https://www.blockchaintechnology-news.com/2023/11/hsbc-offers-tokenised-gold-trials-tokenised-deposits-with-ant-blockchain/

A couple of updates from HSBC have hit the wires: the bank has moved to tokenise ownership of physical gold through blockchain technology, as well as trialling tokenised deposits to enable corporate clients to move money across multiple accounts.

The tokenisation of gold in the bank’s London vault will see a digital twin created of an existing asset. Each token represents 0.001 troy ounce and can be traded on trading platform HSBC Evolve. Mark Williamson, global head of FX and commodities partnerships and propositions, confirmed the launch of the platform in a Bloomberg interview.

This is not the first instance of a bank tokenising gold as a digital asset. Sber, Russia’s largest bank, announced in December that its distributed ledger platform had seen the first issue of gold-backed digital financial assets. Yet this move from a major bank will certainly be of interest. While institutional investors will be the primary target for now, the bank noted there is a possibility of investment from retail investors.

Elsewhere, HSBC has tested the use of tokenised deposits with Ant Group in order to enable always-on, real-time treasury fund movement between accounts held within the HSBC network. During the test, HSBC was connected to Ant Group’s blockchain platform. The test was conducted under the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s Fintech Supervisory Sandbox.

As reported by multiple outlets, the bank noted how this test could lead to future research into how blockchain and tokenisation can improve the efficiency of corporate treasury management.

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https://www.blockchaintechnology-news.com/2023/10/vodafone-and-chainlink-offer-poc-for-blockchain-trade-solution/

Vodafone’s digital asset broker (DAB) has demonstrated a proof of concept (PoC) in concert with three other companies which claims to show the potential for blockchain technologies in the global trade ecosystem.

The demonstration, alongside Chainlink Labs, consultants InnoWave, and trading company Sumitomo, focused on the ‘seamless exchange of crucial trade documents across diverse platforms and blockchains’, as Vodafone put it.

The technology underpinning the demo was two-fold. Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) helped to initiate actions – sending messages and transferring tokens – across blockchains. Vodafone’s DAB, however, is arguably more wide-ranging: it is an IoT platform, utilising SIM and blockchain technology, that ‘seamlessly transforms connected devices into automated and cost-efficient economic agents’.

What this could potentially mean, according to the companies, is a single interface which can enable applications to securely exchange data and tokens across public and private blockchain networks, as well as IoT.

An example given was in the marine industry: a vessel detecting a cargo fire could autonomously relay data to smart contracts which, if applicable, could automatically trigger the process to begin marine cargo insurance proceedings.

This sort of use case falls under the category of the Economy of Things (EoT) which – as one may guess from the moniker – is the next step up from the Internet of Things. This means new value being extracted from the IoT, and the turning of physical assets into digital ones.

Vodafone and Sumitomo announced the launch of a new standalone business to target this opportunity in May. This is where the DAB comes in as the technology supporting the EoT. With Vodafone transferring the platform, including intellectual property, contracts, technology and software, into the new business.

According to a report from STL Partners – commissioned by Vodafone – ‘EoT-enabled’ devices will grow from 88 million devices in 2024 to more than three billion by the end of the decade. This will represent approximately 10% of all IoT devices.

“The integration of IoT and blockchains has the potential to provide new monetisation opportunities for IoT devices,” said David Palmer, chief product officer of Vodafone DAB. “Securing consensus and validation between DAB and Chainlink will be important to drive this growth.”

Photo by Matthew Buchanan on Unsplash

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https://www.blockchaintechnology-news.com/2023/09/kayak-makes-blockchain-push-with-new-enterprise-corporate-travel-offering/

Travel search engine Kayak is dipping its toe into the water for corporate travel for large companies – and is looking to eliminate expense reporting for flights with a solution built on blockchain technology.

The company launched its free Kayak for Business tool in 2020 for small- and medium-sized organisations, with a full launch coming a year later. Yet the enterprise-focused solution – which understandably carries a much bigger prize – has come about through a partnership with Blockskye, a blockchain startup focused on the aviation industry.

Blockskye’s vision is outlined on its company website:

“Blockskye believes that on-chain, tokenized assets should be distributed among all actors. Travellers, buyers, suppliers, revenue accounting, expense, treasury: everyone should have access to the same data at the same time. Today, enterprise travel and procurement relies on batched processes and file transfers that create mismatched records, confusion, and error. We solve this with a secure, encrypted, single version of the truth – powered by blockchain.”

