Alternative lenders are looking for, well, alternatives to survive tough times. Matt Harris of Bain Capital Ventures commented to Bank Innovation last Friday that alternative lenders might need to give up equity or make other concessions in order to secure funding. He was proven correct just days later when #ProsperRead More
Bank Innovation
People working in big companies experimenting with #blockchain we receive PoC proposals every week, and in most cases the selling argument is always how cheap the #technology is, with phrases like “you don´t need any special integration, we can set up a private network or a public node in this or that cloud” (always very well known clouds with Blockchain as a Service offering). I always wonder the value of those PoCs not integrated with core #banking systems or at least with a sandbox environment.
Most PoCs I have seen so far not take into account the security and regulatory requirements when launching a financial service into production
I mean, when we decided to build our own blockchain banking infrastructure the goal was to build a blockchain platform that meets banking security architectural standards and is easy to integrate with existing core banking so that going into production could be done straight away. The first thing we did was to hold meetings with our architects to understand our current architecture (fo both the core banking and digital extensions) with the special focus on the security, APIs and microservices pieces. After those meetings, we realised that we had to change some of our initial assumptions for the blockchain technical design, based on the PoCs we had run outside the banking infrastructure.
The problem is that this technology was born to replace the banking industry and most start-ups and IT vendors have no real experience in the banking industry and the requirements around security in payments or customers personal data and credentials, or they just suggest you to abandon the current core banking and use blockchain as a standalone piece. So, most PoCs I have seen so far not take into account the security and regulatory requirements when launching a financial service into production, or even worse a profitable business model (but profitability is another story I may write about in future). At the end, all the work done during the PoC is not valid and has to be thrown away and remanufactured from scratch.
When designing a PoC we must take into account the requirements for integration with the IT systems
So, my humble recommendation when designing a PoC we must take into account the requirements for integration with the IT systems since it can impact the customer experience, platform productivity, and even the investment costs/ business case when going live. Otherwise, the movement from PoC to commercial pilot/ launch could be a nightmare.
[linkedinbadge URL=”https://es.linkedin.com/in/roberto-garc%C3%ADa-938a333″ connections=”off” mode=”icon” liname=”Roberto García”] is Innovation Manager at Santander Group (IT&Operations Global Division)
By Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott, co-authors, #Blockchain Revolution.
Blockchain #technology is the most important invention in computing in a generation because, for the first time in human history, we have at our disposal a truly native digital medium for peer-to-peer value exchange. Blockchain, a vast global platform based on a distributed ledger, establishes the rules — in the form of computations and heavy duty encryption — that enable two or more parties to transact or do business without needing a third party to establish trust.
Rather than relying on a bank, government or other intermediary to create trust, the blockchain ensures it through mass collaboration and clever code. Trust is built into the system, which is why we call blockchain the Trust Protocol.
Taken one step further, the blockchain also acts as a ledger of accounts, a database, a notary, a sentry, and clearing house, all by consensus. We believe it is the second generation of the Internet and holds the potential to rewire the economic power grid and shake up the old order of things for the better.
Here are the five main myths about blockchains:
(Read an excerpt of our book, Blockchain Revolution, here.)
1. Blockchain good, #bitcoin bad
Many people, especially those in the financial services industry, are excited about the potential of blockchain technology but believe that digital currencies like bitcoin are unfeasible, undesirable or even dangerous.
Whereas the bitcoin blockchain is entirely permissionless — that is, anyone can access it via an Internet-enabled device and interact with it like they would the open Internet — permissioned blockchains require users to have certain credentials, like a license to operate on that particular blockchain, granted by the members or some governing body. Permissioned blockchains use distributed ledger technology without having a digital currency attached.
At first blush, these private and permissioned blockchains appear to have a few clear advantages. For one, members can easily change the rules if they so desire, as they only need to get their small group to agree to a change, rather than convincing a huge network of people. Costs can be kept down, as transactions only need validation from the members themselves, not a network of millions of participants. This streamlining could reduce electricity usage too, which is good for the environment. Regulators might also prefer them over public blockchains, like the bitcoin blockchain, because they need not be anonymous or pseudonymous.
