China's Blockchain Plan Is Winning / Five 2020 Blockchain Trends To Watch / Cardano Extends to 54 African Countries

November 27, 2019

Let’s jump right into this Thanksgiving week edition ?? with a thankful shoutout to all those who continue tirelessly to push this industry forward and share openly their lessons learn for those that come after them. Now to this week’s stuffed full edition —China’s newly unveiled blockchain policy makes sense along with standards for 17 FinTech categories — the U.S. needs to pay attention. We’ve got the five blockchain trends to watch for in 2020. Cardano Extends Blockchain Service To 54 African Countries. Since software ate the world, it’s blockchain’s turn to step in, insights on Ripple’s Swell Conference, an overview of a decentralized Shopify alternative, and stablecoins market comparisons.

In the DApps landscape, we’re talking about distributed storage (gWASM), new protocols and development tools, data tokens / NFTs, Klaytn, & Algorand. Plus updates from DappRadar on DeFi, Gaming DApps, ArcBlock releases 2.0 Version of first of its kind decentralized identity. We even found room to cram in plenty of research (Q3 2019 Blockchain Landscape) & books (on Digital Assets & Enterprise Blockchain) along with insights on venture capital (new funds!!), infrastructure, DApps, Bitcoin, Economics, Exchanges, and Stablecoins. For MORE and to keep you up to speed, here’s a snapshot of the top stories this week around the industry.

???? Why China’s Blockchain Plan Is Winning And The U.S. Should Pay Attention

China’s newly unveiled blockchain policy makes sense as its establishing the blockchain standard as well as the country will get an advantage in the trade war with the US. The new advancements will be coming from China rather than the usual blockchain production areas like New York and San Francisco, and lastly, they won’t be open-sourced and accessible to the world as we are used too…read more

?? Blockchain in 2020: 5 trends to watch

According to George Spasov, blockchain architect and co-founder at LimeChain stated that 2019 has continued what 2018 started — enterprises experimenting in Blockchain. He noted that most companies had been merely testing the blockchain waters, that fits with some earlier data points, circa late 2018 that indicated most CIOs weren’t actively pursuing blockchain projects. Also according to Chris Broderson, Deloitte Americas Blockchain Lab lead stated that from an enterprise perspective, the ‘blockchain tourism’ phase has passed, and companies are beyond [simply] feeling the need to understand the underlying the technology details, he further noted that according to the Deloitte 2019 Global Blockchain Survey, executives stated that they’re expecting common barriers to blockchain adoption — such as security threats, implementation headaches, or regulatory issues — to decrease significantly…read more

?? Cardano Extends Blockchain Service To 54 African Countries

Cardano Foundation is extending its services to 54 other African countries to integrate blockchain governance, aiming to help African countries enhance their legislative and commercial standards in an accountable and transparent manner that will result in the creation of employment while also ensuring sustainable growth. The foundation is looking to function hand-in-hand with different nations’ governments to develop blockchain governance to securely future-screen Africa’s economic sustenance and growth…read more

?? Facebook’s Libra launch was ‘ridiculously stupid,’ blockchain boss says

R3 (The R3 Team) CEO David Rutter said Facebook’s unveiling of its proposed Libra cryptocurrency was very naive, and there is a lack of understanding. Since libra has already undergone intense scrutiny from government regulators, prompting launch partners, including Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal, to walk back their support…read more

?? Scalability problem may finally be solved by redesigning blockchain architecture

Blockchain Project ILCoin holds the potential to change the way blockchain networks function entirely. The project invented a new protocol called RIFT, which utilizes two layers of blocks. In simple terms, ILCoin’s blockchain has two block types — standard blocks, which are quite like those of every other blockchain, and mini-blocks…read more

?? Mythical Games raises $19 million for blockchain-based games with ‘player-owned economies’

Mythical Games has raised $19 million for its game studio that will make blockchain-based games where players can make money through digital ownership. Javelin VP led the funding with other new investors Avon Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and Hashed. With this capital coming in the company has also made the addition of Alex Gurevich (Javelin Venture Partners) and independent board member Rehito Hatoyama (formerly Global COO of Sanrio, Hello Kitty) who will be joining existing board members Sam Englebardt of Galaxy Digital, John Linden, and Jamie Jackson…read more

???? China Central Bank to Set Standards for 17 Fintech Categories, Including Blockchain

The People’s Bank of China (PBoC) has an agenda to set industry standards across the financial sector, including blockchain. As per PBoC vice president, Yifei Fan blockchain is among 17 categories of financial technologies, including cloud services and artificial intelligence regulated under the new standards…read more

