6 Years Ago

Jonny Fry Posted

6 Years Ago |
How Blockchain technology is being used in the energy sector.

Repsol, the Spanish energy company, has recently invested in FinBoot, which is a business with offices in London and Barcelona. FinBoot has been developing a Blockchain-powered platform to improve the efficiency of tracking the multitude of samples that energy companies need to continuously create. Repsol typically has over 60,000 samples it has to create, as refining and transporting petrochemicals requires products to be sampled and checked in order to meet Repsol’s clients’ requirements.“Currently, there is a lot of rework involved in these types of processes where we handle a large number of samples...


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Jonny Fry Posted

6 Years Ago |
Macdonald’s, Virgin Media and Nestle turn to Blockchain to improve trust and transparency in digital advertising

In the 11thMay 2019 Digital Bytes edition, we looked at how Blockchain technology was being used by Pepsi to help make money being spent on digital advertisingto be more efficient. Pepsi had found that it was paying for “click” advertising, where up to 48% of the “click-throughs” were wasteful. Earlier this year Lucidity, which been working with the International Advertising Board Tech Lab's Blockchain Pilot programto help improve the efficiency and cut down on the waste in digital advertising, claimed:

      Only two out of...


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Jonny Fry Posted

6 Years Ago |
Blockchain being used to track honey and create a Coffeecoin Cryptocurrency

The USA tech giant Oracle is working with the World Bee Projectto develop a Blockchain-powered platform that will offer assurance on the sustainability of honey production. This will also offer comfort to buyers that the honey is from sustainable sources as it will provide full transparency of the honey-supply chains. This is welcomed by those involved in buying and selling honey due to the recent concerns over fake honeyin Australia, as it has been found that some honey has had sugar syrup from cane or corn added.
Fake honey has proved...


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Jonny Fry Posted

6 Years Ago |
Ultrain could this new Chinese Blockchain dominate globally?

Ultrainis a new type of public Blockchain that has been developed in China, demonstrating that China continues to be a world leader in this technology. The company has an impressive team with Rui Guo, the CEO, being a former technical director at Alibaba Security and also an employee of IBM. Other team members come also from Alibaba, like the co-founder, Ning Li, who was technical director of the Alipay Blockchain team, and Yufeng Shen from AliOS and Google.

Ultrain Blockchain has been designed to be able to handle high volumes of data created by...


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Jonny Fry Posted

6 Years Ago |
Blockchain technology looks to slash costs in the $100 trillion asset management sector

FundAdminChain(FAC) is looking to massively reduce the cost of administration in the asset management sector, thus making funds better value for their customers which ought to improve fund performance at the same time. FAC is using the open source Blockchain platform, R3’s Corda, with which FAC would appear to have very close links. The new CEO of FAC, Brian McNulty, was a former managing director at R3. One of the advisors for FAC is the founder of R3, David Rutter, formerly CEO of the electronic broking division of...


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Jonny Fry Posted

6 Years Ago |
Energy


The business of providing energy is rapidly evolving as the sector has to adjust to legislation to reduce carbon, it is decentralizing, and we are seeing a rise of micro-generation suppliers entering the market. Increasingly we are seeing new business models being developed to hold manage and process data drawing on technologies like machine learning, Blockchain  and artificial intelligence, With ever more data and the roll-out of smart meters, the “Internet of Energy” is slowly, becoming a reality, increasing the value of data management even further.
In the wake of cryptocurrencies, interest in blockchain technology peaked in late 2017, Blockchain start-ups,...


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Jonny Fry Posted

6 Years Ago |
Facebook spur China on to look at their own Digital Currency

With the announcement of Libra, Facebook’s new Digital Currency, it was reported in The South China Morning Postthat Wang Xin - a directorof the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) – said recently at an academic conference hosted by Peking University’s Institute of Digital Finance“If [Libra] is widely used for payments, cross-border payments in particular, would it be able to function like money and accordingly have a large influence on monetary policy, financial stability and the international monetary system?”China was one of the first countries to look at Digital Currencies back...


