Thursday 27 October 2016

Blockcerts — An Open Infrastructure for Academic Credentials on the Blockchain

Article from MIT Media Lab announcing the launch of BlockCerts.

Blockcerts provides a decentralized credentialing system. The Bitcoin blockchain acts as the provider of trust, and credentials are tamper-resistant and verifiable. Blockcerts can be used in the context of academic, professional, and workforce credentialing.

This is probably the first of many blockchain academic credentialing systems, but it's released under on an open source license, so will have some advantages for users. 

Further reading:
What we learned from designing an academic certificates system on the blockchain
Certificates, Reputation, and the Blockchain

Wednesday 26 October 2016

What are Appcoins?

Coin Center explain Appcoins, what they are and how they can help crowdfund public goods like the development of open protocols.

Is this the future of financing open technologies?



Monday 24 October 2016

State of Blockchain Q1 2016: Blockchain Funding Overtakes Bitcoin


Article summarising the CoinDesk’s Q1 2016 State of Blockchain report which includes key trends, data and events from the first quarter of 2016.

They ask "Are we just short distance (1-2 years) away from witnessing the radical, transformative effects of blockchain technology? Or is five to 10 years a more realistic timeframe before blockchain technology fully matures and achieves wide adoption?"

Wednesday 5 October 2016

Where Is Current Research on Blockchain Technology? — A Systematic Review

Research which conducted a systematic mapping study with the goal of collecting all relevant research on Blockchain technology.

The objective is to understand the current research topics, challenges and future directions regarding Blockchain technology from the technical perspective.

The results show that focus in over 80% of the papers is on Bitcoin system and less than 20% deals with other Blockchain applications including e.g. smart contracts and licensing.

The majority of research is focusing on revealing and improving limitations of Blockchain from privacy and security perspectives, but many of the proposed solutions lack concrete evaluation on their effectiveness.

Many other Blockchain scalability related challenges including throughput and latency have been left unstudied.

The paper from Yli-Huumo J, Ko D, Choi S, Park S & Smolander K is available under Creative Commons licence from PLOS ONE.

Lessons from one year on the (block)chain gang!

Article from John Palfreyman on IBM Developer Works reflecting on his learning over the past year of working on blackchain.


1] First projects make blockchain real
2] Business networks drive value
3] Choosing a first project is key
4] Permissioned networks are ideal for business
5] Hyperledger project engenders open innovation

Read the full piece here.    

Virtual workshop enables global participants to collaborate and develop innovative blockchain solutions

IEEE and the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) have announced the world’s first Advancing HealthTech for Humanity™ virtual blockchain workshop, designed to enhance participants’ knowledge of blockchain technology and platforms.

The virtual workshop, which launched on 22 September and runs through 21 October 2016, will help demystify blockchain technology and give participants a better understanding of its capabilities, with an improved ability to address key challenges in healthcare today relating to privacy and security.

Participants in the IEEE-SA’s Advancing HealthTech for Humanity ™ virtual blockchain workshop will gain a better understanding of several of the key challenges related to healthcare, develop a base level understanding of blockchain technologies, and receive support to leverage participating blockchain platforms available on the market today. Workshop challenges focus on areas such as patient anonymity, addressing the problem of counterfeit medicines, and patient-driven interoperability. Specific challenges for the first virtual workshop include:
  • How can we use blockchain-related technologies to drive patient-driven interoperability?
  • Can blockchain technology facilitate incentivization of data sharing between patients and researchers?
  • Exploring the use of blockchain technology to secure the drug supply chain against counterfeit medicines
  • Can the healthcare blockchain be used as a platform to aggregate the many different data stores patient data may live on? 
Full story @ BusinessWire.