From Kayak’s side, the theory is that an aeroplane ticket, for business usage, is one of the places where a source of record, available to all parties, recorded on the blockchain, is actually useful. With business travel, it is not only more common for a third-party actor to deal with the admin, but, as Kayak CEO Steve Hafner explained to PhocusWire, regardless of what the last change was to the ticket or who made that change, any party can touch it. 

This is not to mention the more evident payment aspect, as the two companies explained in the press release announcing the Enterprise solution. “The KAYAK for Business Enterprise offering can facilitate direct payment between companies and participating major carriers,” the companies noted. “This innovative technology reduces overall business costs, and allows travellers to walk onto a flight without ever having to submit airline expenses.”

Other features of the product are skewed towards business custom, including a real-time breakdown of loyalty benefits during checkout, as well as a CO2 emissions calculator sent directly to the company for simplified reporting. Integrations with third-party business apps are also noted, from calendar, to HR and ERP.

Founded in 2017, the journey for Blockskye’s vision for a ‘new way of booking business travel’, as co-CEO and co-founder Michael Share put it, has been comparatively long. Yet Share added Kayak was the ‘ideal platform to partner with.’

Photo by Jonathan Lassen

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https://www.blockchaintechnology-news.com/2023/08/celo-touts-google-cloud-win-confirms-move-to-ethereum-layer-2-solution/

The Celo Foundation, provider of a carbon-negative, Ethereum virtual machine-compatible (EVM) blockchain ecosystem, has announced that Google Cloud is running a validator on its network.

A validator participates in the running of the blockchain and helps maintain its security by staking their own crypto to support the network, and validating new transactions. Google Cloud joins contributors such as Deutsche Telekom – T-Systems is ranked as one of the top 10 validator groups – alongside a16z, Binance, and ‘human empowerment protocol’ impactMarket, also all in the top 10.

Alongside this, the foundation confirmed that community members had voted for a proposal for Celo to transition from an independent layer-1 blockchain to an Ethereum layer-2 solution to ‘provide scalability, security, and more real-world use cases to the Ethereum ecosystem.’

The proposal was from cLabs, the primary architect of the Celo blockchain, who announced plans to ‘return home’ at the Ethereum Community Conference in Paris last month. The vote passed 100% in favour.

Google Cloud’s move has been analysed as a success for not just the Celo network, but for wider blockchain technology. Benzinga described the entry as a signal for mainstream blockchain adoption. The two firms have previously collaborated, announcing in April an initiative to help sustainability-focused startups in the Celo network build and scale Web3 applications. Founders who build on Celo get credits for Google Cloud, as well as Firebase, Google’s mobile development platform.

“Google Cloud and the Celo Foundation have a shared mission to leverage blockchain technology and innovation to bolster sustainable solutions for everyday people and the planet,” said Xochitl Cazador, Celo Foundation head of ecosystem growth. “The Celo community is honoured to have Google Cloud choose us, highlighting a mutual commitment to the broader adoption of Web3 tools and for scalable, real-world solutions.”

You can find out about both announcements at the foundation’s Medium page.

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https://www.blockchaintechnology-news.com/2023/08/deloitte-and-chainalysis-team-up-to-bolster-digital-asset-compliance-for-clients/

Deloitte and blockchain data platform Chainalysis are collaborating to help mutual clients address compliance challenges within their digital asset ecosystems.

The two companies have announced a strategic alliance to meet market demand for risk management technology solutions and services. The partnership will combine Deloitte’s services, which help organisations manage forensic, investigative and compliance programs, with the Chainalysis platform and proprietary blockchain dataset.

There are several key objectives Deloitte and Chainalysis are looking to solve across their customer base around crypto crime analytics and enforcement. These are helping increase speed to target for investigative clients; providing finished intelligence for mission-oriented agencies and organisations; providing broad, holistic cyber investigative capabilities, environments and dashboards ‘powered by leading blockchain intelligence’, as well as helping law enforcement identify the actors behind the keyboard.

As with many such partnerships – think a big cloud vendor training a blue-chip firm’s employees in digital services – there is an ‘inside baseball’ element to this deal. Deloitte will expand its practitioner pool trained and certified in Chainalysis products focused on blockchain analytics and investigations.

