The Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative B3i announces that 23 new entrants are joining its Market Testing program; The new entrants are: AIA, AIG, Aon, Chubb, Covéa, Everest Re, Gen Re, Guy Carpenter & Marsh, JLT Re and more; the new companies will join the existing group in testing the prototype platform. Source.
Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman said he thinks bitcoin is “certainly something more than just a fad,” according to a Bloomberg report; he also stated that the concept of anonymous currency is interesting because of the privacy it provides; while he has yet to invest in the technology he does see more regulatory control coming soon. Source.
Considered part of the 'Big Four' banks in China, the China Construction Bank (CCB) is looking to launch a banking and insurance blockchain product; their hoping to use their new bancassurance product in Q3 to sell third-party insurance products on the distributed ledger as CoinDesk reports; they are using the IBM blockchain and have been testing the products for months. Source.
Article shares the participants in the major consortia and networks; discusses the advantages to blockchain technology in banking and what banks need to keep in mind when looking at implementing the technology. Source
While the crackdown on bitcoin in China has hurt the value of the digital currency, prices have stabilized and traders are confident this is a blip on the radar; what traders are more focused on is the technology behind the currency and the blockchain protocol has not been affected; there are also reports that say the crackdown is temporary and China has become less central as overall volume has dropped. Source.
The use cases of blockchain technology has increased significantly in 2017; Business Insider looks at how the technology behind bitcoin is being used in international payments, capital markets, trade finance, regulation, money laundering, insurance and peer to peer transaction; they also look at other industries like healthcare, real estate, media, energy and more. Source.
Fortress Alum Mike Novogratz is starting a $500mn hedge fund to invest in cryptocurrencies, ICOs and other companies in the blockchain space; he will start the fund with $150mn of his own money and raise the rest from family offices, fund managers and wealthy individuals; “This is going to be the largest bubble of our lifetimes,” Novogratz said to Bloomberg. "You can make a whole lot of money on the way up, and we plan on it.” Source.
ConsenSys has announced their latest venture, a peer to peer trading company called CarbonX; CarbonX plans to tokenize carbon credits; the company is backed by a co-founding group that includes the Tapscotts, authors of Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business and the World; Joseph Lubin, Founder of ConsenSys stated, "As one of the fastest growing companies working on Ethereum, a platform that is poised to reformat how the world organizes itself, ConsenSys is committed to enabling technologies to be built that will facilitate attention to externalities like pollution and critical new foundations like sustainability. CarbonX has the potential to incentivize behavior that contributes to environmental sustainability, and is an excellent example of Ethereum-based technologies poised to make positive change." Source
The Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), J. Christopher Giancarlo, told government technology executives at an event that blockchain technology is in our national interest; Coindesk reports that the chairman said, "Distributed ledger and blockchain technologies ... are going to challenge orthodoxies that are foundational to our financial infrastructure."; he also discussed agencies moving beyond just talk of implementation but to actually try to use the tech within their agency's. Source.
TechCrunch has published the video from an interview with Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum; in the interview he talked about cryptocurrencies and blockchain, highlighting what makes a good use case for the technology. Source