Nine major investment banks including J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs have partnered with distributed ledger startup R3CEV. The partnership will see collaborative efforts between the institutions take shape, work that will include the development of standards for using blockchain technology within the broader financial industry. The banking group includes Credit Suisse, State Street, UBS, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, BBVA, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland. Many on the list have previously announced independent efforts to study blockchain tech, and the banks are said to be investing money in R3 as part of the effort, according to a report by The Financial Times. The banks and R3 will form working groups as part of the development of blockchain prototypes…
If the first day of Scaling Bitcoin focused on fostering constructive dialogue, day two moved the conversation toward defining how that dialogue would proceed following the event and how such discussion could coalesce into a clearer vision for the open-source technology’s future. Topics of discussion at the event still focused most directly on the larger question of how the bitcoin network could support increased transaction levels. However, these presentations were buoyed by musings on the trade-offs that will need to be weighed should the community want to honor the project’s original democratizing vision. For example, some of the day’s talks occasionally provided a broad, analytical look at current proposals, delving into the theoretical…
Billed as a potential venue for debate on more heated issues surrounding the long-term viability of the bitcoin network, Scaling Bitcoin saw a who’s who of developers decamp to Montreal to talk about the underlying technical issues facing bitcoin yesterday. Often reduced in conversation to mentions of its price or market cap, Scaling Bitcoin succeeded at showcasing the breadth of challenges posed by bitcoin’s approach to incentivizing disparate parties to maintain a common and equally beneficial distributed resource. Held in Montreal, day one of the much-anticipated event focused more on how incentivizes for network participants should be balanced and less on the positives and negatives of any of the competing proposals – whether Bitcoin Core, its…
Bitcoin in the Headlines is a weekly analysis of bitcoin media coverage and its impact. After weeks of relative quiet, the bitcoin and blockchain industry got a much needed publicity boost this week as startups raised $45m in newly announced venture capital rounds. The vast majority of the attention was awarded to one blockchain technology startup, San Francisco-based Chain, which turned heads for attracting an impressive cast of VC investors to its $30m Series B round. Investors involved included financial incumbents such as US bank holding company Capital One, financial services technology provider Fiserv and global credit card giant Visa. Also contributing to the round were US stock exchange Nasdaq; Citi Ventures; and former Bank of America CEO David Coulter….
CoinDesk’s inaugural conference, Consensus 2015, took place at New York’s TimesCenter yesterday with speakers including Blythe Masters, Kosta Peric and Wences Casares. The afternoon sessions were kicked off by CoinDesk’s Joon Ian Wong, who led a one-on-one session with Debra Brackeen, the global head at Citi’s Innovation Center. Brackeen explained how Citi became involved in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space and said, during her approximately four years at the company, digital money had been part of the conversation. Citi funded its first crypto project in January 2014, which dealt with state-backed digital currencies. This led the bank to be much more proactive in developing a portfolio of activities in and around blockchain…
CoinDesk’s inaugural conference took place at the TimesCenter in the heart of New York today, with over 500 guests in attendance. Garrick Hileman, a CoinDesk analyst and economic historian at London School of Economics, kicked off the day’s sessions with an overview of the current state of bitcoin and blockchain technology. Next was the day’s first panel, Trust, Permissions, Openness: The Future of Innovation on the Blockchain, moderated by Emin Gun Sirer of Cornell University and featuring Adam Ludwin, of Chain.com; Greg Maxwell of Blockstream; Bitcoin XT developer Mike Hearn of – joining via video link – and Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum. The panellists explored the obstacles facing greater adoption and possible applications of blockchain…