CCN Every so often a blockchain project that comes along that knocks your socks off and Kleros may be just the that one. Steeped in intellectual concepts, Kleros delivers a decentralised organisation that promises fast, affordable and transparent justice for all. Given that we live in a time were justice is perceived to the preserve of the rich, this platform may very well change the world. Let’s start with the name and philosophical origins. Kleros derives from the Greek. Jury duty was much sought after in Ancient Greece and moreover paid. Citizens wishing to be picked for jury duty would submit tokens, called pinakions, into an allotment machine called a kleroterion. A justice officer would use a dice on the side of the machine eliminating random names with the remaining people selected. Fast forward into more recent history and consider the work of American economist Thomas Schelling. He set up an experiment where he asked students to rendezvous in New York without giving either party a time or place. The most popular choice selected was the information booth in Grand Central Station at noon. This introduced the concept of the Focal Point, often called the Schelling point, where people can […]
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FundRequest, Aiming To Monetize Open Software
CCN The open software community is a very special space. People are committed to open source as an ideology, a way of collaborating and a way of being. For many it is also a pastime or hobby to jump onto a platform like GitHub and start solving other people’s issues. There are downfalls, of course, sometimes solutions can be a long time coming. Waiting six months for a bug fix is not really ideal in a commercial operation. There is also the possibility of getting bad fixes or inelegant code. Given the open nature of the community it is hard to police and hard to determine quality. Having said that, the open source community has come on a long way in the past twenty years. Nowadays many commercial operations use multiple elements of open source in their overall systems. The overall quality is as good, if not better than proprietary software (think of all those super brains fixing common issues) and it is typically robust and secure. FundRequest is a project looking to propel open source to the next level – without compromising the core ethos of the community. The concept was originated by Karel Striegel, a Belgium IT entrepreneur. […]
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Xtrade And Gimmer Form Trading Partnership
CCN Xtrade.io’s vision is to bring Wall Street Trading to the emerging Cryptocurrency markets. Before Christmas CCN interviewed Alexander Kravets on his new idea. An experienced trader with more than 20 years in the business, Kravets understood that for cryptotrading to be successful, it had to somehow mirror traditional trading. Today Kravets announces a new partnerhship with Gimmer, an existing decentralised automated cryptocurrency trading platform. XTRADE.IO will be bringing their expertise to further develop Gimmer’s back end systems. This will include building a unified FIX API to allow Gimmer users to execute strategies across multiple exchanges automatically as well as aggregated liquidity. Kravets says, ‘Gimmer is a pioneer in the retail algorithmic crypto market space and an ideal partner for leveraging XTRADE’s institutional grade infrastructure, single-portal API, and multi-market connectivity for market data and execution. By partnering with XTRADE.IO, Gimmer and their clients can expect higher fill rates, deeper liquidity across exchanges, greater opportunities for arbitrage, longer uptimes, and reduced latencies for multi-asset crypto execution’,’ he says. Using AI, Gimmer’s trading bots can execute deals quickly at the best possible price. Gimmer already has a working beta version and a crypto trading bot app that has been downloaded over 10,000 times. The […]
Continue readingCreating A Safe Haven For Crypto Investors
CCN The X8Currency ICO closed early. It reached its hard cap of €3.4million on Saturday, a full week before the closure date. Founder and CEO Gregor Koželj, whose voice is worn out through speaking so much, is very happy. His project, an ultimate safe haven for crypto investors, is a way to provide an alternative to the current financial system. ‘I don’t want to replace the traditional financial systems,’ he explains. ‘Replacing systems always involves too many hurdles, I want to transcend the current financial system – to offer a real alternative.’ Currency and its fluctuations played a big part on Koželj’s upbringing. Living in Slovenia, he witnessed the deflation of his native currency, the tolar – as a child his savings to purchase a bike were downgraded to only a tyre when the tolar lost its value – and he remembers the value of foreign currency when given as a present by visitors. ‘As a result I have always been fascinated by currency,’ he says. As a grownup he followed his passion and worked in trading and investment. As head of asset management for a major brokerage he started to notice some unusual results. ‘When working with large […]
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Blockchain And Traditional Industries – Where Is The Overlap?
