Category "Multimedia"

Ripple has released its annual ‘Blockchain in Payments report’ for the third consecutive year, offering a comprehensive look into the fintech industry and blockchain’s growing role in payments.

The report has revealed that not only is growth possible for blockchain and digital assets initiatives, but that familiarity with them has increased as well. Across five global regions (North America, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Latin America and Asia Pacific) familiarity with blockchain and cryptocurrency ranges from 82% to 94%

The report has also found the blockchain adoption and positive sentiment is growing, with 67% of respondents claiming that cryptocurrency is net reliable, and over one-third using blockchain payments. IT was also found that nearly 4 in 5 (79%) of industry innovators reported growth in 2020 despite the economic pressures of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Other key findings include:

• Adopters view blockchain as the fuel to business growth: 44% of respondents in production have recorded strong business growth in the past 12 months—while 45% of respondents that reported processing mostly digital transactions, recorded a large amount of growth.
• Interest in using digital assets has dramatically increased: 99% of respondents state that their business would consider using a digital asset, either as a currency itself or as a means to instantly process cross-border payments. This is up from 94% in 2018.
• Industry innovators are realising significant growth, even amid Covid-19: this is attributed to an expansion of products, services and target customers within companies, as well as innovation in payment technology- a key growth driver for 44% of businesses.

Source: https://thefintechtimes.com/blockchain-and-digital-assets-adoption-continue-to-grow-despite-covid-19-pandemic-report/

Relatively recent experience in containing outbreaks of Ebola in Africa has allowed its nations to effectively contain the spread of coronavirus. Many African countries have quickly deployed effective track, trace, and quarantine measures of the kind that have been remarkably absent in the US and Europe. However, the economic impact of the virus is hitting parts of Africa in other more indirect ways.

The World Bank projects that the value of remittances to Sub-Saharan Africa will decline by around 9% in 2020 due to the global recession caused by the pandemic. In a region where many families depend on remittances from members abroad, the fall is likely to result in an increase in food insecurity and poverty.

Furthermore, the World Bank has found that the cost of sending $200 worth of remittances to Sub-Saharan Africa is around 8.5% – among the most expensive in the world. However, it also identifies that developing digital technology is an area that can help alleviate the cost of remittances. Reducing the cost would help boost the value of payments from abroad, helping offset some of the negative economic impacts of the COVID-19 crisis.

Lowering Remittance Fees Using Blockchain

Given the low cost of sending payments via a blockchain, it seems likely that the technology could have a significant role to play in reducing the cost of remittances to Sub-Saharan Africa. It’s one area that blockchain development firm Jelurida has identified where blockchain could make a significant difference in the lives of people living in Africa.

Through its African branch, Jelurida Africa DLT, the company works with local enterprises to help them implement its blockchain-based solutions into their businesses. Jelurida operates the Ardor multichain platform, which has an innovative parent and child chain structure. Anyone can use Ardor to set up their own child chain for any use case.

Bitswift is one such example. It has been operating for the last six years and made the decision to move its blockchain architecture onto Ardor in 2017. Bitswift is a combination of companies and an online community that works together to promote healthy digital lifestyles. Its Bitswift.cash branch allows anyone to participate in the blockchain-based token economy, providing a low-cost means for any two parties to transact value. It’s designed to appeal to even non-technical users who want to reap the benefits of token markets, making it a workable solution to the challenge of high remittance costs.

Unlocking the Potential of Sustainable Energy 

Blockchain also offers significant potential in other areas, beyond pure payments, that could help innovators looking to solve challenges in African nations. For example, many African countries remain heavily dependent on fossil fuels, which may be hampering investment in renewable energy sources, according to the United Nations. Nigeria alone subsidizes the production of fossil fuels by up to $2.5 billion each year.

Therefore, it’s essential to remove barriers to more sustainable means of energy production. Through its Swiss entity, Jelurida has been working with a project collaborating with the Austrian government and aimed at recycling waste heat energy. The project is called “Hot City,” and it uses gamification to crowdsource waste heat that can be recycled back into the energy grid. Citizens can be rewarded for their efforts in identifying these sources using blockchain-based tokens, which are secured using the Ardor platform. Although it’s currently operating in Vienna, such an initiative could be even more valuable in a city like Lagos, which has around seven times the population. It could reduce the dependence on fossil fuels, helping to save costs, and also combat the effects of climate change.