But not so fast. The easier it is to change the rules, the easier it is to flaunt them. Intentionally limiting certain freedoms or access can inhibit neutrality. With no open value innovation, the technology is more likely to stagnate and become vulnerable. Further blockchains tied to a digital currency like bitcoin have a built-in system to incentivize people to do the work necessary to validate transactions.
2. The main opportunity for blockchains is in the financial services industry.
The financial services industry can transform itself around blockchain technology, if it can find the leadership to do it. The technology holds great promise to revolutionize the industry — from #banks to credit card networks and everything in between. When everyone shares the same public, distributed ledger, settlements occur instantly for all to see. Banks could speed up the metabolism of the system, and cut out massive costs. The smartest incumbents will use blockchain technology strategically, including permissionless systems to penetrate new markets like the unbanked and bring new services to market.
Yet financial services are the tip of the iceberg.
Blockchains can disrupt the disrupters like Uber. They will be at the heart of the Internet of Things — animating the physical world by, for example, allowing smart devices to contract, transact and securely share data peer-to-peer through blockchains.
They can reinvent democracy by making politicians accountable to citizens through smart contract. Imagine if a politician only received her salary or an appropriation for a project after fulfilling pre-set objectives laid bare in that smart contract. She would be beholden to the people, not powerful interests or donors.
3. Blockchains are really a B2B thing. They won’t affect me personally.
We’re convinced that this technology will change our economy, our institutions and day-to-day life in more dramatic ways than the first era of the Internet.
These are but a few ways blockchain will help you.
The list goes on.
4. Blockchains have too many problems for them to be feasible.
Some say the technology is not ready for prime time; that it’s still hard to use, and that the killer applications are still nascent. Other critics point to the massive amount of energy needed to reach consensus in the network: What happens when thousands or perhaps millions of interconnected blockchains are each processing billions of transactions a day? Are the incentives great enough for people to participate and behave safely over time, and not try to overpower the network? Is blockchain technology the worst job killer ever?
Our research suggests such concerns should not go into a category called “Reasons why this is a bad idea” but rather into a category called “Implementation challenges.”
5. Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto
Early this month, Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright claimed to be the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.
We know for a fact that he is not the sole creator. The reason? We — Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott — are among those who created bitcoin.
Let us explain. Whomever wrote the original bitcoin paper and protocol got things off the ground. Then he (or she) disappeared, leaving it to an ever-growing community to carry on. This community is now responsible for the vast majority of code and other content related to bitcoin. In that sense, we are all Satoshi.
Which is why it doesn’t really matter who wrote the original paper. In other open source communities, such as Linux, there is an ultimate arbitrator. Bitcoin, and for that matter all permissionless blockchains, will never have such a benevolent dictator. As such the entire ecosystem needs to take the next steps in achieving bottom-up, self-organizing governance to steward these extraordinary resources forward.
[linkedinbadge URL=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/dontapscott” connections=”off” mode=”icon” liname=”Alex Tapscott “] is the founder and CEO of Northwest Passage Ventures. Don Tapscott is CEO of The Tapscott Group and an Inaugural Fellow at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto.
This post is adapted from Don & Alex Tapscott’s new book, BLOCKCHAIN REVOLUTION: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World and originally appeared in Thomson Reuters.
Connect with the Authors on Twitter at @dtapscott and @alextapscott
Nick Szabo proposed the idea of smart contracts back in 1997
Satoshi Nakamoto incorporated the idea of a smart contract in his Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System whitepaper. Instead of a vending machine safe keeping snacks and cash, and dispensing snacks plus change in exchange for cash, a distributed ledger, controlled by smart contract code, keeps account of how many bitcoins are held by which account and determines if new coins can be issued or existing ones transferred.
So what happens when the vending machine fails to give you back the right change? Most likely you look for a sticker on the vending machine with a phone number to call. You call the number, tell the operator the machine number, they pull up the instructions on what to do in case of failure, based on clauses of the vending machine legal contract, and hopefully proceed to solve the issue.
Wait, hold on, the operator follows instructions based on legal contract clauses! So there is an overall legal contract, some of contract clauses are performed by the vending machine’s smart contract code, others are performed by people. #Bitcoin’s design deliberately focused on a pure digital asset exclusively controlled by distributed-consensus-seeking smart contract code, which means that all legal clauses are covered by smart contract code, and hence there is no need for an encompassing legal contract, but for most real world use cases, including vending machines, you do need an overarching legal contract, and autonomous agents – be they humans, organizations or smart contracts, distributed or centrally operated, to ensure performance of one or more legal clauses.
