The crypto market remains range bound with a slight positive bias. Most of the cryptos have gained between 0.5% and 2% in the past five trading sessions. Ripple (XRP) and its competitor Stellar (XLM) have recorded gains of 12.5% and 15.8%, respectively. Bitcoin (BTC) has gained about 3% in the past week. One of the reasons that fueled the uptrend is the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) tweet that reveals that the average daily trading volume (ADV) of Bitcoin futures has gone up by 41% in the recent quarter (Q3), versus the previous quarter (Q2). The CME futures report also states that the number of open contracts, referred to as the open interest (OI), on Bitcoin futures, has increased 19% in Q3, 2018.
Government initiatives
The Government of Gibraltar has entered into a partnership with the University of Gibraltar to form an advisory group focused on the creation of blockchain-related educational courses.
The New Technologies in Education (NTiE) group is supposedly a partnership program between the government, the University of Gibraltar, and several leading technology firms in the country. Following the development of new technologies in Gibraltar, the NTiE will deal with the increasing requirement for related competencies both in the private and governmental sectors.
The courses, which are anticipated to be launched later this year, will also be supported by considerable feedback from main industries that are in the process of obtaining a license from the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission.
China’s top-level internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), has unveiled fresh draft guidelines for blockchain-based data service providers. The rough copy, available for public discussion until November the 2nd, suggests twenty-three articles for monitoring all companies or organizations offering blockchain-based data services to the Chinese public. Under the planned rules, all such organizations would necessarily enroll with the CAC within ten days of launching their blockchain platforms.
The rules also necessitate service providers to repress content that is considered a risk to national safety or to “disrupt the social order,” and to permit enforcement agencies to examine user information stored on their platform. Notably, one of those rules makes it compulsory for service providers to request clients to sign up using their real names, phone numbers and national ID card numbers, in order to negate the apparent risks of a fake blockchain-based system that functions without monitoring by a centralized authority.
Private sector initiatives
Visa is preparing its blockchain-based digital identity system for cross-border payments to be introduced in the first quarter of 2019.
The system, called Visa B2B Connect, will offer a block-chain digital identity solution for finance-related firms to handle cross-border payments safely. The system supposedly tokenizes confidential business data such as banking details and account numbers and grants them a distinct cryptographic identifier that will be utilized for dealings on the platform.
From a technical viewpoint, the solution will put together a Hyperledger Fabric framework (hosted by the Linux Foundation after developing in consultation with IBM) with Visa’s “core assets,” which the news release claims will set up a scalable permissible network for employment in the financial domain.
Europe’s largest port, the Port of Rotterdam, has teamed up with Dutch bank ABN AMRO and IT subsidiary of Samsung to trial Blockchain for shipping. As per Samsung SDS, the IT and tech division established by Korean tech giant Samsung, the test will concentrate on shipping containers from an undisclosed manufacturing plant in Asia to the port of Rotterdam.
The first trial is completed by the three parties specified above, with an intention to introduce the system to other companies later on. According to the Port of Rotterdam’s official announcement, the trial is set to begin in January 2019, while the outcome will be declared in February.
The official press release further states that the infrastructure behind the project was built by BlockLab, a subsidiary of Rotterdam Port Authority. The system also involves two other decentralized platforms, Samsung’s Nexledger, unveiled in 2017, and Corda, an enterprise-level open-source blockchain platform launched by software firm R3.
Paul Smits, CFO of Rotterdam Port Authority, has revealed that the shipping logistics from China to Rotterdam with the present framework involves at least 28 parties.
The Dutch multinational banking and financial services group ING has confirmed the launch of its open-source blockchain tool Zero-Knowledge Set Membership (ZKSM). ZKSM, which works as a privacy “improvement” to distributed ledger technology (DLT), intends to offer validation of certain alphanumeric figures without compromising that data’s overall safety. According to ING, the software allows a blockchain to verify that part of the data belongs to a specific document without disclosing its complete properties.
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