Tim Davis, Deloitte advisory blockchain and digital asset practice lead, said the alliance with Chainalysis was ‘another demonstration of Deloitte’s investment in its digital asset innovation ecosystem for the benefit of clients.’ “As digital asset adoption and proliferation continues, Deloitte is committed to advising our clients on leading thinking and approaches to risk management, analytics use, and regulatory compliance,” Davis added.

“For law enforcement agencies, regulators, and financial ecosystem players across the nation, the alliance offers new, collaborative solutions that help identify transformation gaps, accelerate mission success at enterprise scale, and mitigate risk while increasing revenue,” added Thomas Stanley, Chainalysis president and chief revenue officer.

In May, Deloitte was one of several star-studded names to join the Canton Network, an initiative spearheaded by Digital Asset to launch a privacy-enabled interoperable blockchain network designed for institutional assets. The network, whose other members include BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs and Microsoft, was claimed to be an industry-first.

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https://www.blockchaintechnology-news.com/2023/08/researchers-bet-on-blockchain-to-help-protect-cultural-artifacts/

A new project has launched which aims to use blockchain technologies and NFTs to help verify the provenance of cultural artifacts.

The project, called Salsal – or AGUR – is the brainchild of Adel Khalifi, professor of computer science at the University of Abu Dhabi, and Mark Altaweel, professor at the UCL institute of archaeology.

Salsal is aimed at cultural heritage collectors, such as museums. They, the ‘collector’, uploads a collection and submits it for verification as the first step. The collection is then evaluated by multiple experts who submit their evaluation to a central verification board. If the latter decides the collection is legitimate, then the collector can turn it into an NFT.

“We store all collection data, expert votes and verification on the blockchain,” a note on the AGUR website reads. “Since the blockchain is immutable, it provides us with a factual history of an object’s owners.” NFTs are also used for ownership transfer, the researchers added, again owing to NFT data being stored on the blockchain providing an immutable, permanent record.

As reported by CNN, the certification process is borrowed from metrics used by the Museums Association, where objects can be rated on a scale from one to five based on the security or validity of a collection.

Altaweel told CNN: “The idea was that this also becomes a way to pressure those collectors – including museums – to really make sure that the items they are displaying to the public are legal.”

Some wrangles over cultural artifacts go back centuries – and are still dividing opinion today. In the UK, the most infamous example is arguably the Elgin Marbles, a collection of sculptures from the Parthenon in Greece. The sculptures have been held by the British Museum since the 19th century despite increasing opprobrium from the Greek government who had previously enlisted UNESCO in the row. A poll earlier this month found that almost two thirds of British citizens polled would conditionally support sending the sculptures back to Greece.

A more recent example – and one which has been resolved – concerns an ancient gold coffin stolen during the Egyptian revolution in 2011 to eventually be displayed at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The coffin has since been returned to Egypt.

The purpose of Salsal, in the words of the AGUR website, is to ‘allow heritage collectors a platform to verify their collection [and] provide an accurate history of an object’s ownership.’

Photo by Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez

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https://www.blockchaintechnology-news.com/2023/07/sabre56-signs-deal-with-bootstrap-energy-to-become-one-of-worlds-largest-blockchain-operators/

Sabre56, a digital asset management consultant offering specialist design of blockchain data centres, has announced a five-year agreement with Bootstrap Energy in what the company describes as the ‘biggest single operations contract’ in the crypto mining industry to date.

The agreement with Bootstrap Energy is to provide miner operations at the 300MW Saxet Energy Park in Texas, which has the capacity to host approximately 100,000 ASICs (application-specific integrated circuit), designed for the sole purpose of mining cryptocurrency, as well as AI and high-performance computing (HPC) platforms.  

“Saxet Energy Park is one of the largest builds in the space and shows the shared vision of Sabre56 and Bootstrap Energy,” Sabre56 commented in a LinkedIn post announcing the news. “It is a perfect example of the future of at-scale mining and will host the industry’s most successful public and private miners.

“We shall we one of the world’s largest blockchain operators of miners under management, and together we shall be setting new and higher standards of performance via this partnership.”

Phil Harvey, founder and CEO of Sabre56, added that the two partners were ‘united in bringing the new standard and creating a benchmark in the sector.’ “This agreement is a sign that the industry is maturing and the infrastructure and operations professionals are in the driving seat of one of the largest facilities in North America,” said Harvey.