Traditional legal contracts are unstructured paper or electronic documents that are not machine-readable, not surprising given they were only designed for human consumption. They also tend to be declarative, not procedural in nature i.e. they specify what should happen, not how.
That is why often there are operating instructions and procedures that describe how humans should do what things in order to comply with legal clauses. It is therefore useful to think of smart contracts as procedural code that is executed by a centralized or distributed-consensus-seeking platform in order to enforce performance of one or more declarative legal contract clauses, but in order to do that, the legal contract’s automation salient details must be machine readable.
This is where Ian Grigg’s idea of Ricardian Contract comes in
Whilst the focus of a Ricardian Contract is in recognizing that financial instruments e.g. currencies, bonds, shares should be issued as human and machine readable contracts, same principles can be in my opinion applied more broadly to any kind of legal contract, so as to be fully or partially enforced by both human and smart contract autonomous agents.
This is by no means a new idea. Primavera de Filippi published an excellent Legal Framework For #Crypto-Ledger Transactions post about integrating legal and smart contracts. She cites CommmonAccord, a global legal contract template system, as a means to create Ricardian Contracts.
Eris proposes an alternative eris: legal system, based on legal_markdown templates and CommonForm renderer, for what they call cryptographically-certain duel integration process:
#Blockchain smart contracts are by no means the only way to enforce Ricardian Contract clauses. Open-Transactions project, see whitepaper, implements financial instruments as Ricardian Contracts, processed by a transaction server based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any willing parties who wish to contract with each other to enjoy the benefits of a server without needing to trust it &8211; a solution that demotes transaction servers to mere notaries, only able to counter-sign contracts that have first been signed by their clients. Barclays’ Dr Lee Braine recently presented yet another alternative vision when he demonstrated an ISDA Master Agreement proof of concept on R3’s Corda &8211; a blockchain inspired platform lead by Richard Gendal Brown &8211; R3’s CTO.
One of the issues I foresee with the emergence of many different template and markup standards is the very plurality of standards. How do you know that the term in contract A is same or different in contract B. How can you create a nice looking document, yet mark it up in such a way as to make it machine readable. Turns out most of these questions have already been solved by the Semantic Webproject in the form of RDFa standard that embeds Linked Data in HTML, an extension to HTML5 that helps you markup things like People, Places, Events, Recipes and Reviews.
It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTML, HTTP, RDF (allows creation of unambiguous structured data taxonomies) and URIs, but rather than using them to serve web pages for human readers, it extends them to share information in a way that can be read automatically by computers. RDFa was originally designed for Search Engines and Web Services to use this markup to generate better search listings and give users better visibility on the Web, so that people can find websites more easily, but in my opinion can be applied without alteration to Ricardian Contracts.
Let’s provide a simple example – a Ricardian Contract for weather insurance. Here is what a user would see in their web-browser:
—-
Example:
I, Alex Batlin, authorise the transfer from address ‘abcdwerr&8217; to address &8217;24dsfrg3434′ using smart contract agent address &8217;24dsfrg3434&8242; of &8217;10&8217; unit(s) of GBP pounds held by smart contract address &8216;4854398578934&8217; on the condition that website &8216;Weather.com&8216; confirms that &8216;0.5&8217; cumulative inches of rain did indeed fall between start date &8216;9:00AM UTC 10th of March, 2015&8217; and finish date &8216;9:00AM UTC 11th of March, 2015&8217; in country &8216;GB&8217; and postcode &8216;EC2Y 0RT’.
