Posts Tagged ‘smart contracts’
Want VC Returns? This Firm Makes It Possible For Everyday People
A venture fund digital token could solve a problem in venture capital. “My phone is blowing up with other VCs saying I want to do this — not blockchain and bitcoin VCs — because the biggest problem with venture, the thing everyone hates about venture capital, is that it’s delivered fantastic returns but no one wants to invest in an asset that’s locked up for 5-10 years. The idea you can invest in a venture fund and have liquidity is probably the most innovative thing that has ever happened in venture capital.”
Stan Miroshnik, managing director of the Argon Group, an investment bank focused on cryptocurrency- and token-based capital markets, which will be managing the crowdsale, said the BCAP was significant for several reasons.
“What you don’t have in traditional LP investment is the freedom to sell your limited partner interest. There’s usually a redemption period, a redemption notice period, a valuation process and then it’s unclear what the value of your piece of the portfolio is. What’s unique here is not only do you have the freedom, but the secondary market tells you what the market’s view of the worth of this asset is,” he said
Source: Want VC Returns? This Firm Makes It Possible For Everyday People
Read MoreWant To Hold An ICO? CoinList Makes It Easy — And Legal | Forbes
These crowdsales of new cryptocurrencies give entrepreneurs access to funding from the crowd, and token buyers, in turn, get something akin to a form of equity in the network, since, if the platform becomes more popular, the price for their shares should rise
Some of the thinking around the legality of ICOs stems from whether or not the token has utility, such as how people who buy a golf club membership presumably do so because the buyer wants to use the club, not because the value of the membership may rise. However, if developers sell a token before the network has launched, that muddies the distinction.
One characteristic of the sales on CoinList that may help curb some of the current rampant speculation is that they will only be open to accredited investors who earn $200,000 or more a year or have a net worth of at least $1 million. On the other hand, that might also dampen some of the enthusiasm for CoinList, because some have felt that ICOs have been democratizing finance and making venture-type deals available to the average retail investor rather than only the wealthy.
Still, both CoinList and SAFTS could be good antidotes to the problem of groups raising money before they have a product. It could get more groups to hold an ICO is held at the same time as the launch of the network, which, he says, “makes the crowdsale more about getting a piece of software instead of being an investor in a future piece of software.”
Source: Want To Hold An ICO? CoinList Makes It Easy — And Legal
Read MoreHardware Oracles: Bridging the Real World to the Blockchain
Cryptographically attestable anti-tampering sensors
To be able to securely report a reading (from any kind of sensors), the combination of the following is necessary:
- a cryptographic attestation of the sensor reading, authenticating the origin of the measure: each device has a private key signing outgoing payloads (with a nonce to avoid replays)
- an anti-tampering installation of the reader device, rendering it inoperable (by wiping the private key) in case of manipulation attempt (connect to another object, inject false stimuli, etc.)
These secure reading devices are called Hardware Oracles, and are the gateways from the physical work to the Blockchain realm.
Source: Hardware Oracles: bridging the Real World to the Blockchain
Read MoreBlockchain Oracles – BlockchainHub
Blockchains cannot access data outside their network on their own. An oracle – also known as data feed – is a third party service designed for use in smart contracts on the blockchain. They provide external data when needed and push it onto the blockchain.
Such conditions could be any data like weather temperature, successful payment, price fluctuations, etc. Smart contracts contain value and only unlock that value, if certain pre-defined conditions are met. When a particular value is reached, the smart contract changes its state and executes the programmatically predefined algorithms, automatically triggering an event on the blockchain. The primary task of oracles is to provide these values to the smart contract in a secure and trusted manner.
An oracle, in the context of blockchains and smart contracts, is an agent that finds and verifies real world occurrences and submits this information to a blockchain to be used by smart contracts.
There are four different types of oracles based on the type of use. We differentiate between software oracles, hardware oracles, consensus oracles and inbound and outbound oracles.
Source: Blockchain Oracles – BlockchainHub
Read MoreAnnouncing The Town Crier Service
Why do we need Oracles?
Smart contracts confined to on-chain data are like sports cars on local roads. They’re purring with latent power, but can’t do anything really interesting.
To unleash their potential, smart contracts need access to the wide open vistas of data available off-chain, i.e., in the real world. A financial smart contract needs access to equity, commodity, currency, or derivative prices. An insurance smart contact must be aware of triggering events such as bad weather, flight delays, etc. A smart contract allowing consumers to sell online games to one another must confirm that a seller successfully transferred game ownership to a buyer.Latent power waiting to be unchained…
Today, though, smart contracts can’t obtain such data in a highly trustworthy way. And they can’t achieve data privacy. These deficiencies are starving smart contract ecosystems of the data they need to achieve their full promise.
Source: Announcing The Town Crier Service
Read MoreThe $3.8bn Initial Coin Offering bubble is a huge deal. But it could break the blockchain | WIRED UK
There is a stick-it-to-the-man undertone behind this take on ICO: the idea that smart, independent teams are raking in millions from the anarchic crypto-crowd to take on blindsided VCs and bank-loving private blockchainers. And increasingly, ICOs are being used by companies outside of the blockchain field, such as messaging service Kik, which portrayed its upcoming ICO as a last-ditch attempt to compete with juggernauts such as Facebook.
