Busan is developing an Ethereum-compatible mainnet to become a ‘Blockchain City’

September 21, 2023 Coin Telegraph

The city administration behind the project aims to make Busan a blockchain city and has launched a $75 million development plan to realize the goal.

South Korea's second-largest city Busan is developing a public blockchain network compatible with mainstream blockchain platforms such as Ethereum and Cosmos. The aim is to integrate blockchain-based services from various blockchain mainnets onto a single platform at a city level and develop Busan into a Blockchain city.

Busan City has allocated a 100 billion won ($75 million) budget for open blockchain development compatible with global standards under the Blockchain Innovation Fund (BIF). The funds will be raised through investments from public financial institutions in Busan with nearly 100 private companies showing interest. BIF is a private fund that supports the development of Busan's blockchain industry and infrastructure construction, led by financial and public institutions in Busan.

The public blockchain development is being done under the Busan Digital Asset Exchange Establishment Promotion Plan and Future Schedule plan with a focus on making Busan a Blockchain city.

*Busan Blockchain City Development Plan. Source: News1*

The official announcement noted that Busan city has been actively testing various use cases of Blockchain technology in its trade-free zone, however, most of these projects were carried out on different blockchains resulting in an 'uncomfortable' experience for businesses. This was one of the key reasons for city administration to zero on a public blockchain at the city level blockchain compatible with global blockchain networks such as Ethereum.

Busan City is also involved in the process of establishing the blockchain trust framework (BTF) technology standard conducted by the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA).

The project aims to improve the quality of private services and encourage interconnection between services by presenting requirements such as blockchain technical system, performance, and security level. The standard will also be utilized for public services within Busan City.

The long-term blockchain development plan also includes the development of the Busan digital asset exchange in the first half of 2024. The digital exchange will not only list virtual assets, but also tokenized securities, including precious metals and raw materials such as gold, copper and oil. In the future, the administration behind the projects aims to tokenize and trade global intellectual property rights (IP) and carbon emissions rights.

Magazine: Big Questions: Did the NSA create Bitcoin?

China to launch national blockchain research center

February 10, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Blockchain Competition

The goal of the new state-supported institution is to speed up the country’s industry through blockchain technology.

Despite its ongoing crackdown on crypto, China continues to embrace blockchain technology — up to the point of launching the National Blockchain Technology Innovation Center in the capital city of Beijing.

According to the China Daily’s report from Feb. 8, the Center will create a research network with the local universities, think tanks and blockchain businesses to carry out the inquiries into core blockchain technologies. The fruits of this research will be used for further digitalization of China and, as emphasized in the report, its industry in particular.

In charge of the new institution is the Beijing Academy of Blockchain and Edge Computing (BABEC) — an entity most famous for the development of Chang’an Chain or ChainMaker blockchain. This blockchain is already backed by an ecosystem of 50 business corporations, most of them — such as China Construction Bank or China Unicom — owned by the state. By the press time, the known number of transactions per second (TPS) that the ChainMaker can execute is 240 million — up from 100,000 TPS in 2021.

China has been actively marketing itself as a blockchain nation in recent years. In September 2022, its government claimed that China accounts for 84% of all blockchain applications filed worldwide. While the real numbers might not differ much, the approval rate is significantly low, with only 19% of the total filed applications getting approved.

Along with the blockchain, the project of central bank digital currency (CBDC) became the trademark of the Chinese government. Millions of dollars worth of e-CNY have been handed out across the country in a bid to boost its adoption. However, cumulative e-CNY transactions only crossed 100 billion yuan ($14 billion) in October 2022.

With all the efforts to catch on with the digital innovations, recently, a former executive of the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) urged the country to review its stringent crypto restrictions. The former official argued that a permanent ban on crypto could result in many missed opportunities for the formal financial system, including those related to blockchain and tokenization.

China accounts for 84% of all blockchain patent applications, but there’s a catch

September 23, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Blockchain Competition

China’s push for blockchain technology gained steam after 2019 when President Xi Jinping called for corporations from tech giants to become industry leaders in the nascent tech.

China accounts for 84% of all blockchain applications filed worldwide, according to the latest data shared by the country’s government official.

China has steered clear of the cryptocurrency market. However, the Beijing government has been supportive of the underlying blockchain technology. The country has actively promoted the use of blockchain tech over the years, and thus the high percentage of blockchain patents isn’t surprising.

President Xi Jinping has also played a key role in promoting the nascent blockchain technology. In 2019, the President called upon citizens, tech companies and stakeholders of the ecosystem to actively participate and innovate with the nascent tech as it would play a key role in the future of the next industrial revolution.

As Cointelegraph reported earlier, Chinese companies had filed 4,435 blockchain patents within one year of President Xi Jinping’s endorsement of the industry. According to another study, China accounted for roughly 60% of the world's blockchain patent applications from 2015 to June 2021, followed by the US and South Korea.

The figure was released on Tuesday by Wang Jianwei, deputy director of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. However, the figures didn’t include a time frame in which these patent applications were filed.

While China accounts for the highest number of blockchain patent applications, the approval rate is significantly low, with only 19% of the total filed applications getting approved, reported South China Morning Post.

Another important thing to note here is that China is not very big on decentralization, the same principle that blockchain tech is based on. This was evident from the country’s digital yuan development, where the central bank developed the digital national currency on the curated version of a blockchain with full control over its functioning rather than using the traditional distributed network approach.

BIS report warns about front-running threat in crypto mining

June 17, 2022 Coin Telegraph

BIS

A fresh report from the Bank for International Settlements comes to a radical conclusion, claiming that the public identities of intermediaries are necessary to fight “miner extractable value.”

