The Digital Revolution
Most Influential Blockchain Personality 2017
Blockchain is now powering a new “operating system” for the banking world: HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, and Bank of America are all behind this ambitious project.
A new Internet of Things (IoT) platform: Samsung and IBM have partnered to use blockchain to create a new IoT platform… with the IoT market predicted to surpass 20 billion devices by 2020, this could be a huge breakthrough.
Healthcare: Famed U.S. university MIT is working on moving health records directly onto blockchain technology.
Supply chain: Alibaba has begun using blockchain to fight China’s fake food problem by tracking genuine food products through the supply chain.
Blockchain as a service: One of the past decade’s most successful IPOs was Salesforce.com, which has gained more than 2,300%, dominating the software-as-a-service market… Today, Microsoft has already launched “blockchain as a service”!
The State Bank of India (India’s Largest Bank) will launch two blockchain production-ready beta solutions [smart contracts and a common know your customer (KYC) platform] in december 2017, ready for use to 27 major Indian banks of the ‘BankChain’ consortium.
The Smart Dubai Office has bagged an award for its Dubai Blockchain Strategy at the Smart Cities Expo and World Congress in Barcelona.
Launched in 2016, the Dubai Blockchain Strategy sees the Dubai government aim – among many objectives – to execute all of its transactions and place all its documents on a blockchain by the year 2020. Dubai intends to become the world’s first city that runs on blockchain technology. It is already being implemented or developed in a designated urban area.
Singapore will conclude its experiment with blockchain technology and its own digital currency next year (2018) before deciding whether to commercialize the trial, the country’s regulator has told CNBC.
In 2016, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced “Project Ubin“, an exploration of blockchain or distributed ledger technology.
The project is split into five phases. The first, which looked at establishing a proof-of-concept design to conduct inter-bank payments using blockchain technology, was completed earlier this year (2017). The second phase, which finished in early october 2017, saw the development of three different models for inter-bank payments using blockchain.
Now, the MAS trial is looking at delivering securities, cross border payments and, finally, using a digital version of the Singapore dollar to carry out real transactions and buy assets.
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Marc Andreesen, the inventor of the first Web browser and one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capitalists, had this to say about blockchain…
“We’re quite confident… that when we’re sitting here in 20 years, we’ll be talking about [bitcoin’s blockchain technology] the way we talk about the Internet today.”
-Marc Andreesen, inventor of the first browser and top Venture Capitalist
A group of UBS analysts told the South China Morning Post:
“Just as internet has transformed our lives with email, e-commerce, or smartphone apps, we believe blockchain as an infrastructure technology can power future disruptive technologies through distributive ledgers, smart contracts, tokens or identity management.”