The recent commentary by Coindesk reporting on identity issues caught your editor’s eye:
Coindesk reported that dealing with personal data and identity verification has been a concern for quite a few industry players this week:
Causing a storm of disappointed comments, the cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift announced that it would start to gather users’ personal data in exchange for benefits, and that this “membership program” would soon become mandatory. CEO Erik Voorhees expressed reluctance, but indicated that the decision was made under duress, presumably the regulatory kind.
In Washington, Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey told a House committee that the social media giant is eyeing blockchain as a solution to the issue of misinformation and impersonation on the platform.
“We haven’t gone as deep as we’d like just yet in understanding how we might apply this technology to the problems we’re facing at Twitter, but we do have people within the company thinking about it today,” said Dorsey, a known bitcoin aficionado.
Another identity-oriented startup, supported by IBM, Hu-manity.co launched the #My31 app on iOS and Android mobile devices, claiming to protect one’s legal ownership of personal data as a “31st human right.” Users receive a title of ownership, and their personal details, signature and photograph can be added in the form of a hash on the blockchain, along with their data-sharing preferences.
Civic announced that it would try to boost its user numbers by paying for all identity checks for business partners’ customers until the end of the year. No less than a third of all CVC tokens will be allocated for this, amounting to $43 million. If the idea turns into a huge success, however, the ethereum blockchain might get overwhelmed. “It would make CryptoKitties look like a walk in the park,” Civic co-founder Vinny Lingham told CoinDesk.
Eye on enterprises
Talk about chutzpah. As revealed this week by CoinDesk’s Ian Allison, in June the enterprise blockchain startup R3 approached the Utility Settlement Coin (USC) consortium and suggested that the project be built on R3’s Corda platform.
This was an audacious proposal, to say the least, as USC since its inception three years ago has been managed by another blockchain tech vendor, Clearmatics. Despite R3’s offer to fund the technical development and pay a share of legal fees, its overture was rejected by all 17 of USC’s bank members during a vote.
Microsoft’s Azure cloud division is building bridges between its blockchain services and other, widely used infrastructure and platforms, such as Office 365 Outlook, SharePoint Online, Salesforce, Dynamics 365 CRM Online, SAP, and even Twitter. Once ported from those services to a distributed ledger, data will be a lot easier for customers to mine for business insights, Microsoft reckons.
IBM’s Blockchain World Wire is fresh out of beta to provide cross-border payments using the stellar blockchain. World Wire replaces banking intermediaries (correspondent banks, in industry parlance) with digital assets sent over a distributed network, though like Ripple, Big Blue is pitching the product to financial institutions.
A blockchain startup founded by former Deloitte employees, Citizens Reserve is launching a new supply chain platform known as SUKU, which aims to provide trading partners with real-time data on the location of goods, a bid-and-order marketplace and automated contracts. The platform will use both the ethereum and Quorum blockchains.
Source: Coindesk.com [Marc at CoinDesk: reply@coindesk-email.com]
