As the first vaccines against COVID-19 roll out, governments and institutions across the world are scrambling to figure out how to provide proof that someone has been vaccinated. Paper certificates, PDFs, wristbands and mobile apps have all been suggested — and the former director of the Centers for Disease Control, Tom Frieden, and international human rights attorney Aaron Schwid urged the adoption of digital “immunity passports” as a way to reopen the world. In theory, their idea is great. In practice, it’s terrible. Or, as the Daily Beast put it: “Vaccine Passports Are Big Tech’s Latest Dystopian Nightmare.” As a …

Food supply chain management, or FSCM, has long been put forth as a low-hanging-fruit application in the enterprise blockchain space. Now, after years of pilots, the verdict is finally in: Blockchain-supported FSCM works perfectly. For innovation managers in food companies that haven’t yet dabbled, this is your chance. The big players have put in millions of dollars to prove the efficacy of the tech. All you have to do now is figure out the right application for your business. Of course, there are still risks — and in this article I’ll provide ways to minimize them — but the opportunity …

In March 2020, COVID-19 was declared by the World Health Organization to be a pandemic. Just over six months after that declaration, there have been almost 33 million cases of the disease worldwide and nearly 1 million deaths. While most of the stories from the pandemic involve its astronomical cost in terms of human life and suffering, the disease has also revealed a number of problems in our global economic infrastructure. A surprising number of these weaknesses might be addressed, or at least reduced, with blockchain technology. As a result of COVID-19, businesses around the globe, including in the most …

Researchers say 2020 is on track to become a second-worst year for cryptocurrency-related thefts, hacks and fraud. Digital asset intelligence firm CipherTrace released a report on June 2 revealing that in the first five months of this year so far, the value of ill-gotten funds siphoned through cryptocurrency crimes has reached almost $1.4 billion. This makes it possible that the amount of funds lost to bad actors in 2020 will outstrip the $4.5 billion lost in 2019, This makes it possible that 2020 will be the worst year for cryptocurrency losses to crime behind 2019, which saw net losses of …

Before 2009, cryptocurrency and blockchain were not popular terms. However, since their release as open-source software that year, the underlying technology has become a crucial driver for various industries, including finance, gaming, health care, engineering and agriculture. The size of the blockchain industry is expected to reach a stunning $23.3 billion in 2023. Blockchain technology is a decentralized, digitized ledger or database for storing “blocks” of information. It allows for the transfer of ownership of units using an encryption system without requiring control by the government or a central bank. In this article, we will discuss how blockchain will revolutionize …

We, as a society, are now experiencing a crisis of trust. The three pillars that we’ve had faith in all our lives — institutions, government entities and the media — have all failed us. From trusting financial institutions to guard our assets to expecting politicians to enact smart policies to hoping the media informs us on issues truthfully, we’ve entrusted these institutions to have the public’s best interest in mind and to provide crucial guidance in times of crisis. Instead of witnessing any of that, we have seen politicians, government agencies and the media fail catastrophically in the critical, early …

As per a detailed report released by accounting giant Deloitte at the World Economic Forum on the subject of blockchain interoperability, this fast-evolving technology still has some distance to tread before it can be ported into action for mainstream purposes such as large-scale supply chain management, secure data sharing and other processes. In this regard, a number of big-name web service providers such as IBM, Oracle, Azure Blockchain Services and SAP have been vocal in their support for cross-chain platforms and have made a firm commitment to solving many of the issues that currently plague this fast-growing technology. For example, …