Burke has no doubts where this leaves traditional investors. “The VC model is dead,” he says. “Over time people like us will stop being the main source of capital. VCs will become more like auditors. I’ve got people in ICOs saying, ‘We don’t need your money, what we want is your validation.’”
Still, Burke admits that, while this is the direction he sees ICOs evolving over the next few months and years, the current state of affairs is far from optimal.
For the time being, ICO’s real challenge is whether it can thrive without being a pain in the side for the blockchain ecosystem itself. ICOs are likely behind the recent spike in the value of ether — with investors buying the cryptocurrency in order to take part in token sales; ICOs might also be behind ether’s sudden 30 percent drop in value, as many ether-loaded projects are converting their ICO-generated ether into fiat currency to pay their staff.
And the Ethereum network itself — which less than one year ago went through a traumatic restructuring following the collapse of The DAO — is being put under strain by the ICO onslaught, as relentless, massive volume of transactions generated by token sales commandeer the ledger’s computing power.
But that is not necessarily a bad thing, Van Valkenburgh says. “It could be a way to battle-harden the network: there have been issues with transaction delays and scaling because of the popularity of ICOs put strain on the network,” he says. “But if the blockchain has to grow, ICOs are a good way to test the infrastructure.”
Source: The $3.8bn Initial Coin Offering bubble is a huge deal. But it could break the blockchain | WIRED UK
Read MoreMr. Blockchain Goes to Washington | CoinDesk
“It’s prudent for businesses to have a relationship with their representatives especially in a highly regulated environment like financial services,” said Boring, noting that this is especially true when a company’s business model overlaps with the jurisdiction of federal agencies.
Boring, a former congressional staffer herself, emphasized that constituent groups and businesses have significantly more pull with members of Congress than hired suits, adding that when groups travel significant distance to Washington, it helps add emphasis, proving how far they’re willing to go to make their case.
“No one has a stronger voice in Congress than a constituent,” she said, adding:
Source: Mr. Blockchain Goes to Washington – CoinDesk
Read MoreWTF is The Blockchain? | Hacker Noon
The ultimate 3500-word guide in plain English to understand Blockchain.
If you ever find someone feeling left behind and wondering, “WTF is the Blockchain?” you know where you can point them to.
Earlier the third-party/middleman gave us the trust that whatever they have written in the register will never be altered. In a distributed and decentralized system like ours, this seal will provide the trust instead.
Everyone who is the part of the Blockchain is eligible for rewards.
That’s how Bitcoin got into existence. It was the first currency to be transacted on a Blockchain (i.e. distributed registers). And in return, to keep the efforts going on in the network, people were awarded Bitcoins.
When enough people possess Bitcoins, they grow in value, making other people wanting Bitcoins; making Bitcoins grow in value even further; making even more people wanting Bitcoins; making them grow in value even further; and so on.
Source: WTF is The Blockchain? – Hacker Noon
Takeaway
Great explanation on how Blockchain works, including the game-theory that keeps it running.
Read MoreBlockchain Could Make the Insurance Industry Much More Transparent | HBR
… in the U.S. there is approximately $7.4 billion in unclaimed life insurance money from insured people passing away and their beneficiaries being unable to connect the dots. A blockchain-based registry could help address this challenge while retaining anonymity and improving security as a distributed public record. Part of the driver of these unclaimed funds is known as longevity risk: People living longer means more life insurance policies mature and the memory of who was insured and where physical policy documents may reside fades. Rather than being a threat to the industry, a blockchain-based public ledger would enable the rightful claimants to these proceeds to receive their due, rather than having these unclaimed funds be sold in a secondary market or stagnate.
Part of the reason insurers are wary of insuring tangible assets in developing markets is the fear of fraud and losses that cannot be validated. In these cases, the insurers’ right to subrogate, or go after the assets of others to recoup their losses, is largely unenforceable. A blockchain-based claims validation network can serve as a utility benefiting the entire industry by recording in a semipublic blockchain ledger the physical status of an insured asset, which in turn could help improve insurance penetration and adoption rates in emerging and developing markets.
Source: Blockchain Could Make the Insurance Industry Much More Transparent
Read MoreBitcoin Hedge Fund Director: ICOs Are Having a ‘Eureka’ Moment | CoinDesk
Lauding the mechanics of the sale as “striking,” he asserted that Bancor was able to use blockchain technology to offer services that transcend traditional services like Kickstarter.
“Bancor gave a money-back guarantee backed by 80% of the ethereum raised should the market price of [its BNT token] fall below the issue price. Sure enough, a few days later in an overall market sell off, BNT traded to par. Bancor issued a statement saying the buy-back was activated,” he wrote.
Overall, Masters sees this type of “coded instruction” as a “eureka moment” showcasing what he thinks is evidence of the truly disruptive power of peer-to-peer digital assets.
Source: Bitcoin Hedge Fund Director: ICOs Are Having a ‘Eureka’ Moment – CoinDesk
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