Hedera Hashgraph is positioning itself as a “Consensus-as-a-Service” blockchain, serving other enterprise chains with a hybrid network model. The concept was explained by Hedera CEO, Mance Harmon, at a May 14 speech on Consensus Distributed. Cointelegraph followed up with Harmon right after the panel to learn more about the concept of providing consensus as a service. Hybrid enterprise consensus Hedera is a thoroughly enterprise-centric product, though it also has a public token named HBAR. Its consensus model can be described as a hybrid between a locked-in federated consensus and a delegated Proof-of-Stake model, like that found in EOS. Hedera is …

Russian blockchain firm Waves has announced updates to its enterprise platform, including accelerated smart contract execution, licensing fees and inter-chain anchoring. On March 17, Waves wrote that the new Version 1.2 of Waves Enterprise will enable an increase in containerized smart contract execution speeds by up to 70 times. The company has sped up execution times by replacing the platform’s former REST communication protocol with Google’s Remote Procedure Call (gRPC) — which containerizes contract execution by removing guest operating systems from the protocol. The speed-up in contract execution will facilitate scaling so that clients can process billions of transactions each …

Global taxation and transaction advisory firm EY have announced the launch of their open-source Baseline protocol. Baseline comprises a smart contract and tokenization platform built for enterprises on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Baseline was founded by EY in partnership with Microsoft and ConsenSys, and was developed in collaboration with many companies operating in the cryptocurrency sector, including Chainlink, MakerDAO, Unibright and AMD. The platform’s code has been made available to select entities by invitation and will see a public release before April. Baseline features zero-knowledge proofs and off-chain storage to protect privacy In a video published by development partner …

It has long been understood that satisfied customers are key to a thriving business. Customer relationship management, or CRM, enables just that by helping a business engage meaningfully with its customers, improving profitability while lowering costs. With companies spending a whopping $48.2 billion on CRM software in 2018 alone — up more than 15% from the previous year — and a forecast that CRM will become the largest segment in the software market by 2020, it’s curious that only 46% of businesses invested in such solutions last year. CRM is inhibited by the inability to connect relevant data to real, …

A whole new exciting world of value is being coded into life right now by gamers. While it may be a far cry from the lofty ideals of banking the unbanked and taking down the global banking system, gaming is gearing up to be a massive force in the crypto space. Addictively fun games will draw a whole new base of users into the crypto economy. Gamers are an excellent target market for adoption because many gamers are a touch more tech savvy than the average internet user and tend to be a bit more open to new ideas. Just …

JPMorgan Chase — whose CEO, Jamie Dimon, once notably expressed skepticism over cryptocurrency — was actually one of the first financial institutions to “learn to love the blockchain.” In 2015, the bank created a division dedicated to exploring emerging technology such as blockchain. We were two of the first members of the JPMorgan blockchain team. We built some of its earliest blockchain technology and vetted other blockchain providers for the bank’s strategic investment and adoption. In this article, we’ll discuss the technology we developed during our time at the bank and our insights into the current suite of JPMorgan blockchain …

Part of the appeal of digital currencies is their global nature. Since the vast majority of digital currencies are not sponsored by an individual state, the hope was that the crypto world could be largely borderless. This has turned out to be a bit of a pipe dream. It turns out that countries actually do matter when it comes to digital currencies, as they have the power of the law and the ability to regulate. It very much matters if an individual trader is located in China, where almost all cryptocurrencies are outlawed, rather than Japan, which has created a …

The music streaming industry has come a long way since the old days of Napster and the first-ever downloadable music. The new technology that was the internet, combined with faster download speeds, made music sharing possible. Since those early days, regulations and structure have provided a way for companies to monetize digital content while protecting it and putting new technology to work. As the industry evolved, a few major platforms exploded into the market. These early growth leaders received huge boosts as users began tossing out their CDs and flocking to media services. However, those early days have come to …

Thanks to the high computational flexibility that it offers, the influence of cloud computing on the blockchain space continues to grow. It's less of a surprise, then, that cloud computing giants — such as Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle and Google's parent company Alphabet — are leading the charge to merge blockchain, especially the enterprise type, and the cloud. Microsoft in particular has been actively engaging with blockchain startups that are developing blockchain solutions for the enterprise market, working with them to deploy their solutions on the Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure. The company's aggressive approach to bolstering the blockchain functionalities of Azure …

Ethereum currently is known as the most popular public blockchain network for the development of decentralized applications (DApps) and smart contracts. Its prospective blockchain protocol is one of the few cryptocurrency projects actually achieving real-world adoption, with dozens of applications that can be divided into 11 major categories: open finance, decentralized exchanges, gaming, collectibles, marketplaces, developer tools, identity, governance, infrastructure, token-curated registries and Ethereum Request for Comments (ERC) token standards. Thus, it appears to be leading the field of enterprise blockchain solutions. Ethereum is contributing to the revolutionizing of the internet with the creation of the Decentralized Web — or …

An out-of-the-box solution says it enables anyone, even with no experience, to build their own blockchain in under 10 minutes. According to Nuls, businesses are going through a similar evolution as they did with the early internet, when every company wanted their own website: They now want their own blockchain. And although these firms may not fully understand how to deploy blockchain technology, they are aware of how their business may benefit from it. Nuls aims is to “dismantle some of the biggest barriers” that are stopping individuals and companies of all sizes from creating their own blockchains. Hurdles for …

Research firm Gartner has warned that 90% of the blockchain technology used by enterprises will need to be replaced within the next 18 months, tech site ITPro reported on June 3. The company’s senior research director, Adrian Lee, said the industry’s fragmented nature means the technology implemented by some companies is at risk of becoming obsolete or insecure by 2021. Lee also said blockchain vendors often use marketing messages that fail to address an enterprise’s needs — leaving companies confused as to how decentralized platforms work, and whether they would add any net benefit to their operations. He told ITPro: …