Posts Tagged ‘smart contracts’
Provenance | Case Studies
Tracking sustainability claims through global chains
Can we prove that products are sustainably-sourced and slavery-free? In an international pilot, working with IPNLF and 12 tuna producers, we used Provenance to track fish through the complex Southeast Asian fishing industry for the UK, Japanese and US markets.
Pioneering a new standard for trust in food retail
How can we empower customers all along the supply chain with data they can trust? Provenance partnered with the UK’s largest consumer co-operative The Co-op to track fresh produce, and their product claims, from origin to supermarket.
Increasing transparency in fashion with blockchain
Can tech help boost trust and transparency in the fashion industry? Collaborating with businesses along a UK-based fashion supply chain, we’ve used blockchain to track raw alpaca fleece from farm to finished garment.
Boosting the value of small, independent food brands
How does the Provenance platform benefit small businesses? Enabling producer, shop and shopper to collaborate on product stories and journeys, Provenance demonstrated a new way to increase trust and visibility for independent brands.
Showcasing craftsmanship via smart labels
How can we give shoppers the information they need to chose your product? Provenance presents the journey of material to finished product through interactive labels.
Raising the value of single-origin coffee
How can single-origin coffee producers prove the provenance of their product? We trial location data verification to differentiate between authentic single-origin coffee from mere marketing buzz.
Tracking towards a circular future for cotton
How can tech help cotton producers increase demand for the sustainable, renewable and biodegradable, fabric? We use Provenance to track cotton from origin to finished good and beyond, closing the loop.
Source: Provenance | Case Studies
Read MoreFrom Farm To Finished Garment: Blockchain Is Aiding This Fashion Collection With Transparency | Forbes
Each garment has a unique digital token, enabling Provenance to verify every step of its production and create a digital history of that information including location data, content and timestamps, all of which is presented to consumers via an interface they can access through their item’s QR code or NFC-enabled label (so that it works on both Apple and Android devices).
Another keyword for the blockchain therefore is storytelling. As Drinkwater adds: “Where transparency and sustainability play a part, then there’s really beautiful storytelling to be told. And brands can do that actually fairly easily. For Martine, there was a real desire to show off the craftsmanship and ability [of the partners]. Rather than just presenting the final product, it enables every partner to show off their expertise and their brilliance in a very visual and engaging way. Ordinarily when you look at a finished product you never think about that.”
Source: From Farm To Finished Garment: Blockchain Is Aiding This Fashion Collection With Transparency
Read MoreWill Provenance Be the Blockchain’s Break Out Use Case in 2016? – CoinDesk
Much has been said about the blockchain as an ownership layer. But what exactly does that mean?
It means that blockchains represent ownership of an asset in terms of control over the data relating to that asset. In other words, only the current owner can authenticate a transaction that would cause that asset to be transferred to another owner.
This is provenance expressed in protocol form. The word “provenance” is derived from the French “provenir” which means “to come from”, and is used to describe the custodial chronology of an object.
Provenance is one of the backbones of economies, whether it relates to artifacts or real estate. There has always been a need to authenticate that a party actually owns an asset prior to any business dealing involving that asset, to ensure that the asset is “true” rather than stolen or faked.
In the past, trusted third-parties have traditionally played this role.
However, blockchains can streamline this function by serving as the infrastructure for registering and authenticating asset ownership between untrusting parties with common interests.
Source: Will Provenance Be the Blockchain’s Break Out Use Case in 2016? – CoinDesk
Read MoreIBM Think Academy: Blockchain, How it works
What is Blockchain? Blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger for recording the history of transactions. It fosters a new generation of transactional applications that establish trust, accountability and transparency—from contracts to deeds to payments.
Frees up capital flows, speeds up processes, lowers transaction costs and most importantly provides security and trust. We believe that Blockchain will do for business what the Internet did for communications.
Source: IBM Blockchain
Read MoreBlockchain – A Platform for Disintermediation – Infocast
Disintermediation is the investment magnet for blockchain-related ideas, riding on the success of the business and underpinned by peer-to-peer and crowdsourcing models. The promise of blockchain for enterprise goes beyond its role as an industry disruptor. It also has tremendous potential to improve existing business processes, as well as to improve efficiencies in existing transaction systems, leading to exponential cost saving for the enterprise and the end consumer. I like to draw the analogy of the impact of information dissemination due to the internet serving as an information network. Blockchain technology promises a similar explosion in trade, ownership, and trust, as the tenets of both technologies rely on principles of distributed governance and rules established for a time-tested protocol.
