration, it creates an independent record that should carry legal weight. Lands said the intention is to democratize copyright. He said the Binded product will always be free. In time, more services will be added that the company could charge for, such as registering with the Copyright Office.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about – TCC-Bitcoin.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Blockchain Moves Ahead With Nasdaq-Citi Platform,
Hyperledger and Ethereum Growth

  

Investors in private company securities on Nasdaq

can use Citi’s cross-border payments facility and blockchain to buy, sell and settle transactions. Nasdaq and City Treasury and Trade Solutions announced today they have developed a new integrated payment solution that enables stray straight-throughout processing and automates reconciliation by using a distributed ledger to record and transmit payment instructions. They have run a  number of transactions through the CitiConnect for Blockchain connectivity platform and the Linq Platform powered by the Nasdaq Financial Framework, the companies said in their announcement.

Nasdaq has been early in experimenting with blockchain for private securities which don’t trade on an exchange but can generate significant paperwork as they are bought and sold. At the Futures Industry Association (FIA) conference in Chicago in November 2015, Fredrik Voss, vice president for blockchain innovation at Nasdaq, said shares in private equity deals are deployed in paper certificates and transferring them is very time-consuming.  At the time he said Nasdaq was in a pilot with five clients.

This integration can allow businesses such as Nasdaq Private Market to address the challenges of liquidity in private securities by streamlining payment transactions between multiple parties, their announcement said. Key benefits include a seamless end-to-end transactional process for private company securities and direct access to global payments from Nasdaq’s Linq platform using CitiConnect for Blockchain and WorldLink Payment Services, Citi’s cross-border, multicurrency payments service. The service, which uses Chain’s blockchain infrastructure platform, will provide increased operational efficiency and ease of reconciliation with real-time visibility of payment transactional activity on the blockchain ledger, the announcement added.

"This new payment capability marks a milestone in the global financial sector and represents an important moment in the commercial application of blockchain technology," said Adena Friedman, CEO at Nasdaq. "Through this effective integration of blockchain technology and global financial systems, we can realize greater operational transparency and ease of reconciliation, which can have profound implications for outdated administrative functions in the capital markets.

In another blockchain development today, Hyperledger, an open source organization to promote distributed ledger technology sponsored by the Linux Foundation, announced significant new members including Alphapoint, CITIC, EY and Schroder Investment Management Limited. Hyperledger now has 142 members, a 373 percent increase since the project was announced with 30 members in February of 2016. he Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, which has more than tripled in size, today announced several new financial services members including Broadridge, DTCC and the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, which oversees licensed businesses in the state.

Ethereum is a blockchain-based, general purpose, decentralized application platform, enabling smart contract functionality, the DTCC said in its announcement. The technology is expected to improve banking trade settlement latency, increase transparency in supply chains and create peer-to-peer markets where intermediaries typically were previously needed between counterparties. Ethereum has a heavy representation of financial services firms — the founding members of the EEA rotating board include Accenture, Banco Santander, BlockApps, BNY Mellon, CME Group, ConsenSys, IC3, Intel, J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, and Nuco. Founding members include BBVA, ING, Credit Suisse, Thomson Reuters and UBS among others.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about – TCC-Bitcoin.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member