&8212;-
Hopefully pretty much self-explanatory, but on first glance not very useful for machine consumption. Let’s have a look at the underlying HTML:
&8212;-
<html>
<head>
<title>Example <a href=”http://reference.com/master-agreement-123&#8243;>Weather Insurance</a> Ricardian Contract</title>
</head>
<body prefix=&8221;rc: http://batlin.com/ricardian#&8221;>
<h1>Example Weather Insurance Ricardian Contract</h1>
<p typeof=&8221;rc:RicardianContract&8221;>
<span>I, Alex Batlin, authorise the transfer</span>
<span property=&8221;rc:hasTransferAuthorisation&8221; typeof=&8221;rc:TransferAuthorisation&8221;>
from address &8216;<span property=&8221;rc:hasFromAddress&8221;>abcdwerr</span>&8217;
to address &8216;<span property=&8221;rc:hasToAddress&8221;>24dsfrg3434</span>&8217;
using smart contract agent address &8216;<span property=&8221;rc:#hasAgentAddress&8221;>24dsfrg3434</span>&8217;
of &8216;<span property=&8221;rc:hasInstrumentUnits&8221;>10</span>&8217; unit(s)
of GBP pounds held by smart contract address &8216;<span property=&8221;rc:hasInstrumentAddress&8221;>4854398578934</span>&8217;
</span>
<span property=&8221;rc:hasTransferCondition&8221; typeof=&8221;rc:TransferCondition&8221;>
on the condition that
website &8216;<a href=&8221;https://www.weather.com&8221; property=&8221;rc:hasOracleUrl&8221;>Weather.com</a>&8217;
confirms that &8216;<span property=&8221;rc:hasCumulativeInchesOfRainDetected&8221;>0.5</span>&8217; cumulative inches of rain
did indeed fall between start date &8216;<span property=&8221;rc:hasStartDate&8221; content=&8221;2016-03-10T09:00:00<“>9:00AM UTC 10th of March, 2015</span>&8217; and
finish date &8216;<span property=&8221;rc:hasFinishDate&8221; content=&8221;2016-03-11T09:00:00<&8220;>9:00AM UTC 11th of March, 2015</span>&8217;
in country &8216;<span property=&8221;rc:hasCountryCode&8221;>GB</span>&8217;
and postcode &8216;<span property=&8221;rc:hasPostCode&8221;>EC2Y 0RT</span>&8217;.
</span>
</p>
</body>
&8212;-
You will notice that many HTML tags have additional attributes like property and type. When the same document is parsed through an RDFa parser, the following structured data (for this example in Turtle format) is extracted:
&8212;-
@prefix rc: <http://batlin.com/ricardian#> .
[] a rc:RicardianContract;
rc:hasTransferAuthorisation [ a rc:TransferAuthorisation;
rc:hasAgentAddress &8220;24dsfrg3434&8221;;
rc:hasFromAddress &8220;abcdwerr&8221;;
rc:hasInstrumentAddress &8220;4854398578934&8221;;
rc:hasInstrumentUnits &8220;10&8221;;
rc:hasToAddress &8220;24dsfrg3434&8221; ];
rc:hasTransferCondition [ a rc:TransferCondition;
rc:hasCountryCode &8220;GB&8221;;
rc:hasCumulativeInchesOfRainDetected &8220;0.5&8221;;
rc:hasFinishDate &8220;2016-03-11T09:00:00<&8220;;
rc:hasOracleUrl <https://www.weather.com>;
rc:hasPostCode &8220;EC2Y 0RT&8221;;
rc:hasStartDate &8220;2016-03-10T09:00:00<&8221; ] .
&8212;-
You will notice that at the top there is a link to the taxonomy definition file, which means every single property, is completely unambiguous. In fact you can define many different taxonomies or use many shared ones within the same document, which promotes re-use and efficiency, and you can use your client to also pull-in descriptions, labels, additional facts and any rules associated with a property. See if you can read the extract below, from the http://batlin.com/ricardian taxonomy file:
&8212;-
<rdf:Description rdf:about=&8221;http://batlin.com/ricardian#hasAgentAddress&8221;>
<rdfs:label xml:lang=&8221;en&8221;>Agent Address</rdfs:label>
<rdfs:comment xml:lang=&8221;en&8221;>Address of the smart contract responsible for doing the actual condition transfer.</rdfs:comment>
</rdf:Description>
&8212;-
Pretty powerful stuff! It’s worth pointing out that many financial vocabularies or taxonomies like ISO20022 are already expressed in XML Schemas, which can be easily converted to RDF schemas. In another words you do not need to re-invent how create your legal documents, just write them in HTML, which even MS Word supports, you don’t need to re-invent structured data serialization – use RDF, you can use RDFa to mark-up HTML with RDF, and you can reuse existing taxonomies like ISO20022 either by converting them from XML Schema or writing them native in RDF Schema or OWL.