Since 2020, miners on the Ethereum blockchain have extracted around $600 million from other investors by miners, according to a new report by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) focusing on common malpractice in the crypto mining industry.

The June 16 bulletin, “Miners as intermediaries: extractable value and market manipulation in crypto and DeFi,” suggests three key takeaways from the BIS' research on the functioning of the Ethereum protocol.

The first is hardly surprising, which observed that Ether (ETH) and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols built on it “rely on validators or ‘miners’ as intermediaries to verify transactions and update the ledger.” The main thesis of the report is formulated around the abuses these intermediaries can make of their role in the form of “miner extractable value” (MEV):

“Since these intermediaries can choose which transactions they add to the ledger and in which order, they can engage in activities that would be illegal in traditional markets such as front-running and sandwich trades.”

A more precise definition in the report qualifies MEV as “the profit that miners can take from other investors by manipulating the choice and sequencing of transactions added to the blockchain.” Authors estimate that one out of 30 transactions in the Ethereum blockchain is added by miners for artificial profiteering.

According to the report, MEV resembles front-running by brokers in traditional markets but, unlike that practice, isn't illegal itself:

“If a miner observes a large pending transaction in the mempool that will substantially move market prices, it can add a corresponding buy or sell transaction just before this large transaction, thereby profiting from the price change.”

The third key takeaway is that MEV is an intrinsic shortcoming of pseudo-anonymous blockchains, and thus there is no simple way to get rid of it. per the BIS, it poses a threat to a range of new DeFi applications and could intensify in the future, making it inevitable.

Nevertheless, the report does recommend an approach to tackle MEV in the form of permissioned distributed ledger technology based on a network of trusted intermediaries whose identities are public. This means giving up blockchain's core value of anonymity.

Hedera’s governing body adds ServiceNow to its ranks

November 16, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Blockchain Competition

Hedera Hashgraph intends to integrate the Now Platform to create a new level of trust and accountability in digital transformation transactions.

The Hedera Governing Council has accepted cloud-based digital workflow platform ServiceNow as its newest member. Hedera intends to integrate the Now Platform to create a new level of trust and accountability in digital transformation transactions.

Hedera and ServiceNow will develop trusted processes based on digital ledger technology, or DLT, for interactions that span multiple companies, according to the company’s press release.

ServiceNow is a cloud-based digital workflow platform that delivers outstanding customer experiences and unleashes employee productivity while also increasing business efficiency.

Hedera “provides the most secure network connectivity and transaction processing in the world,” according to a company press release. ServiceNow, on the other hand, is a core engine that drives all digital transformation efforts throughout an entire organization.

Commenting on the development, Tasker Generes, global head of strategy and transformation at ServiceNow, stated:

“Hedera is poised to become the foundation and primary broker of trust and transparency for the digital economy and ServiceNow is bringing that strategic foundation to our powerful workflow experiences.”

ServiceNow's membership on the Hedera Governing Council, according to Mance Harmon — CEO of Hedera Hashgraph — will have a significant impact on the future of distributed digital workflows and enterprise adoption of DLT. The Now Platform will empower simple, frictionless, low-code DLT adoption through the Now Platform by removing the hurdles to DLT implementation for businesses, said Harmon while speaking to Cointelegraph:

“This will be a game-changer for development teams in organizations that today have no DLT experience or expertise, and will serve to accelerate the adoption of Hedera as the DLT of choice for enterprises. Together, ServiceNow and Hedera will deliver the trusted digital workflows powered by DLT for experiences that extend beyond any one organization.”

Hedera Hashgraph, an enterprise-grade distributed ledger, has been engaged in a number of partnerships to apply blockchain technology in real-world use cases across several industries. If these initial initiatives are a success, they will open up a world of possibilities across the globe. Last month, Cointelegraph reported that the Hedera Governing Council welcomed Singapore’s DBS Bank as the first Southeast Asian bank to join the worldwide organization.

Ubisoft selects blockchain startup for its Entrepreneurs Lab

May 10, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Blockchain Competition

The theme of the sixth annual Entrepreneurs Lab is “blockchain and positive entertainment.”

Aleph.im, a blockchain-based storage and computing startup, has been selected to participate in the sixth season of Ubisoft’s Entrepreneurs Lab, offering further exposure to the emerging blockchain industry.

The French video game developer has been running Entrepreneurs Lab for the past six years, offering startups and entrepreneurs the ability to access company resources and expertise as they scale up and commercialize their products. This season’s focus is “blockchain and positive entertainment.” In addition to Alepi.im, 11 other startups from Canada, Europe and Australia have been selected to participate.

“We are very proud to be welcoming all of these talented startups for the 6th season of the Ubisoft Entrepreneurs Lab, said Virgina Hass, the chief studios operating officer at Ubisoft.

Jonathan Schemoul, CEO of aleph.im explained his company’s focus:

“Our primary mission is to make decentralized cloud services a reality. It is really encouraging to have such a successful business getting behind our vision of creating the next generation of cloud services that will be open-source, unstoppable and trustless.”

The mentorship program gives Aleph.im the opportunity to enhance its decentralized ecosystem with direct support from Ubisoft domain experts. The end goal, according to aleph.im, is to merge blockchain and social entertainment to “drive the future of entertainment.”

2021 has been a big year for blockchain startups, with venture capital and private equity firms pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into dozens of projects. Unlike the 2017 ICO craze, it’s smart money that’s leading the capital raises, with the likes of JPMorgan Chase, Mastercard and UBS pledging large amounts of money.

Blockchain Competition

Share this video