Supporting New Innovation

Jelurida Africa supports the development of a new generation of blockchain innovators via the Africa Blockchain Institute. The institute offers several industry-leading programs helping would-be developers establish their blockchain credentials.

Jelurida has also recently been a key participant in the Africa Blockchain Developers Call series, showcasing various applications built on the Ardor platform, including a Smart Voting Bot application and GiveSafely, a secure system for charitable donations.

In a continent as vast and diverse as Africa, there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution to any issue. However, blockchain technology is versatile enough to address many of the specific challenges faced by African countries. Jelurida Africa is putting the focus on education and innovation to help businesses and entrepreneurs to unlock the true benefits of blockchain.

Source: https://coingape.com/more-use-of-blockchain-technology-could-bring-benefits-to-africa/

lockchain has made major strides as of late, making headway into more traditional financial and payment circles. That came in the form of PayPal, the world’s largest payments processor, announcing it would allow its customers to buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrency. It manifested itself in aspiring digital assets exchange INX Limited launching history’s first SEC-registered IPO to accept crypto, opening the floodgates to American retail investors. And it glares perhaps most obviously in the sheer fact that one third of all large institutions have invested in crypto.

But there’s another, less-mentioned sector that is currently testing the waters with blockchain. That’s the $160-billion gaming industry, and it’s ripe for adoption. Many have debated over which niche will win the proverbial race to propel blockchain into the mainstream, including folks in finance championing crypto-based assets, and others in gaming firmly convinced their space will pave the way first. As is so often the case, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

What’s for certain is gamers now make up almost a third of the world’s population. If blockchain does become a central component of mainstream gaming, they could have an influence on the direction of blockchain. That process is gaining momentum, though there is still work to be done.

Out of all transactions performed on smart-contract platforms, including trades, deposits, and withdrawals on decentralized exchanges, gaming-based actions make up 30 percent of all activity, according to a DappRadar report. Most of that today involves blockchain-specific games, rather than traditional games. While blockchain’s infrastructure provides gamers a huge set of new benefits and rewards, the current availability and diversity of games remains at the developmental stage, plateauing blockchain assimilation. How will blockchain make its way further into the territory of traditional gaming?

For a real boom in blockchain games, developers will have to hasten the creation of charismatic games in order to provide genuine appeal outside of blockchain incentives. They will also need to combine rewards with a higher-end gaming experience—this is the real added value blockchain offers. Rewards exist in non-blockchain games, yes. But blockchain ups the ante, offering gamers a secure and efficient way of earning something that’s truly valuable for the time they put into gaming.

These rewards come in the form of accruing assets, such as weapons or in-game currencies. Non-blockchain rewards programs, such as Steam Points and Google Play Points, do let gamers earn rewards for “playing.” Unlike blockchain-based token rewards, however, these rewards can only be used within their respective ecosystems. Blockchain empowers users to spend their assets across ecosystems, expanding their possibilities and paving way for an interconnected framework of gaming.

If it is to appeal to average players, blockchain games will have to be competitive on many levels, one of them being familiarity. While it’s true many brand new games sell super well and create cult fandoms of their own, there’s something to be said about familiarity often boosting the chances of a game to succeed. Just like in other industries, the name-recognition factor goes a long way. There’s a reason legacy Triple A games like Pokemon continue to sell year after year.

And we’re not just talking about the familiarity of the games themselves—familiarity with key aspects of the gaming experience is important. While traditional gamers might be unaccustomed to distributed ledger technology, they are very familiar with the concept of digital assets and rewards. So gamers confronted with the option of earning and accruing digital assets by playing games won’t see the idea of earning tokens on the blockchain as such a big leap from what they are used to. All that’s left is to show them the advantages such tokens offer.

Imagine if Fortnite, the most profitable video game of all time bringing in over a billion dollars of revenue in its first ten months alone, was not a closed-loop system but an open, democratic marketplace. Players could share in the value generated within the Fortnite game economy and perhaps even sustain an ongoing revenue stream, all the while participating in the governance and decision-making as the game evolves.

