“‘The Senate may consider blockchain‘ if its 100 members must vote remotely, staffers wrote. They also proposed voting on end-to-end encryption platforms, and via a military-esque “air-gapped” communications system akin to those presidents and generals use.
Assuming one could prevent a 51 percent attack and also shore up any bugs, cryptographic or otherwise, the staffers were bullish on blockchain voting in the Senate. They wrote that it adds transparency and lowers the risk of incorrect vote tallies.”
“Iran’s parliament voted to institute a new currency as coronavirus and sanctions hyperinflate the rial. The new law dictates the transition from rial to the toman — valued at 10,000 rials — within the next two years.
Back in 2018, Iranian authorities set an official exchange rate at some 42,000 rial to the dollar. According to Radio Free Europe, black market trading had the U.S. dollar selling for 156,000 rials. The toman would cut four zeroes off of current rates, but may well run into the same problems that have stymied the rial.“
“VeChain, Mastercard and Alipay are among the heavy hitters backing the new APAC Provenance Council, which has already secured millions in funding for supply chain tracking and financing pilots throughout the Asia Pacific region.
The consortium will provide comprehensive solutions for authenticating and tracking food, wine and produce using blockchain, with a particular focus on the $76 billion of exports from Australia to China.
Products can be tracked using VeChain as the public blockchain or Mastercard Provenance as the permissioned ledger. Australia’s share in the value of exports to China reached a record 38% in 2019.”
“Ethereum’s network is experiencing its busiest days in 10 months amid increased issuance of stablecoins and the runup to Ethereum 2.0. As of April 21, the market capitalization of all stablecoins operating on Ethereum’s blockchain was over $9 billion.
The uptick in the demand for and the issuance of stablecoins has coincided with the coronavirus-induced dollar shortage influencing the global economy.
The economic impacts of COVID-19 have created USD shortages around the world, especially in emerging markets. As such, USD stablecoins could be providing an alternative to physical dollars in jurisdictions experiencing stricter capital controls and currency devaluation.”
“Daily exchange volume is far higher in 2020, we have a much broader array of market participants, larger market players, more established exchanges and a far more developed derivatives market.
This means that “the market is more mature and efficient: the market is better at pricing-in future events.
For now, Tsavliris thinks that the options market could be more risk averse. ‘The market is more concerned about the downside of Bitcoin dropping in price, than the potential upside.'”
See Also: Sell the News? Why the Post-Halving Bitcoin Price Drop Isn’t Guaranteed
See Also: Bitcoin Price May Drop After Halving, Historical Data Shows
“Holders of Kyber Network Crystal (KNC), an Ethereum-based (ERC-20) token, will be able to delegate their tokens and voting power to StakeWith.US’s staking pool, ATLAS, when the network’s Katalyst upgrade is completed by the end of June.
This seems like a logical tie-up and would allow KNC token holders who are either too busy or don’t feel comfortable enough to vote on KyberDAO initiatives to delegate their votes to an informed third party and still receive voting rewards.
It’s interesting to see staking providers, such as StakeWithUs, working closer with DAOs. Collaboration will lead a healthy debate around governance and proxy smart contracts.”
“IBM, Merck, Walmart and KPMG’s drug-tracing blockchain pilot has exceeded the benchmarks outlined by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
In their final report to the FDA, the partners called distributed ledger technology (DLT) a safety-enhancing answer to the U.S. Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA), which gives the pharmaceutical industry until 2024 to implement stringent new electronic tracing requirements on drug packaging.
The trial began in June 2019 and the project was built on Hyperledger Fabric.”
“The protocol – a sharded, Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain – operates in a similar design space as the forthcoming Ethereum 2.0 and the existing Cosmos network.
The network will operate under a Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus algorithm administered by the NEAR Foundation and the 40 or so validators who purchased tokens from the foundation. Phase 2 and Phase 3 will transition the blockchain to a PoS system and community governance following general testing.”
“The lead developer on the Litecoin Mimblewimble (MW) project, David Burkett, has now built a functional testing framework and started to integrate the development work done so far into the Litecoin codebase.
Burkett predicted that MW would be running on the Litecoin testnet by the end of the summer.“
See Also: Zcash Fully Shielded Transactions Jump 70% to New Record in April
See Also: Spanish Multinational Bank BBVA to Explore Zero-Knowledge Proofs
“Based on data from McCaleb’s known addresses, the Ripple co-founder appears to be liquidating his supply of tokens on a regular basis. The Stellar CTO still has billions of XRP tokens available in his wallets — nearly 4.7 billion as of February 2020.
McCaleb is a key figure in cryptocurrency’s history, having created the Mt. Gox exchange and co-founded Stellar. He also co-founded OpenCoin in 2012, which later became Ripple, and was allocated 9.5 billion XRP when the 100 billion supply was pre-mined.”
“The lawyers representing both sides confirmed that they are not planning to file any motions that could delay the trial and are eagerly looking to the opportunity to prove their case in court.”
The Disrupt 