The EU Blockchain Observatory published its fifth report under the headline “Blockchain Applications in the Healthcare Sector.” The document highlights the importance of distributed ledger technology for the European healthcare sector, which faces a number of challenges on its route to the “Healthcare 4.0” revolution. The 66-page document was announced on the EU Blockchain Observatory's Twitter on April 11. Its authors take an optimistic perspective on the implementation of blockchain technology in healthcare, noting its compatibility with the core principles of “Healthcare 4.0”, such as interoperability, virtualization, decentralization, real-time capability, service orientation and modularity. Below are 7 key takeaways from …

UK-based blockchain infrastructure firm Applied Blockchain has filed an initial public offering (IPO) application on Apr. 8 to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission to issue 3,236,245 shares of common stock onto the Nasdaq Global Select Market with the ticker symbol APLD. The firm currently operates a stock on OTC Pink — the lowest of three tiers within the over-the-counter market as per financial volume and the disclosure of company information required — under the same tag with share price of $18.84. The document of application was keen to emphasize that the public offering price would not be determined, …

South Africa has taken another step closer to implementing its central bank digital currency (CBDC) as the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) concludes a technical proof-of-concept for the project. The project, titled Project Khokha 2 (PK2), is the second phase of SARB’s Project Khokha (PK1), launched in 2018. It experimented with distributed ledger technology (DLT) for interbank payments' settlement, successfully replicating the banks’ “SAMOS” real-time gross settlement system. This second phase, PK2 was launched in February 2021 and tested DLT with clearing, trading and settlement within the proof-of-concept environment with industry participants Absa, FirstRand, JSE Limited, Nedbank and Standard Bank …

Scientists can leverage blockchain tools, such as smart contracts and tokens, to improve collaboration in scientific endeavors between different stakeholders. This so-called decentralized science movement, or DeSci for short, combines blockchain and Web3 technologies to improve scientific research. A primary goal of DeSci is wider participation and funding when approaching scientific challenges, as well as democratizing the peer-to-peer review process, which is dominated by a few journals in which it can be costly to appear and combatting censorship. DeSci can also create standards for research storage with the proof of existence technology. Whereas on financial blockchains such as Bitcoin, transactions …

On Monday, March 14, the European Blockchain Observatory announced a call for tenders to contract a consortium, whose mission will be to facilitate and operate a pan-European regulatory sandbox for distributed ledger technologies, or DLT, and blockchain in particular. A major task for the future consortium will be to provide “comprehensive legal advice” concerning the operation of the core services of the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI). The regulatory sandbox is envisaged as a space where regulators, blockchain enterprises and users will interact “in a trusted environment.” In addition to already existing EBSI projects, it will host a broad range …

Advertisements are in abundance everywhere we go — from billboards seen throughout road trips to commercials displayed every fifteen minutes or so during television shows. It’s also the case that most advertisements today display messages from major internet-based brands like Amazon, which was ranked as the largest advertiser in the United States in 2020. Telecommunication providers and payment giants like American Express have also been listed as some of the biggest advertisers in the United States. These companies typically spend billions of dollars per year on marketing messages aimed to inform, persuade and remind consumers about their products and services. …

PayPal was a massive innovation in the payments processing industry. The financial brainchild of Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and eventually, Elon Musk aimed far ahead of its time, facilitating instant payments between customers, businesses and more while utilizing the internet. Solana (SOL) Pay is considered by many to be the next innovation in the payments processing arena, facilitating payments while taking nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and Web3 into account. Some are going so far as to call Solana’s new payment protocol the Visa or PayPal of Web3. This post will break down Solana Pay and how it works so you can …

Understanding the valuation matrix There is no rule book on how to assess an NFT valuation. The metrics you use for evaluating private companies or conventional investment vehicles such as shares are simply not applicable to NFTs. Usually, the payment rolled out by the last buyer gives some indication of the value. For NFTs, however, it is hard to guess what the next buyer might pay, depending on their estimates. Most buyers lack the skills to ascertain the value of NFTs logically and base their quotes on guesswork. For sellers too, it is hard to determine what they might end …

The HBAR Foundation, a philanthropic and independent subsidiary of distributed ledger firm Hedera Hashgraph, has announced the launch of the environmentally-conscious Sustainable Impact Fund, SIF, conceived to foster the development of climate-conscious solutions within the Hedera ecosystem. The first recipient, a Welsh blockchain company called DOVU, will be granted $100 million to pursue their open-source Guardian technology to develop publicly transparent mechanisms, such as their audit trail, to verify carbon-offsetting data. A supporter of the Crypto Climate Accord, Dovu's carbon-centric market capitalization platform aggregates an abundance of real-time quantitative data on all Ethereum-based projects, tracking and openly publishing their carbon …

What is Solana? Solana is a highly functional open source project that implements a new, permissionless and high-speed layer-1 blockchain. Created in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko, a former executive at Qualcomm, Solana aims to scale throughput beyond what is typically achieved by popular blockchains while keeping costs low. Solana implements an innovative hybrid consensus model that combines a unique proof-of-history (PoH) algorithm with the lightning-fast synchronization engine, which is a version of proof-of-stake (PoS). Because of this, the Solana network can theoretically process over 710,000 transactions per second (TPS) without any scaling solutions needed. Solana’s third-generation blockchain architecture is designed …

What is Algorand? Algorand is a blockchain network created in 2017 by Silvio Micali, an MIT professor who won the Turing Award for his work in cryptography. Algorand is a decentralized permissionless blockchain protocol that anyone can use to develop applications and transfer value. The Algorand protocol is powered by a novel consensus algorithm that enables fast, secure and scalable transactions. Algorand addresses the common issues that most older blockchains have, specifically concerning scalability and consensus. The blockchain uses Pure proof-of-stake (PPoS), a consensus protocol that selects validators at random according to the weight of their stake in ALGO coins. …

The Iota Foundation and Imperial College London recently announced the launch of a four-year distributed ledger technology, or DLT, initiative designed to research and develop solutions to foster socially conscious, circular economic models and businesses around servitization. The Imperial-Iota-Infrastructures Lab, known as the I3-Lab, will operate within the Dyson School of Design Engineering and has adopted the tagline “infrastructure powered by Iota; analytics powered by Imperial; use-cases powered by the community; and impact powered by partnerships.” Expected to commence this summer, the I3-Lab has been initially funded by a $1 million philanthropic grant from the Iota Foundation and will soon …