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Jonny Fry Posted

6 Years Ago |
Deutsche Bank lay off 18,000 staff, more worryingly global Debt storm clouds continue to grow

Deutsche Bank finally revealed what the market had been expecting for years, that it needed to reduce its cost base and become leaner and fitter against a back drop of anaemic global growth. This has led to Deutsche Bank cutting 18,000 jobs.
In April 2019, Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, told CNBC that cryptocurrencies and financial technology developments are “clearly shaking” the banking system. She also added, “We do not want innovation that would shake the system so much that we would lose the stability...


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Jonny Fry Posted

6 Years Ago |
Digital Assets are gaining popularity with traditional investors

Almost daily there is a report of traditional investors embracing Digital Assets. The CEO of Goldman Sachs last week, when asked if his firm is looking to launch a Digital Currency like JP Morgan, replied “Assume that all major financial institutions around the world are looking at the potential of tokenisation, stablecoins and frictionless payments”
Meanwhile, Wall Street seasoned-investor Henry Kravis (co-founder of KKR), has been investing in Parifi Capital which has $190 billion undermanagement, and claims he now spends most of his time researching Blockchain and Cryptocurrency opportunities. Billionaire Peter Theil (co-founder...


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Jonny Fry Posted

6 Years Ago |
Crypto infrastructure is being built

There have been a number of interesting announcements around the use of Digital Assets with some interesting products and companies receiving the green light from regulators.
In Europe we have seen a Luxembourg-based business called Argento emerge and, from the UK, The London Block Exchange has launched what it calls “the world’s first genuine bitcoin (BTC) bond”. This new bond being issued by LBX, which is regulated by the UK FCA, will enable institutional investors to buy a bond that has no exposure to fiat currencies. It will have its own International Securities Identification Number (ISIN) code,and its...


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Jonny Fry Posted

6 Years Ago |
Are we to see an asset management war?

Blackrock — the biggest asset manager in the world with over $6.28 trillionundermanagement — is capitalised at $72.billion and, during the quarter ending 31stMarch 2019, generated $3.246 billionof revenue. Facebook is valued at $550 billionand, as at March 2019, it had over 2.38 billion users and generated $15.08 billion of revenue. Blackrock only has $6.49 billionof net cash and short term investments, compared to Facebook’s $41.12 billionof cash and short terms investments. Despite Blackrock’s size and global reach (having offices in over 100 countries) it is still very dependent on the Americas as they make up 62%of...


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Jonny Fry Posted

6 Years Ago |


Do Central banks and governments think Facebook (and other creators of Digital Assets) are stupid or that they do not have the ability to remember, let alone search Google to remind themselves and others of the continued failure of existing banks? It really is not that hard for one to spend two minutes on the internet and find example after example of fines sanctions, staff sackings and judicial criticism being levied against the so called reputable, safe, well-regulated and trustworthy banks. The two main reasons for having financial regulation is:
 
1.    To maintain confidence in the financial system
2.    To treat customers fairly
 
Having confidence...


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Jonny Fry Posted

6 Years Ago |
Converting gift cards and loyalty scheme rewards to Bitcoin


The gift card market is reported to be going to grow by over 15% p.a. in the next four years from $585,311 million to over $1,591,461 million according to Allied market Research. As more retailers understand the benefits of such schemes and as increasingly such schemes migrate to become digital using mobile phones. Given the growth in e-commerce and the demand for cashless payments gift cards are increasingly being used. However, it is possible to convert gift cards in to Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
 
Given some gift cards have an expiry date, if you...


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Jonny Fry Posted

6 Years Ago |
Facebook set to bring 2.3 billion users to Digital Assets

Facebook is looking to establish an independent governing body for its new Digital currency – project Libra. The new Facebook coin will be pegged to a basket of different currencies i.e. Yen, $, £, € etc. Facebook is looking to establish a foundation to oversee the governance, by selling positions to a 100 different organisations which will be on the governing body, which itself, will over-see the Digital Asset. According to Blockcrypto, the initial members will all pay $10million and include:( see attached image) Source:www.theblockcrypto.com

Interestingly, the majority of the above proposed members...


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Joined 7th February 2019