Ownership matters

Empowering gamers with true ownership and control over their assets remains one of blockchain’s greatest advantages. The issue has come to the fore, with high-profile incidents in which highly centralized institutions violated this dynamic. Video game developer Blizzard, for example, banned Ng “Blitzchung” Wai Chung, a player of the virtual card game Hearthstone, for voicing support for Hong Kong protesters during a competition live stream. Since then, Blizzard also banned three college students and temporarily suspended multiple people in a Twitch chat for also expressing support for the protests.

EA Sports also blocked Origin for Myanmar residents, after which Trivial_sublime reacted in anger at the block, leaving him unable to play the games he had bought on Origin. He used the situation to declare: “why you shouldn’t take digital distribution for granted.”

“None of us has been offered a refund,” he wrote, adding, “not even a ‘sorry, all your games are gone.’”

Blockchain continues to promise the moon and shoot for the stars in all spheres, and gaming is no exception. It’s absolutely true that it could change the face of the gaming industry if it ever saw widespread adoption by the EAs and Ubisofts of the world, but that won’t happen until we further bridge the gap between blockchain rewards and gameplay appeal. If recent developments in blockchain expanding into mainstream financial and payment circles are any indication of what’s to come for gaming, the process will happen faster than some might think.

Source: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/why-the-gaming-industry-will-embrace-blockchain-faster-than-you-think-2020-11-10

Nigeria is targeting to realize up to $10 billion from the Blockchain technology by 2030, the Director-General, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, has said. Abdullahi, who disclosed this yesterday in Abuja at the Stakeholder Engagement for the Review of the National Blockchain Adoption Strategy, said that the government wants to harness the potential in Blockchain, and has seen the need to position the country to capture value from the value chain.

He said: “Looking at our youthful population, which is mainly digitally native and our strategic position in Africa, we are looking at how we can get at least around $6-10 billion from this by the Year 2030, and this is doable looking at our strategic and huge payment and financial services sector.  Nigeria is already one of the hottest places when it comes to tapping from this. We are coming up with a strategy that will help Nigeria to capture value from the financial services from the land administration, from education, and from healthcare because Blockchain is going to play a key role in terms of breaking and tracing products and services,” he said.

He noted that a recent publication by PwC showed that in the next 10 years blockchain is going to contribute $1.76trillion to the global gross domestic product (GDP). “Therefore, we want Nigeria to be strategically placed to capture value for this economic potential of Blockchain and that is why we are doing what we do today, to get all the stakeholders in one room, brainstorm and come up with a strategy, Nigeria benefit from the technology.”

In terms of mitigating the risks involved in adopting Blockchain, he said: “What we are looking at is to identify a set of choices, strategy is about your choices, the dos and don’t. At the end of the strategy, we are going to identify the key risks and the mitigant, how can we mitigate those risks so that we can know our dos and don’ts and how we can capture values from the Blockchain.”

Speaking also, a representative of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Fadele Adeolu, pledged the apex bank’s commitment to the initiative.

“CBN is fully committed to the initiative that will drive the development of the economy.  I pray that the programme access will yield desirable results.”

A Blockchain expert, Abdulsalam Umar, in his presentation titled, “An Overview of the National Blockchain Adoption Strategy,” said Blockchain will reduce cost and improve security in the country, because of its conducive environment.”

Source: https://guardian.ng/business-services/nigeria-targets-10-billion-from-blockchain-technology-by-2030/

A few years ago, with digital currencies hitting record highs, blockchain was at the heart of the financial debate, but everyone was wary.
Now, several large banks are testing the technology, tempted by the prospect of improving certain processes in the sector, reports the CNBC channel.

The blockchain was originally created for Bitcoin transactions.
It is a different database format that is maintained on many computers.
Banks have so far chosen to follow some of the principles of the blockchain, adapting the technology to different uses of digital currencies.
In Italy, much of the country’s banking sector uses Spunta, a technology-based blockchain network from R3 based in New York.

“We’ve been talking about the prospects of blockchain for a long time and it’s great to finally see it in action.
It is a beginning. We would like to adopt it in other European countries and then globally.
“The infrastructure it has lays the groundwork for the development of other technologies that can really have an impact,” R3 founder and CEO David Rutter told the channel.