Source: Blockchain – A Platform for Disintermediation – Infocast
Read MoreBasicAttentionToken | A new token to value user attention on the internet.
Basic Attention Token radically improves the efficiency of digital advertising by creating a new token that can be exchanged between publishers, advertisers, and users. It all happens on the Ethereum blockchain.
The token can be used to obtain a variety of advertising and attention-based services on the Brave platform. The utility of the token is based on user attention, which simply means a person’s focused mental engagement.
Source: BasicAttentionToken | A new token to value user attention on the internet.
Takeaways
Despite the eye-candy of Former Mozilla CEO raises $35M in under 30 seconds for his browser startup Brave | TechCrunch, it is a prime example of how Blockchain promises disintermediation, or, compressing a transaction’s endpoints. All of today’s advertising middlemen, ad trackers and fraudulent players can be eliminated, or, drastically reduced.
By the way, if you’re swept up in the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) aspect of this, then please take not the founder is Brendan Eich and his Venture Capital (VC) backers:
Read MoreFrom the creator of JavaScript and the co-founder of Mozilla and Firefox, with a solid team – funded by Founders Fund, Foundation Capital, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, DCG, Danhua Capital, and Huiyin Blockchain Venture among others.
Don Tapscott: How the blockchain is changing money and business | TED Talk | TED.com
18 minutes and 49 seconds well spent!
What is the blockchain? If you don’t know, you should; if you do, chances are you still need some clarification on how it actually works. Don Tapscott is here to help, demystifying this world-changing, trust-building technology which, he says, represents nothing less than the second generation of the internet and holds the potential to transform money, business, government and society.
Thanks Jeff for the find!
Source: Don Tapscott: How the blockchain is changing money and business | TED Talk
There really is more. just click below…
Read MoreIndia Is Likely To Become The First Digital, Cashless Society | Forbes
The top news out of India over the past 12 months has been Prime Minister Modi’s move to ban 85% of the currency in circulation. However, something much more far-reaching has happened.
…A 2015 report from MasterCard found that India was one of the countries least ready to transition to a digital payment system.
Yet, 12 months later such a system was rolled out.
If the transition to a digital society can happen in India, where just 2% of transactions were non-cash a few years ago, it can happen anywhere.
India Stack could fast-track the move to digital payment systems across the developed world and mark the end of cash.
Thanks Jeff for the find!
Source: India Is Likely To Become The First Digital, Cashless Society
Read MoreWhy this venture capitalist wants to make traditional VC obsolete | American Banker
BROCK PIERCE: I don’t need to do an ICO to raise my fund. Arguably, it’s not the right thing to do, because I have a traditional general partners/limited partners structure. But this is the future of how startups will be financed. I’ve been aware of it and following it, but I have a serious concern about how this stuff is being regulated. Most of the people doing ICOs today are creating very convoluted structures with the purpose of circumventing securities law, and in a lot of cases I don’t think it holds up. I think a lot of these deals have substantial regulatory overhang. Rather than circumvent regulations, let’s look at it and say, “Is this something that can be done within the rules? Can you do this compliantly?”
That’s what we set about doing over the last year. Timing is everything for me. I’ve been in the ICO market since day one [as a founding board member of Mastercoin], and it became very clear over the last year that the future is now. We’re off to the races. And so the question is, how does one do it legally?
Thanks Frédéic for the find!
Source: Why this venture capitalist wants to make traditional VC obsolete | American Banker
Read MoreBitcoin & Blockchain: What do They Mean for Financial Services? | Publications | Fasken Martineau
Blockchain and digital currencies are expected to change the way parties transact in coming years. It has been suggested that the Government of Canada is likely to issue a Canadian Dollar digital currency in the future. The Royal Canadian Mint has already issued a version of this known as MintChip. The Bank of Canada announced, in a closed media session at the 2016 Payments Panorama conference, that they had been experimenting with “The Jasper Distributed Ledger Settlement Platform.” This project introduced the concept of a possible “CAD-COIN.” This has placed Canada in a unique position in comparison to other jurisdictions, as the government is actively exploring the applications of this technology.
Source: Bitcoin & Blockchain: What do They Mean for Financial Services? | Publications | Fasken Martineau
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