Category: Business

The UK’s financial regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), has announced the second cohort of its fintech sandbox on June 15. Out of the 24 startups joining this year’s cohort, nine are developing solutions using blockchain technology, which is a testament to the potential that the FCA sees for this new technology to play a major role in the financial...

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Insurance giant AIG, the commercial bank Standard Chartered, and IBM have announced the successful completion of the pilot of the first ever multinational smart contract insurance policy backed by blockchain technology. The solution was built by IBM and is based on the Hyperledger Fabric framework, which is one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation. The technology allowed...

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Everledger, the London-based startup that uses the blockchain to securely store data and provide provenance for high-value physical assets such as diamonds and artwork, has entered into a partnership with the Singapore Diamond Investment Exchange (SDiX) and physical commodity markets expert Kynetix. The Singapore Diamond Investment Exchange (SDiX) is the world’s first commodity exchange in physically settled diamonds. The exchange...

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Cannabis has been legalized in numerous states across the United States. However, the cannabis industry is still plagued with limited access to banking services as traditional banks want to avoid dealing with businesses that engage in business activities that are still largely illegal under federal law. That is where cryptocurrencies could offer a solution. Due to the loosening of anti-cannabis...

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Singaporean blockchain startups are continuing to attract more investors to this emerging sector. On June 9, early-stage startup accelerator Coinsilium announced a SGD$100,000 ($72,500) investment in Singaporean blockchain-based Linkedin-like professional network Indorse. According to the official press release, the deal was secured with the issuance of a convertible loan which granted Coinsilium an undisclosed number of the native tokens of...

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Oil giant BP, the world’s eighth-largest energy company by revenue ($222.8 billion), has officially begun collaborating with Canadian blockchain startup BTL Group. After a few months of successful testing, BP, Italian oil and gas company Eni, and major German energy company Wien Energie all plan to enter a six-month production phase with BTL’s Interbit platform built on top of the...

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SinglePoint and First Bitcoin Capital (FBC) signed a Joint Venture agreement to develop and distribute a proprietary payments solution which will allow large-scale, risk-free use of credit and debit cards within the Cannabis industry. Although the buying and selling of cannabis for medical and recreational use have been legalized by State governments in several US states, payments are mostly still...

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On May 30, LG, one of the largest electronics company in South Korea behind Samsung, officially announced its partnership with R3CEV as a part of a larger vision to target the South Korean fintech and finance industries with distributed ledger technology. Over the past few years, many leading financial institutions and banks in the world have joined R3CEV, including South...

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On May 22, Coinbase.com, the largest centralized online bitcoin exchange, operating in 32 countries, experienced a partial outage resulting in degraded performance, deposit/withdrawal delays, and some customers were unable to log in to their accounts. Bitcoin crossed the $2000 mark on May 20, 2017, and continued to climb to a new all-time high of $2,760 on May 25. The price...

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C‌oins.ph, a mobile bitcoin-based financial services platform operating in the Philippines and Thailand, has raised $5 million in a Series A extension led by Naspers Ventures, a division of Naspers Group, one of the largest technology investors in the world. Naspers is a global internet and entertainment group based in South Africa and operating in more than 130 countries. It...

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