For some large banks, the focus is increasingly on understanding how they can actually make a profit from the blockchain.
JPMorgan Chase, for example, recently unveiled its internal digital currency – the JPM Coin.
The pandemic could play a key role in promoting commercially viable blockchain products by banks, according to Lex Sokolin, co-head of blockchain company ConsenSys.
Sokolin added that banks and other financial institutions are also less reluctant to experiment with digital currencies than before.
The People’s Bank of China is already testing a digital version of the yuan, while other central banks have devised a framework for how these digital currencies might work in practice.

“Our view is that this adoption and transformation will be gradual in most countries, but drastic in some individual areas. Payment systems do not tend to replace each other completely, but rather are being built more and more,” he said.

Mr Rutter, for his part, noted that more commercial banks in Europe could use blockchain technology to improve their profitability.

Source: https://www.bankingnews.gr/index.php?id=531681&fbclid=IwAR3Fs5CMxt-aKk9UECBqMSmdYces6vBsp_o1dKcN-51COKj_bUXZXRfaCRM

German soccer club FC Bayern Munich, which plays in the country’s Bundesliga, is entering the world of blockchain-based fantasy soccer.

The Ethereum blockchain-based fantasy soccer game Sorare, which Bayern joined this week, already counts over 100 participant clubs, including high-profile names such as Paris Saint-German, Juventus, PSG, and Atletico Madrid.

FC Bayern Munich is itself no stranger to collaborations with blockchain projects, having partnered last fall with Stryking Entertainment to produce digital collectibles of its players. These cards are both collectible and playable as part of a fantasy-league style challenge.

In announcing its Sorare deal to fans, FC Bayern Munich noted that the top 20 leagues in the world are now available on the gaming platform, which has become truly global.

Sorare works as a five-a-side soccer game. New players pick an initial squad of 10 blockchain-based player cards from which they create their tournament team.

As reported, Sorare also offers players the chance to buy and trade limited edition cards, whose higher score and value is determined by players’ real-life performance in soccer league tables and their rarity as digital collectibles.

According to Nonfungible, a ranking site for blockchain games and issuers of collectible, non-fungible tokens, Sorare is inching up the league tables and has been gaining popularity with the global gaming community.

As of press time, the platform is ranked third, with a weekly trading volume of roughly $243,000. However, in terms of all-time-sales, Sorare significantly trails behind Axie Infinity, which reports roughly triple the sales of the fantasy soccer market.

Sorare has recently launched in the United States, where the platform hopes to attract some of the 60 million American fantasy sports players.

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bayern-munich-taps-the-trend-for-blockchain-based-fantasy-soccer

The recently created United States Space Force, or USSF, and the U.S. Air Force Research Lab has chosen blockchain firm Xage Security to develop data security systems.

In a statement, Xage Security said it was awarded a contract to provide end-to-end data protection for the USSF. The company will employ its blockchain-based Xage Security Fabric solution for the project.

The company said Xage Security Fabric has a unified platform that can secure all systems and removes single points of entry so hackers can’t wipe information. It will allow the USSF to verify who accesses systems, ensure satellites continue to function securely even if ground equipment goes offline, and protect data until fully transferred to operational units.

This is the second contract Xage Security won from the U.S. Air Force, following the first one signed in December 2019.

The USSF was established in December last year to defend space and acquire military space systems. According to the University of Illinois, space systems are infrastructure and vehicles that work together to perform outer space tasks. These can be satellites or even spaceships. Since many space systems heavily rely on communication and geographical positioning, it’s crucial that data being sent through cannot be compromised.

Xage Security CEO Duncan Greatwood said blockchain meets many of the complex needs of the USSF:

“The USSF requires decentralized enforcement of security to establish space domain resilience and objective situational awareness––across every asset and data element. We built the Xage solution to serve the needs of complex critical infrastructure systems, and are excited to bring the Xage solution to the Space Force in the form of a blockchain-protected space system security.”

The U.S. Department of Defense, which oversees all military branches including the Air Force and the USSF, has been interested in blockchain for a while. It awarded Indiana-based blockchain firm Simba Chain a contract to provide security for sensitive research and development data in March this year. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has also been involved in blockchain since 2019.

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/us-space-force-taps-blockchain-firm-xage-security-for-data-protection