The business of insurance is enormously complex: The process of evaluating and managing a variety of risks that individuals and organizations face every day inevitably involves coordination of the multiple parties’ efforts and reconciliation of extensive records. Both aspects make the insurance sector an appealing ground for blockchain-based optimization — and indeed, distributed ledger technology is a prominent feature of a rising tide of technological innovations, collectively known as insuretech, that seek to bring new efficiencies into the industry. As Cointelegraph previously reported, research firm MarketsandMarkets in 2018 projected that the value of blockchain components in the insurance market will …

The technology that underpins cryptocurrencies has been gradually entering the charity sector, purportedly providing more transparency and trust to the industry — especially given a decrease in people’s trust in charity organizations, where the public is increasingly concerned about how charities spend raised money. Governments and blockchain projects embrace charity space Governments around the world have been showing increasing interest in blockchain deployment and digital currency adoption for philanthropy, although few of them have implemented clear regulations toward the new type of currency at the legislative level. Recently, the British Virgin Islands — a United Kingdom overseas territory in the …

In the crypto industry, there are many examples of how a conflict of interest has led to a company split. Perhaps, the largest ones are the forks of bitcoin (BTC), bitcoin cash (BCH) and the Ethereum (ETH) network. As a rule, the reason lies in disagreements related to the philosophy of the project, its development or financial components. Various views on how the platform should be managed led to the conflict of interest at the headquarters of MakerDAO. It all started with the fact that Andy Milenius, the company’s chief technology officer, left the project, as reported by Cointelegraph on …

Crypto is on the march, and not just in terms of market price. Not only does data indicate that the number of ID-verified users of cryptocurrency doubled over 2018, but there are various other metrics that suggest that adoption is gaining traction. As many as 84% of companies worldwide are involved with blockchain-based technologies in some way, while cryptocurrency ownership is twice as high among young Americans than among the general United States population. And at a time when there's plenty of talk about the need for crypto to standardize and regulate itself before adoption can really take off, it …

On May 30, Tezos implemented the amendment Athens A, as the result of a voting process that involved its baker nodes (the Tezos equivalent of “miners”) from Feb. 28 to May 30. Although the actual relevance of the upgrade was quite small (see below), the Tezos community underlines that the test was a milestone. The smooth shift to Athens A indeed demonstrated the capability of Tezos to evolve without forking, thanks to the features of proposal/selection/voting/test/implementation this blockchain itself encompasses. On the very same day, another fast-growing young company backed by a cryptocurrency, Iota, announced an important step toward total …

Between May 23 and 26, 2019, the European Union’s citizens are renewing their continental parliament. Among the countries that will participate in the poles is Italy (voting on May 26) — one of the founding members of the EU, alongside France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg. Due to the very nature of cryptocurrencies, it's tough to get a correct figure of the actual penetration of these technologies in a single country. However, relying on some proxies — as in the chart below — it is likely that the Bel Paese (the Beautiful Country) would fall outside the leading European group. …

Microsoft, one of the world's largest software makers by revenue, is currently on a blockchain streak. This time, Microsoft presented a vast blockchain-related plan: a decentralized identity (DID) network built atop of the bitcoin network, which can potentially empower users all over the internet to take control over their personal data and content. Earlier in May 2019, the United States tech giant announced its brand new Azure Blockchain Service along with Azure Blockchain Development Kit for the Ethereum blockchain. It also teamed up with Starbucks to present the first use case for its technology — tracking coffee production, from farm …