blockchain
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Crunch Network
How blockchain will grow beyond bitcoin
Since its advent in 2009, bitcoin’s decentralized, broker-less and secure mechanism to send money across the world has steadily risen in popularity and adoption. Of equal — if not greater — importance is the blockchain, the technology that supports the cryptocurrency, the distributed ledger which enables trustless, peer-to-peer exchange of data. Every day, new companies… Read More
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Rakuten buys struggling bitcoin startup Bitnet to create a ‘blockchain research lab’
Rakuten has confirmed that it has acquired the assets of Bitnet, a bitcoin wallet startup it invested in, which will be used to create a ‘bitcoin lab’ for the Japanese retail giant. Read More
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Blockai’s new tool combines tweeting and claiming copyright
Blockai is supposed to help photographers and artists defend their intellectual property. Now it’s launching a new feature to make that process easier — or at least better-integrated with Twitter. Previously, Blockai users would go to the startup’s website to upload their work, creating a record in a public database (namely, the blockchain) stating that they’re the… Read More
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Crunch Network
Looking beyond the hype at fintech in Southeast Asia
According to KPMG and CB Insights, a total of $5.7 billion was invested in fintech in the first quarter of 2016 alone. While companies in China and the U.S. receive most of this funding, Southeast Asia fintech investment has increased significantly as well. Read More
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Blockchain-based banking backend Vault OS from ex-Googler emerges from stealth mode
Despite holding the vast majority of the world’s wealth (or perhaps because of that), banks aren’t exactly hotbeds of cutting-edge tech, often relying on decades-old systems for everyday tasks. ThoughtMachine, a company led by ex-Google engineer Paul Taylor, is looking to change that with a modern, fully integrated, blockchain-based banking operating system called Vault OS. Read More
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Crunch Network
The evolution of the mobile payment
It’s anticipated that there will be more than 4.8 billion individuals using a mobile phone by the end of 2016. Because of this enormous growth, we can expect to see the mobile payments industry and startups in the space evolve to meet the growing demands of users. To understand how big this industry is going to be, you need to understand the history of mobile payments and their… Read More
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ShoCard and SITA want to store your ID details on the blockchain to authenticate travelers
ShoCard and SITA, the IT company for the air transport industry, have been working together on an interesting project. They’ve been looking at ways to store your ID details on the blockchain to manage traveler identification. More generally, ShoCard has been working on a seamless service that lets you store your identity onto the bitcoin blockchain. This way, anyone can retrieve and… Read More
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Blockchain open sources Thunder network, paving the way for instant bitcoin transactions
Blockchain, the company behind the world’s most popular bitcoin wallet, has been quietly working on an interesting project called Thunder. The Thunder network is an alternative network of nodes that lets you make off-chain bitcoin payments in seconds and settle back to the bitcoin blockchain every now and then. And it makes me excited about bitcoin all over again. Read More
Latest Crunch Report
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BitPagos uses the blockchain to enable credit for online payments in emerging markets
The world is familiar with bitcoin being used for many things. Online payments, long-distance remittance, even a substitute for gold, but what about credit? Not so much — and that’s where BitPagos, a startup competing in the Battlefield pitch competition at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, wants to make its mark. Read More
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IBM raises its blockchain game with secure cloud services and Docker integration
Bitcoin may still be the most famous application of blockchain technology, but the distributed, encrypted database architecture is now being applied to a range of other services, from different kinds of (non Bitcoin) financial transactions to anything else that requires secure tracking. And today, IBM laid out its claim for some of that new business: the IT giant announced a new set of… Read More
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Social payments startup Circle rolls into Europe
It may have started as a Bitcoin wallet but veteran entrepreneur Jeremy Allaire’s fintech startup Circle has since shifted focus to social payments, launching an app in Q4 last year that lets users send U.S. dollars to settle IOUs between each other, with its pitch being it makes payments as easy as firing off an SMS. Read More
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Crunch Network
IoT and the development of a circular economy
Few topics receive greater hype in the media today than the Internet of Things (IoT), and still a report produced by McKinsey & Co. last summer argued that the potential impact of IoT technologies might actually be understated. An estimated economic impact of $3.9-11.1 trillion a year by 2025 was the bottom line of McKinsey’s research. Read More
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Stratumn is building a sort of Heroku for blockchain applications
Meet Stratumn, a Paris-based startup that wants to create a platform-as-a-service for developers interested in the blockchain. With Stratumn, you can build, deploy and run applications on the company’s platform, and these applications can communicate with the bitcoin blockchain. It’s like Heroku, but for blockchain developers. The company just raised $670,000 (€600,000) from… Read More
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Blockai uses the blockchain to help artists protect their intellectual property
While most of the discussions around blockchain have focused on its possible uses in finance, startup Blockai is looking at something different — helping artists, photographers and other creators register their work so that they can protect it from potential copyright infringement. CEO Nathan Lands is pitching this as an intermediate step between registering your work with the Library… Read More
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Crunch Network
Let’s Be Honest About The Problems With Blockchain And Finance
Strange times we live in. The world’s biggest financial players and analysts are buzzing about an invention that became famous partly by promising to destroy them. In just a few months, blockchain went from the cause célèbre of crypto-anarchists and tech evangelists to the biggest idea in mainstream banking. Read More
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Crunch Network
Fintech Is Just Getting Started
In just the first week of trading in 2016, the S&P 500 lost 6 percentage points and more than one trillion dollars in market capitalization. With the worst start in more than a century, the markets seem to be predicting a slow period for the U.S. economy. One segment that I think has the potential to survive, if not thrive, in the expected volatility this year is financial technology. Read More
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Five Tech Fixations In 2015
What was on the mind of the tech industry in 2015? Plenty of course, but judging by the emails flowing into the TC inbox a few topics recurred enough to rise to the top of the preoccupations list over the year. Read More
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Crunch Network
Using The Blockchain To Fight Crime And Save Lives
Blockchain technology has been described as email for money, but it has the potential to be so much more. Blockchain technology is a hyper-secure record of digital events that is distributed among many different computers. Blockchain technology is best known for its connection to the cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. It’s what enables transactions to happen without middlemen or a central body… Read More
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Crunch Network
When The Bus Will Be Its Own Boss
Thousands of cabs make their way through the streets of London. Hundreds of buses pick up and drop off passengers. Trucks carry their cargo. They are, of course, autonomous; like Google’s self-driving car, they all move without a driver. This vision is almost a cliche. Everyone is already talking about a future where professional drivers are unemployed and all vehicles will drive… Read More
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