Three global industry leaders in telecommunications — Spain’s Telefónica, Deutsche Telekom, and British provider Vodafone — have jointly finalized a trial blockchain solution for the settlement of roaming discount agreements. Developed by blockchain startup Clear, the solution is expected to reduce capital costs for telcos, support faster revenue recognition, and provide more efficient settlement for their inter-company deals and workflows. Both Telefónica Innovation Ventures and the Telekom Innovation Pool of Deutsche Telekom had participated in a $13 million Series A investment for Clear earlier this year to support the startup in developing its blockchain settlement system. The finalized trial solution …
Google Cloud is incorporating core technology from Band Protocol, a decentralized oracle service, to enable “immediate and accurate analysis of financial time series data,” according to Kevin Lu, head of business development at Band. Lu announced Thursday that Band’s Standard Dataset is now live on Google BigQuery, an enterprise data warehouse powering ultra-fast SQL queries. Lu described the partnership as “one of the direct collaborations with the Google Cloud team to enable traditional, hybrid blockchain and cloud applications to be built which use decentralized oracles.” He continued: "Our teams are empowering researchers and developers to use decentralized oracles for any …
World-famous car manufacturer BMW Group plans to roll out its blockchain supply chain solution to 10 suppliers this year. Dubbed “PartChain,” the platform has already been successfully tested by BMW in 2019, an official announcement on March 31 revealed. In its early version, PartChain is designed to ensure traceability and immediate data transparency for automobile components across complex supply chains that engage multiple international parties. The 2019 pilot implemented the solution for purchasing and tracking front lights, with the involvement of two of BMW Group’s total 31 plants, as well as three locations of the supplier Automotive Lighting. Andreas Wendt …
Tokyo’s biggest finserv firm, SBI Group, will now allow general Japanese investors to purchase cryptocurrencies via its newly launched ‘crypto asset fund’. The fund is composed of seven cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), XRP, Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Chainlink (LINK) and Polkadot (DOT). The crypto-asset fund, to be traded and operated by the SBI Alternative Fund, was established on Dec. 02 with a dedicated capital of 5 million yen, worth approximately $45,000 at the time of writing. However, the company may choose to release the capital in smaller break-ups of 1 million yen each. According to the official …
The tokenization of global property markets has been an ambitious goal of the blockchain space, and decentralized finance (DeFi) could offer a novel solution for the sector to pick up the pace. Decentralized oracle network Chainlink is set to power a tokenized real estate platform serving the Latin American property market. LaProp will allow investors to buy tokenized shares in various real-world properties, which will yield a percentage of income from rental payments. LaProp will look to leverage Chainlink Keepers’ node operators’ track record in securing billions of dollars invested in DeFi markets. The decentralized automation service carries out tasks …