CCN Everyone knows that blockchain is transformational but sometimes it is hard to get one’s head around how it can transform a traditional industry. Kyle Forkey, CEO of Ethmint, thinks he may have the answer. ‘Blockchain at its most simple has a very simple value proposition,’ he says. ‘It is a way to show ownership and can be a way to raise capital. That makes sense.’ He has a point. He is currently advising for Moria, an asset backed, ICO. The asset in question is a real life gold mine based in Colorado, US. The project, billed as the world’s first decentralised investment platform for the extraction of precious metals, looks to reward investors with annual premiums far in excess of normal investment terms, but maybe not as much as traditional crypto investors might wish for. Given the week that is in it, with the spectacular crashes in value across bitcoin and its alt mates, this might not be a bad thing. The mine is located in Colorado and is part of the ‘Gregory Lode’ once said to be the richest square mile on earth. Called the Bates Hunter Mine it extends over 35 acres of ground cover and consists of a […]
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Learning More About NEO, The Chinese Ethereum, Malcolm Lerider Explains
CCN NEO offers the possibility of both Public and Private blockchains in the same ecosystem Zalando, located in the heart of Dublin’s Silicon docks, was the venue for the first meetup of NEO – dubbed the Chinese Ethereum – in Dublin. It was also the kick start off for a European tour with the NEO stars heading off to London, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Zurich before ending January with a large two-day DevCon in San Francisco. The Meetup was oversubscribed twofold with many developers disappointed not to make the gig. The main speaker was Malcolm Lerider, senior R&D manager for NEO. His talk covered off the key components of NEO, namely that it was designed with business in mind. Lerider spoke of the main features promised by NEO including speed. ‘We can cope with thousands of transactions per second,’ he said. ‘That is pretty impressive but I have to warn you that there are other projects suggesting they can offer multiples of that – I ask you to listen with a degree of scepticism. Claims like that are all using off-chain scaling mechanisms, which are technologies just as easily applied NEO. In the end, the on-chain single core processing speed is […]
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Trying To Inspire Socially Responsible Trading, Bobby Bhatia, TrakInvest
CCN Bobby Bhatia has worked in finance his entire career, much of it based in Asia, working for some of the biggest names in banking and trading. In his sector, he observed the way the world was changing, in particular for millennials and their careers. ‘The world went from too little data to too much data almost overnight,’ he says. ‘And there was little or no curation. Artificial Intelligence was added in and all of a sudden the challenges facing millennials in their careers were huge.’ ‘I saw an opportunity to teach trading as a life skill, proving a primary or even a second income.’ ‘In Institutional trading the odds are stacked against the little guy,’ he says. ‘I felt there had to be a way to close the gap and also to head towards a social responsible trading concept.’ Not normally terms associated with trading but Bhatia is on the money in terms of his timing. He first set up TrakInvest in 2014. It was a free to use, gamified trading platform with phantom money. It was also a world first. Mirroring the top ten equity exchanges across the world, people could set up accounts and learn to trade […]
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Why Binance Is The Number One Cryptocurrency Exchange, Exclusive Interview With Changpeng Zhao, Aka CZ
CCN Binance has exceeded all expectations, including those of the CEO and founder Changpeng Zhao, or CZ as he is known, to reach the number one cryptocurrency exchange in just six months. Binance is arguably also the fastest ever Unicorn reaching double the valuation required (hitting $2billion) and is moreover profitable. ‘If you had asked me a month ago when we would hit the number one spot,’ says CZ from Tokyo where he had not stopped working all over the holidays, ‘I might have answered six to nine months. If you had asked me about unicorn status, I might have thought the same period. This growth has surprised even me.’ Binance may be an overnight success but CZ has certainly put in the time and there is very little left to chance in this booming exchange. With three lines of business: trading, incubation labs and Binance’s ICO Launchpad, things are moving very quickly. Two ICOs have already been rolled out on the Launchpad; GIFTO and Bread. The two ICOs raised $3million and $3.5million respectfully in a matter of minutes. ‘We are building a community of trust,’ says CZ. ‘Part of that is the release of ICO funds.’ In an exclusive […]
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The Pineapple Fund, Using Bitcoin Profits For Crypto Good
CCN When Bitcoin hit the $20,000 high in late 2017 there was endless talk of how much money people holding coins had made. It was reminiscent of Dublin during the Celtic Tiger where dinner party conversations were dominated by the rising price of houses. On the face of it, these Bitcoin conversations were all about greed. However there are exceptions. While there are many people making money from Bitcoin, there are also do-gooders who are donating Bitcoin to charities and causes. We have covered some of these people and organisations here (Paxful) and here (CharityStars). One of the largest donators to hit the press ever in the history of Bitcoin is an unknown man or woman who goes by the name ‘Pine’ and has set up ‘The Pineapple Fund’. The name The Pineapple Fund comes from the fact that if you eat too much pineapple your mouth can become sore and you can develop a temporary intolerance to them. While anonymous, he or she quoted on their website: “I’ve always liked Pineapple but since it contains bromelain [an enzyme that digests protein] your mouth becomes tender if you eat too much of it. Then, like now, is a good time […]
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Did You Realise Coinhive Has Been Using Your CPU Power For Altcoin Mining?
CCN Coinhive mining – a victimless crime? Coinhive delivered a clever piece of software in September with very little fanfare. Website owners were asked to create an account with Coinhive and then run their application on their websites. The software was an in-browser java script app that allowed the host website use the visiting people’s CPU’power to mine for alt coin Monero. Visitors were unaware of this CPU filtering, or stealing, and may only have spotted that their machine had slowed down or their fans suddenly revved up. Typically the additional electrical costs per stolen CPU ran in the region of a few dollars per month, but it all adds up of course for the website miner if they can get multiple visitors ‘donating’ their CPU. Sophos Senior Technologies Paul Ducklin is calling out the practice. ‘Here at Sophos we don’t agree with the subterfuge,’ he says. ‘We are calling it parasite-ware. The donating CPU may not be actually damaged and the energy costs next to minimal in most cases, but it is permission-less and therefore unacceptable.’ Ducklin compared it to an employee driving to a restaurant for lunch and the loaning the company car to a stranger to run […]
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