Blockchain Newsletter: European Banks Select IBM Blockchain for Small Business Trade Finance [2017W27]

Altcademy Team wrote on 7 February 2018

This Week's Update on Bitcoin and Blockchain [2017W27]

Issue: Week 27 of 2017

Markets

Price per Bitcoin BTC is at ~$2490 USD (-0.7% from last Monday)
Price per Ether ETH is at ~$275 USD (+1.8% from last Monday)

Articles

European Banks Select IBM Blockchain for Small Business Trade Finance by Coindesk
Barclays spoke to regulators about bringing bitcoin 'into play' by CNBC
Bitcoin accepted at New York pre-school by BBC
Why You Won’t Be Buying a Coffee With Bitcoin Anytime Soon by Wall Street Journal
Bitcoin exchange operator tied to hacks gets five-and-a-half years U.S. prison by Reuters
SEC Files Fraud Charges in Bitcoin and Office Space Investment Schemes by U.S. SEC
Blockchain - The new technology of trust by Goldman Sachs
Hijacking Bitcoin: Routing Attacks on Cryptocurrencies by ETH Zurich
Beyond Bitcoin: Truly Decentralized Banking by Hackernoon
4 Reasons I'll Never Invest in Bitcoin by Motley Fool
A Y2K moment for Bitcoins as the cryptocurrency may be headed for a split by Factor Daily
Bitcoin mining on a vintage Xerox Alto by Ken Shirriff
Fake news of a fatal car crash wiped out $4 billion in ethereum’s market value by Quartz
Analyzing Ethereum, Bitcoin, and 1200+ other Cryptocurrencies using PostgreSQL by TimescaleDB
Hong Kong company raises $185m in record-breaking initial coin offering by Techinasia

This week’s new initial coin offerings (ICOs)

Blocktix (White Paper)
Blocktix is an Ethereum based event hosting platform. Think Eventbrite on blockchain.
They aim to solve the counterfeit ticket problem with Ethereum smart contracts and cryptographic signatures.
Blocktix will build a trustless peer-to-peer ticket exchange and an incentivised advertising network to kick start its event hosting platform.
Blocktix is minting its own Ethereum based token “TIX” to be used on its platform.
Anyone can create an event but only events that are backed by a minimum of 1000 TIX will be shown on the event feed of the platform.
TIX token holders can earn a return on ticket fees for the events that they back.
A total of 62,500,000 TIX will be created and 40 Million TIX will be offered in the ICO in 4 stages with different exchange rates.
The first stage will be set at $0.12 USD per TIX, second stage at $0.1 USD per TIX, third stage at $0.20 USD per TIX and the fourth stage at $0.24 USD per TIX. Each stage will have 10 Million TIX available for sell.
The ICO is set to begin on 7th July 2017.
EOS (White Paper)
EOS is a new decentralized network that aims to solve the scalability and high fee problems that plagues the current dominant dapp platform Ethereum.
EOS is expected to have scaling ability to facilitate millions of transactions per second.
They are also focusing on on boarding large corporations to expedite the process of bringing dapps to the masses.
EOS will be using delegated proof-of-stake for its consensus protocol and there won’t be any transaction fees for using the network.
Instead EOS tokens, the native token of the EOS network, is required to keep dapps operational on the platform.
The platform will be free to use by users that have token balance in their accounts.
EOS is creating 1 Billion EOS tokens initially and selling 90% of them in the crowd-sale. The crowd-sale began on June 26 and phase 1 has already ended.
We are now in phase 2 where there will be 350 consecutive 23 hour periods that will sell 1 Million EOS tokens each.
The ICO is facilitated on Ethereum using the ERC-20 standard token.
EOS has already raised $190 Million USD so far from the crowd-sale and is likely to break all kinds of crowd-sale records.
Since the crowd-sale is uncapped, the final ICO price will depend on the total Ether raised. You can keep track of the crowd-sale on http://eosscan.io/.
Mothership (White Paper)
Mothership is building a service platform around the Estonian e-Residents scheme.
The platform includes a cryptocurrency exchange, an e-wallet, an ICO platform, a cloud hosting service connected to the exchange.
All of the services can be connected to an Estonian e-Resident account which represents a legal digital identity of Estonia.
Mothership is minting 200 Million MSP tokens and offering 140 Million MSP for sell during the ICO.
MSP token holders will have access to Premium and Platinum account tiers, the Mothership app platform layer, community curation and insight rewards, access to Mothership beta products, and Mothership reputation management.
There is a minimum cap for the ICO which is set at 50 Million MSP.
The exchange rate is set at $0.4 USD per MSP.
The ICO will be facilitated on the Ethereum network using a ERC-20 standard token.
The ICO begins on 7th June and will end on 26th of July or when all 140 Million MSP are sold.
Agrello (White Paper)
Agrello is building an A.I. based service that helps users create legally binding smart contracts.
Smart legal contracts will be programmatically enforceable and a human friendly natural language based version can be extracted from the smart contract with digital signatures.
Agrello has its own programming language called the ArgelloLanguage which allows human readable contract constructs.
A web based interface will also be built to allow lawyers to easily construct a legal smart contract.
The crowdsale is set to begin on 7th July 2017.