So ok, you have defined your Ricardian Contract as RDFa marked-up HTML document that grants someone the right to withdraw some money from someone’s account based on a pre-specified condition, now what?
This is where I get inspired by Bitcoin – it defines a distributed ledger that safe keeps bitcoins and defines in a smart contract the generic transfer and issuance rules e.g. only allow someone who possesses the correct private key to spend only the ones what they own etc. If I try and create a more generic pattern, lets say on Ethereum, I end up with what I called the Instrument Smart Contract (ISC) – something that defines the procedural rules linked to one or more contractual clauses of a financial instrument Ricardian Contract and keeps ledger of ownership.
Bitcoin actually specifies some of it’s transfer rules via scripts attached to transactions – default one being that a specific key is required to spend the transactions, whilst double spend prevent etc. rules are hardwired into the protocol code. Scripts can support more advanced conditions like multisig. To create a more generic and re-usable pattern, I propose the idea of an Agent Smart Contract (ASC)– something that encapsulates more user specific conditions in procedural code to achieve the declarative end state, again linked to legal clauses.
In effect, the Weather Insurance ASC is granted permission to transfer value held in the GBP ISC from issuer to beneficiary if it is presented with sufficient evidence by the beneficiary. In this example, proof-of-contract and proof-of-weather (a form of proof-of-condition) will be required as evidence. Proof-of-contract is the digitally signed Ricardian Contract expressed as RDFa marked-up HTML document. Proof-of-weather is in this case a digitally signed JSON response from a RESTful API service by Weather.com with contract matching parameters. It could as easily be a smart contract controlled by a smart oracle – if on-chain notary is an advantage.
Here is a, not at all well thought out, process to claim your insurance and get paid:
Note, the ASC may itself be an ISC – meaning that for instance if you buy a bond, the bond gives you the right to get paid coupons from the issuer’s money smart contract. In this way you can implement complex atomic swaps spanning multiple instruments e.g. Delivery vs. Payment, Payment vs. Payment. In fact the ASC may be a good place to implement Interledger’s notary services, as long as the ISC supports ledger-provided escrow. Interledger is a protocol for payments across payment systems. It enables secure transfers between ledgers and allows anyone with accounts on two ledgers to create a connection between them. Ledger-provided escrow removes the need to trust these connectors. Connections can be composed to enable payments between any ledgers, creating a global graph of liquidity or Interledger.
The ASC can also be a good place to implement state (micropayment) channels and off-chain oracles. Many contracts never get exercised e.g. options, insurance – so recording them on-chain is a waste of resource – good enough security can be achieved without use of on-chain smart oracles or storage of contract instance if proof-of-contract and proof-of-condition (in this case weather) is submitted to ASC when the claim needs to be made. Another advantage of this approach versus bundling all logic into the instrument code is flexibility – code can be kept tight and implement core logic, and allow many claim conditions e.g. if the holder of a bond fails to collect coupon payments, but has a credit default swap, this can be activated and money collected from underwriter.
Source: Content from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/crypto-20-musings-combining-ricardian-smart-contracts-alex-batlin and Image from http://www.lyntonweddingvenue.co.uk/hands.jpg
The post Alex Batlin’s Briefing of Crypto 2.0 Musings &8211; Combining Ricardian and Smart Contracts appeared first on Fintech Schweiz Digital Finance News – FintechNewsCH.
#PayPal wants to be at the center of your “financial vibes,” Chief Executive Dan Schulman said to PayPal stockholders on Wednesday. To do so, Schulman continued, PayPal is reinventing itself, alongside the quickly evolving industry. No question, the world of financial services is being redefined by mobile and the digitizationRead More
Bank Innovation
Today we are officially opening up our database of startups through the launch of a #Blockchain Startup Tracker. With over 760+ startups and growing from across the globe it makes it the World’s largest and most comprehensive public database of its kind.
Because we at Blockchain Angels are the World’s largest network of professional investors dedicated to blockchain inc. over 400+ angels and VCs, it means startups listed can quickly and easily gain visibility to the most active investors in the space to increase deal-flow. Being able to directly make submissions themselves and keep their profiles up to date as they progress.
The ecosystem aims to be the go-to resource for investors active in the blockchain space and we have committed teams tracking every public start-up as far back as 2012 including corporate venturing activity. Unlike Coindesk’s data, our data covers everything from basic POCs all the way to Series A.