According to Sabre56’s website, the company has worked on several sites, with operations in Texas maxing out at 400MW. The company also has a footprint in South Carolina, West Virginia, and Kentucky in the US, as well as smaller sites in Canada and Norway. In February, Sabre56 secured $35 million to build its own hosting sites, with 150MW of energy capacity the target by the end of 2023.  

The honours for the largest mining facility still go to Riot Blockchain, also in Texas. The company’s Rockdale site is claimed to have a total power capacity of 750MW, with 450MW currently developed.

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https://www.blockchaintechnology-news.com/2023/05/ripple-acquires-custody-infrastructure-provider-metaco-for-250m/

Ripple has announced the acquisition of Metaco, a Switzerland-based provider of digital asset custody and tokenisation technology, for $250 million (£201.1m).

The acquisition is aimed at expanding Ripple’s enterprise offerings, with Metaco promising enterprise-ready packages for financial service providers and corporates across multiple digital asset use cases around custody infrastructure.

The company’s primary product is Harmonize, cited by Ripple as the ‘institutional standard for digital asset custody and tokenisation infrastructure.’ Current customers include Citi, BNP Paribas, and Union Bank.

Metaco was advised on the sale by law firm Kirkland & Ellis.

Monica Long, president at Ripple, said the company was ‘uniquely positioned’ to address the growing institutional crypto custody market. “Custody is a key facet of the infrastructure required for enterprise crypto services,” said Long in a statement. “Adding these capabilities to Ripple’s already growing product solutions means we can continue to support customers as they look to utilise crypto and blockchain for real-world use cases across all phases of adoption.”

Ripple estimates that the institutional crypto custody market will hit $10 trillion by 2030.

The move is Ripple’s first acquisition, with CEO Brad Garlinghouse saying that through the company’s financial position, it will ‘continue pressing [its] advantage in the areas critical to crypto infrastructure.’

“Bringing on Metaco is monumental for our growing product suite and expanding global footprint,” Garlinghouse added.

It has been a good week for Ripple all told. Earlier this week, a federal judge ruled that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) could not seal documents related to a 2018 speech from former official William Hinman which argued Ethereum was not a security. District Judge Analisa Torres ruled that the documents were ‘relevant to the judicial process.’

The update, in a years-long legal battle between the SEC and Ripple, is being seen as ‘another win for transparency’, as Garlinghouse put it. Ripple’s position is that XRP, its native cryptocurrency, is not a security, pushing against the SEC’s claims – and understanding how Hinman came to his conclusion five years ago would be key for the company.

Photo by John Guccione www.advergroup.com

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https://www.blockchaintechnology-news.com/2023/05/china-to-train-half-a-million-blockchain-experts-amid-national-research-centre-launch/

Here’s a good example of how you can separate the blockchain signal from the crypto noise: China is to train 500,000 blockchain professionals after launching a national blockchain research centre in Beijing.

The centre, as reported by the South China Morning Post (SCMP) citing state-run media outlet Xinhua, will work with universities, research institutes and companies, as well as establish a ‘national-level blockchain network’ to connect existing blockchains in China as well as other industries. The Beijing Academy of Blockchain and Edge Computing will lead the centre.

The move looks to put clear water between industrial applications of blockchain technology and digital assets in China. Crypto-related activities remain banned in the country, with the most recent hammer coming down in September 2021, although NFTs are slightly more relaxed under the ‘digital collectibles’ banner.

In spite of this China’s fourteenth five-year plan, issued in March of that year, saw the government outline a vested interest in blockchain technologies as part of its ‘new infrastructure’ investments, leading this publication to describe the country’s relationship with digital assets as ‘difficult to assess at the best of times.’

Hong Kong, meanwhile, appears to be moving in a different direction. According to the SCMP, some Hong Kong branches of mainland banks have begun to onboard crypto clients. Some firms have taken separate steps to branch out into the city. Cryptocurrency exchange Huobi is moving its Asia headquarters to Hong Kong from Singapore, reported Nikkei Asia, with entrepreneur Justin Sun citing ‘crypto-friendly policies recently introduced by the government’ as factors. The SCMP report advises that the Hong Kong policy as it relates to the mainland remain separate with no signals of changing.

In January SCMP, citing local financial website Sina Finance, reported that Huang Yiping, a former adviser to China’s central bank, had called for a review of the cryptocurrency ban. Huang noted that a permanent ‘no’ to related products could result in ‘missed opportunities in technologies such as blockchain’, the report noted.

Photo by aboodi vesakaran

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