COVID-19 is the most devastating plague to ravage humankind this century. Every day, the number of patients infected with the coronavirus is rising globally and taking the highest human toll in the United States. The highly infectious virus was first contracted in November 2019 in Wuhan, the capital city of China’s Hubei province, through horseshoe bat-to-human contact at the Huanan seafood market. Many of the initial COVID-19 patients were either stall owners, market employees or regular visitors of the market, who rapidly developed a severe respiratory illness. Despite the market being shut down on Jan. 1, 2020, the virus has …

For years, tribalism has plagued the blockchain industry. Developers align to specific consensus protocols and defend technologies that use them, regardless of their limitations. These deeply rooted divisions are slowing the innovation needed to scale blockchain for future adoption. The enterprise market is only beginning to understand the promise of blockchain, and that promise will be difficult to achieve until blockchains can communicate and cooperate with each other. To achieve this, developers, companies and hobbyists alike must be able to leverage every platform without being locked into one simply because the platform developers are not working together. Blockchain can bring …

Ashley Lannquist, blockchain project lead for the World Economic Forum, or WEF, explained blockchain has its use cases, but the technology is not without limitations. "I think it is unlikely that blockchain technology will become the underpinning technology of all systems in the future," Lannquist told Cointelegraph. When asked about blockchain adoption's biggest roadblock, she explained: "Because of the trade-offs associated with blockchain – including capabilities as well as limitations and downsides – it has not been easy to identify many high-value use cases. This is probably a significant roadblock to adoption." Blockchain has aspects useful for fighting corruption The …

The World Economic Forum (WEF) hopes to make corrupt activity in the public sector more difficult using blockchain technology. “Corruption is a ‘high-potential’ space for blockchain because you really benefit from decentralization; records are very difficult to remove or censor, for instance,” WEF blockchain project lead Ashley Lannquist told Cointelegraph. Lannquist is one of the authors behind a June report detailing how the WEF, the Office of the Inspector General of Colombia and the Inter-American Development Bank have formed, "a multistakeholder team to investigate, design and trial the use of blockchain technology for corruption-prone government processes." Corruption comes from the …

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has recognized seven blockchain firms on its list of 100 ‘early to growth-stage’ companies as Technology Pioneers for 2020. According to the WEF’s website, the blockchain and crypto startups recognized for pioneering new technologies and innovations in 2020 are Lightning Labs, Chainlink, MakerDAO, Bitcoin analytics firms Elliptic, Taiwanese digital property rights startup Bitmark, Latin America-based cryptocurrency startup Ripio, and Veridium Labs. They’re among 100 companies from around the world chosen for their contributions to bleeding edge technology, from “artificial intelligence to diagnose cancers and quantum computing systems, to carbon capture and removing technologies, cell-grown meat …

Last week, Cointelegraph organized another episode of “CT Talks” dedicated to addressing challenging issues in the crypto and blockchain space: on diversity and inclusion. The blockchain space is known for openness, transparency and a strongly liberal environment, but our industry does not always demonstrate these values. During the panel, several ideas were discussed on how the crypto industry’s intrinsic openness can be highlighted in our daily work and life. Amplifying diverse voices and encouraging public commitment was the answer of Sheila Warren, head of blockchain, digital assets and data policy at World Economic Forum: “Part of what I see as …

Cointelegraph Talks’ third event kicks off at 1 p.m. EST on Tuesday, with the event set to tackle the issues of gender and diversity in the crypto sector. The hour-long discussion will be hosted by Cointelegraph managing editor Kristina Lucrezia Cornèr and include a panel featuring three of crypto’s most-influential women: the World Economic Forum's head of blockchain, digital assets and data policy, Sheila Warren; Stellar Development Foundation's CEO and executive director, Denelle Dixon; and Avandis Consulting's founder and managing director, Anino Emuwa. The event will be streamed free of charge on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, with Eventbrite processing registrations …

Crypto industry leaders and law experts debated the privacy implications of central bank digital currencies, known as CBDCs, during the "Money Re-Imagined" panel as part of Consensus:Distributed on Monday. Lawrence Summers, the former United States treasury secretary and former chief economist of the World Bank, argued that the current fiat monetary system exhibits issues of too much privacy, advancing that a CBDC should seek to facilitate greater oversight capabilities. The current monetary system has "too much privacy" Summers argued that supporting the anonymous movement of multimillion-dollar sums of money should not be an objective of financial policy: “Of all of …

Last week, the World Economic Forum (WEF) published a major new blockchain deployment toolkit designed to help governments, enterprises and organizations worldwide to develop more resilient value chains going forward after the COVID-19 crisis. The toolkit’s authors believe that the case for blockchain implementation is stronger than ever in the wake of the pandemic and has major potential to help with the global economic recovery through an innovative digitization of trade. Recognizing that “a fair share of puzzlement and anxiety” persists among supply chain actors when it comes to the blockchain, the toolkit tackles not only technology, but also key …

The World Economic Forum published a report looking at how the deployment of blockchain-based solutions can address the supply chain inefficiencies and failures that have been exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Alongside the report, the WEF has released a blockchain deployment toolkit intended to assist government and businesses in adapting their supply chains to the current economic climate and to “accelerate an economic rebound post-COVID-19.” World Economic Forums advocates DLT to restart the economy The report, published April 28, asserts that the resilience of private and public supply chains have been tested amid the coronavirus outbreak — citing the supply …

Over the past few years, Blockchain technology integration has increased within a wide number of industries. As such, there are now hundreds of diverse blockchain networks in operation all over the world. For the most part, however, most of these Blockchains are not able to communicate with each other in a way that provides efficient use for enterprise solutions. According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), the current level of blockchain interoperability is still too low for such implementations. On April 9, the WEF published a white paper on blockchain interoperability as part of its wider investigation into blockchain deployment …

Prediction can be a bit of a gamble. And when cryptocurrency and blockchain are involved, it wouldn’t be surprising to see people shying away from scrying experiments of any sort. Blockchain gets a bad rep because of its relation to Bitcoin (BTC), the cryptocurrency that many love to hate due to its apparently volatile value. But according to George Gilder, co-founder of the Discovery Institute in Seattle: “Blockchain is the future...it will usher in a world beyond Google.” That’s a pretty hefty claim to make. In order for blockchain to truly flourish as the next “global fabric for value exchanges …