”The feedback was just hearing about those that have completed their Series A round is often too late for investors. They want to see where the innovation is happening and it’s not always in the obvious places. This gives our network an edge which is why many of the top investors use us for insights”.
Because of the work we do at Blockchain Angels, speaking with at least 2 startups a day, we know who their teams are, the sectors they are targeting, and even what tech stack they are using. Along the way we track if they fold or pivot as well as levels of funding and investment stage.
By signing up by email you can also receive deeper insights and analysis to track trends and significant events live as they happen in a monthly newsletter from our research team who power the tracker headed by Lawrence Lundy.
Data can be segmented live in charts at the Blockchain Angels site and can be embedded live in blogs through a handy widget.
An example of some of the insights investors can expect include:
About Blockchain Angels
Blockchain Angels is a market intelligence and events platform to educate and connect up angel networks and early stage VCs to enable deal-flow for the blockchain community.
http://www.blockchainangels.eu
About Outlier Ventures
Outlier Ventures, the owner of Blockchain Angels, is a blockchain venture builder founded in 2014 which services Outlier Capital LLP to deliver ventures to budget through joint-venturing with a partner ecosystem.
[linkedinbadge URL=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamieburke” connections=”off” mode=”icon” liname=”Jamie Burke”] is founder of Blockchain Angels, CEO @ Outlier Ventures & Outlier Capital LLC
Bitcoins underlying #blockchain #technology is a potential disruptor to the way core businesses have been working. This is the reason why it has been catching everyone’s attention, especially those involved in the financial services industry. The blockchain technology is in fact driving most innovation by #FinTech companies in the present time. Start-ups to well-established companies are involved or interested in putting the blockchain technology to use and benefiting from it in some way or the other.
The idea of applying blockchain technology outside of the realm of #Bitcoin has gained a lot of interest from forward-thinking companies in the past year or so. Blockchain applications are also called “distributed ledger technology” because they remove the need for a centralized database and, like Bitcoin, give every transaction in a particular system a cryptographic hash that can be checked by any member of the group.
In a report published in December, “Beyond the Hype: Blockchain in Capital Markets”, McKinsey said there is great promise in distributed ledger technology but expects that development will require cooperation among market participants, regulators and technologists.
IBM, Intel, Cisco, J.P. Morgan and several other big #banks are among those making a big bet on blockchain. The companies have joined forces to create the Open Ledger Project with the Linux Foundation, with the goal of re-imagining supply chains, contracts and other ways information about ownership and value are exchanged in a digital economy. The Open Ledger Project is described as a development library that will allow businesses to build custom distributed ledger solutions, without needing to rely on open, public blockchain such as those offered by bitcoin and Ethereum. To show its commitment towards the development IBM has open sourced a significant chunk of the blockchain code it has been working on, putting its weight behind the Linux Foundation and its hyper ledger project.
R3 (R3CEV LLC) leading a consortium of 42 financial companies in research and development of blockchain usage in the financial system. The full list of banks signed up are: Banco Santander, Bank of America, Barclays, BBVA, BMO Financial Group, BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, CIBC, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Citi, Commerzbank, Credit Suisse, Danske Bank, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, ING Bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, Macquarie Bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Mizuho Financial Group, Morgan Stanley, National Australia Bank, Natixis, Nomura, Nordea, Northern Trust, OP Financial Group, Scotiabank, State Street, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, Royal Bank of Canada, Royal Bank of Scotland, SEB, Societe Generale, Toronto-Dominion Bank, UBS, UniCredit, U.S. Bancorp, Wells Fargo and Westpac Banking Corporation.
Last week a consortium of 11 giant banks including UBS and Credit Suisse announced that they had completed their first trial run of the idea of using software inspired by the digital currency Bitcoin to move assets around more efficiently was successful.
While all this development was going on Bank of America is trying to steal a march on the latest developments in the technology behind digital currency bitcoin by loading up on blockchain-related patents. BOA has already filed for 15 blockchain-related patents and is currently in the process of drafting another 20 to be submitted to the U.S. Patents and Trademark Office (USPTO) later this month.