?? I Learned How Much We Need Blockchain From A Falling Branch Destroying My Car

This shocking event had a couple of good outcomes. The first was that I ended up leasing a nice new car. The second outcome was some education that is hard to come by, and has serious implications — I learned how valuable Blockchain technology would be in helping to coordinate the information and efforts of my car insurance company, the repair shop, and the car rental company that supplied me with a car until I could get a new one…read more

?? Cryptocurrency Will Not Die

Money is life. For nearly every human being on the planet, it’s more important than children, mom, art, whatever. Technically, it’s a record of payment. It can be a currency, but it doesn’t need to be. For an abstract idea, both real and unreal, money is quite tangible. Money means your kids eat or go hungry. Money enables a bag of paper to be exchanged for a house full of appliances. Money can be sex. Money can be murder…read more

Research To Read This Week:

?? Barbarians on the Blockchain

While the cryptocurrency industry is still in its infancy there has been a rise in mergers & acquisitions involving crypto companies. However, beyond anecdotes, press releases and high-level summaries, there haven’t been any thorough or forward-looking analyses, until now. 350 acquisitions involving cryptocurrency and blockchain companies have taken place since 2013. M&A activity peaked in 2018 with more than 160 deals, and we estimate 90–100 deals for 2019…read more and more by TokenData

More For Your Week:

?? Fintech: The Fourth Platform — Part One 

?? Software ate the world. Now it’s Blockchain’s turn by Nuke Goldstein

?? The OAN Invests in Privacy by Ali Sharif & The Open Application Network

?? The Complete Crypto Wallet User Guide by Taylor Rolfe

?? Built on Origin: A Decentralized Shopify Alternative by Nick Poulden

?? Crypto Christmas Gift Guide 2019 by Decrypt

?? What’s The Difference Between MakerDAO And Equilibrium_EOSDT?

?? Privacy & Cryptocurrency, Part IV: Stablecoins — Blacklists & Traceability by Eric Wall

?? HSBC to Track $20 Billion in Assets on a Blockchain Next Year

?? EOSIO Resource Allocation Reimagined by Daniel Larimer

?? Current Market Overview of Digital Assets by David Nage

DApps (Decentralized Apps) Watch

?? Algorand upgrades protocol aimed at Dapp development

Algorand Foundation has announced the availability of its protocol upgrade. This will allow cost-effective securities trading infrastructure and will enable Securitize.io to provide an efficient version of our compliance layer for customers…read more

?? Build your decentralized applications with gWASM

Golem Project team has launched the latest meta-use case, gWASM, which stands for WebAssembly on Golem. It is intended to be a bridge between applications and extensible infrastructure. It gives your applications or services easy access to external and decentralized computational power…read more

?? New Volume Statistics From DappRadar Show DeFi Was Underreported

According to the industry article in addition to gaming, exchanges, and other sectors, Ethereum has been the chief beneficiary of the recent Defi rise, which was believed to be a rapidly growing but still commensurable segment about all the others. Moreover, while many consider DEXs to be the source of Ethereum’s on-chain activity, adding token data reveals that staking-based DeFi applications deserve just as much credit. As the oldest and most established smart contract platform on the market, Ethereum has a diverse offering of dApp categories…read more

?? Data Tokens 2: From Non-Fungible to Fungible and Composable Data Tokens

Ocean Protocol aims to kickstart an open Data Economy. Data tokens are a key part. Part 1 of this series described non-fungible data tokens to tokenize data access control, which allows a new approach to data custody, using crypto-wallets. This article builds on that foundation. It asks — What are driving use cases for fungible data tokens? How would we implement them What are driving use cases for hierarchically-organized (composable) data tokens? How would we implement them?.…read more

?? Neon District: The Future. Edited. by Neon District

?? ArcBlock Releases 2.0 Version of First of its kind Decentralized Identity 

?? 5 Months Since Klaytn Mainnet Launch…Klaytn BApps Going Strong by Klaytn

?? Tune In:

This week I’ve got the latest episode of The Jay Kim Show queued up as he recaps the Singapore based Ripple’s 2019 Swell Conference. Jay interviews four of Ripple’s executives — CEO, Brad Garlinghouse; CTO David Schwartz; SVP of Customer Success Marcus Treacher; and SVP of Global Operations, Eric van Miltenburg — tune in! 

?? Download the latest Blockchain for Infrastructure Landscape Q3 2019 edition

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