Applying the blockchain concept to the world of Finance and IOT offers fascinating possibilities. Right from the time a product completes final assembly till the delivery , payment and service.Blockchain have a part for each process involved in business to make it more efficient, faster and reliable.
Auxesis a startup from IIT Bombay is a blockchain application development company going to release Btc2Bid for its European partners. We welcome entrepreneurs, managers having ideas related with the Blockchain for a cup of coffee to realize your ideas into products.
Thanks for reading you can also find me at facebook.
[linkedinbadge URL=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/kumargauravitc” connections=”off” mode=”icon” liname=”Kumar”]
While #Switzerland might be one of the best locations in the world to set up a business, the country’s own #entrepreneurship ecosystem has not yet reached its full potential, according to the Start-up Monitor foundation.
In a new report, the Start-up Monitor foundation provides an in-depth analysis of entrepreneurial activities in Switzerland. Founded in 2012 by ETH Zurich, University and St.Gallen and University of Basel, the Start-up Monitor foundation is an organization aimed at monitoring and helping develop the startup ecosystem in Switzerland.
The document, entitled ‘The Swiss Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Report 2015/2016,&8217; addresses the strengths and weaknesses of Switzerland&8217;s entrepreneurial scene and suggests that although the country is one of the most competitive and innovative in the world, there are still many challenges to overcome in order to become an internationally recognized “Start-up Nation.”
Switzerland is globally recognized for its stable, transparent and effective institutions, but also its healthy finances, attractive taxes, excellent infrastructure, exceptional capacity for innovation, and world-class education system, and yet, the country does not rank among the most entrepreneurial countries in the world, the report says.
It notes that due to the lack of growth-stage funding, many startups leave Switzerland at this stage to countries with more favorable conditions. &8220;Switzerland needs to ensure funding opportunities not only for seed-stage, but also for the start-up and growth-stages of a venture,&8221; the report says.
It advises for more entrepreneurship education programs on primary and secondary level, and notes that there is a strong need to strengthen a supportive entrepreneurial culture, notably among young people, in order for them to consider entrepreneurship as a desirable, feasible and viable career opportunity.
The document also claims that there is a strong need to focus on ageing workforces, increasing entrepreneurship intentions to prolong working lives and reduce older-age unemployment.
Moreover, the fact that Switzerland is a relatively small market can cause significant scalability challenges for new ventures.
The report lists a number of initiatives that have been undertaken to foster the Swiss entrepreneurial spirit, among which the new innovation center set to launch later this year in Dubendorf. The Swiss Innovation Park is a project of the federal government, cantons, science and economy, which will be dedicated to industrial research.
Another initiative is Digital Zurich 2025, which focuses on turning the greater Zurich area into a leading European center for digital innovation. It aims at being a platform where academics and experts in information and communication #technology would meet and collaborate. Digital Zurich 2025 is also planning an annual congress and a Swiss Investor Summit where startups would have the opportunity to meet with international investors and business leaders.
Balgrist Campus on the other hand, has recently established a research and development center for medicine located between the lake of Zurich and Balgrist University Hospital.
Finally, the Swiss Investment Fund (SIF) initiative of the Swiss Private Equity and Corporate Finance Association aims at closing the financing gap and foster innovation entrepreneurship in the Swiss innovation ecosystem. SIF acts as a &8220;fund of funds,&8221; which means that it invests in a number of smaller funds, which in turn, can provide equity capital to a number of young Swiss tech companies.
That said, Switzerland has got many advantages for businesses as well. In addition to its high innovation capability, Switzerland has a very supportive government, as well as regulations in favor of entrepreneurship.
Additionally, its geographical location provides young companies with an easy access to the European market and stronger trade links.
Featured image: Zurich pinned on a map of Europe by Dmitry Kaminsky, via Shutterstock.com.
The post Recommendations to Boost Entrepreneurship in Switzerland appeared first on Fintech Schweiz Digital Finance News – FintechNewsCH.
More than 15 members of #Congress met with representatives of the #blockchain #technology industry this week in Washington, DC.
fintech techcrunch
Originally published by TechCrunch.   &160; &160; &160; &160; &160; &160; &160; Everything was so much simpler before the Internet. Back then, the VC world was neatly divided into IT and Health Care, and the whole rest of the U.S. economy could go about its merry business without worrying too much about Silicon Valley and […]
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