Tag: blockchain

Humanity Protocol Raises $30 Million as Blockchain-Based Digital ID Startup Hits Unicorn Status

Humanity Protocol, a decentralised identity solution, has raised $30 million (roughly Rs. 250 crore) from a fresh funding round led by Kingsway Capital and the startup has hit unicorn status with its valuation surpassing the $1 billion (roughly Rs. 8,350 crore) mark. Over 20 other venture capital firms participated in the seed funding round, including Animoca Brands, Blockchain.com, Hashed, and Shima Capital. The startup competes with Worldcoin, a rival service that has faced legal challenges in several regions.

Decentralised identity solutions (DIDs) aim to authenticate users and entities without a central authority. In order to record the uniqueness of each individual, Humanity Protocol collects the palm scans of individuals. These scans are stored on a blockchain, and a proof-of-humanity is issued that verifies that the holder of this identity is genuinely a human and not a bot.

“Proof-of-Personhood is a powerful concept but the solutions that exist today haven’t seen adoption because onboarding is invasive and high friction,” Terence Kwok, Founder of Humanity Protocol wrote in a blog post. “The world needs a truly self-sovereign identity framework that is built on first principles of inclusivity, privacy, and decentralisation.”

Humanity Protocol’s Proof of Humanity (PoH) consensus mechanism aims to mitigate the risks of identity frauds and Sybil attacks. This brings a layer of trust and credibility on human individuals within decentralised networks in the real world.

Explaining why the proof-of-personhood is a promising concept, Kwok’s Medium post said, “The PoH allows users to perform various transactions, such as asserting their ownership of real-world assets, accessing restricted services, or proving their education and employment history, without having to disclose their personal information to third parties.”

The blockchain ID project also claims that deploying PoH could make activities like the distribution of Universal Basic Income more equitable because these transactions are linked to real human beings.

In recent times, however, these controversial decentralised identity projects have garnered criticism and concerns from several governments from around the world.

One similar such project is Worldcoin founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Using the scans of people’s irises, Altman plans to generate a unique global identification of individuals, that would eliminate the need for them to present their IDs like names or email ids to interact with computers and machines while also ensuring that the holder of this ID is genuinely human. The project has been perceived as intrusive and is currently facing legal hurdles in countries like Nairobi and Italy.

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Mastercard Onboards Five New Blockchain Startups to Start Path Programme: Details

US-based card payments giant Mastercard is forging ahead with choosing and onboarding promising blockchain startups to join its Web3-focussed Smart Path programme. In a fresh development, the company has onboarded five new startups to be part of this initiative. In the coming months, Mastercard will work with these up-and-coming firms to explore how blockchain can be used to produce scalable payment solutions that add more impact to the global digital commerce sector.

France-based startup Kulipa joined UK-based Parfin and Singapore’s Peaq to be handpicked by Mastercard for the Start Path programme. While Kulipa enables digital wallet-friendly crypto payment cards, Parfin helps enterprises adopt blockchain rails and Peaq provides borderless digital infrastructure for real-world apps leveraging vehicles, machines, robots, and devices.

The other two newly added firms to the initiative are Belgium-based Venly, that simplifies blockchain integration for businesses, and the US-based firm Triangle, which triangulates climate data with finance on blockchain, the official release by Mastercard said.

Commenting on the development, Mastercard said, “Each currency format – from regulated money to bank deposits, to stablecoins and CBDCs – serves a specific purpose, and Mastercard is connecting with industry experts and fintechs to explore differentiated use cases that can help to solve real-world problems.”

As per Mastercard, digital assets are rising to fame because they can speed up commerce and add another layer of transparency to transaction tracking. In the coming times, digital assets will see mainstream adoption, the company predicts.

The company, reportedly valued at around $427.98 billion as of May 2024, first launched its Start Path initiative back in 2014. Over the last decade, the initiative has worked with over 400 startups from over 54 nations.

“As part of its collaborative approach to innovation, Mastercard is exploring future use cases to scale new solutions with startups around the world. High-potential blockchain, digital assets and Web3 startups receive the opportunity for collaboration, bespoke training and access to Mastercard’s customers and channels through the virtual four-month program,” the payments giant noted in its release.

Mastercard has been at the forefront of experimenting with Web3 for some years now. Just in April this year for instance, Mastercard teamed up with 1Inch to offer crypto debit cards. The company has also previously launched a CBDC partner programme to open dialogue around digital currencies.

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Dubai Gets Metaverse Strategy, Plans to Be Among Top Ten Metaverse Economies

The UAE, that is working on establishing itself as hotspot for Web3 activities, has decided to make Dubai one of the world’s top ten metaverse economies. This week, Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, announced a roadmap for the growth of metaverse in Dubai. Called the ‘Dubai Metaverse Strategy’, this plan aims to onboard over a thousand Web3 firms onto its industrial ecosystem. This move, the UAE estimates, can bring about 40,000 jobs in the next six years leading to 2030.

In the coming years, Dubai is looking to knit a state-of-the-art metaverse ecosystem to offer to the companies that are offering services related to the technology. The Dubai Metaverse Strategy will test the applications of metaverse in various sectors including tourism, education, retail, remote work, healthcare, and legalities, disclosed an announcement published on WAM, an official news agency of UAE.

To ensure that the metaverse technology is well incubated, Dubai will be stepping up its game to conduct research and development on other technologies like Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (XR). These make for essential elements of the overall metaverse tech and have already added 6,700 jobs in the UAE, adding $500 million (roughly Rs. 4,175 crore) to the nation’s economy in recent times.

“The strategy also aims at leveraging real-time data, using machine learning and IoT, and employing AI simulation and blockchain to enhance the human thinking processes,” the announcement added.

Market research firms have different projections about the growth of the metaverse market by 2030. While Marketsandmarkets.com projects the market size to reach $1,303.4 billion by 2030, PS Market Research, Statista, and Precedence Research estimate it to swell to the sizes of $1,157 billion, $507 billion, and $1.3 trillion, respectively.

The World Economic Forum (WEF), in its latest report said that nearly 700 cities will have some kind of a metaverse infrastructure by the year 2030. As of now, however, South Korea’s Seoul, UAE’ Dubai, and the US’ Santa Monica have been named as leading cities in the international metaverse sector.

Dubai has already been taking steps to become an early adopter of the metaverse technology. In September 2022 for instance, UAE’s ministry of economy made a debut in the metaverse.

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Crypto Wallets Grab Vodafone’s Attention as Telco Looks to Integrate Blockchain in Operations

The senior leadership at Vodafone is looking to integrate the blockchain technology with its operations. The concept of crypto wallets has also grabbed the attention of the UK-headquartered telecom giant in recent times. David Palmer, the lead of Blockchain initiatives at Vodafone spoke about some company plans during a recent interview with Yahoo Finance. Palmer hinted that blockchain networks, crypto wallets, smartphones, and SIM cards may all come together for a big Web3 twist to Vodafone’s services around the world.

In the next six years, Palmer sees billions of smartphones into circulation. In the same duration, the number of crypto wallets is also expected to see a big jump given that the sector is already heading towards regulated adoption in several nations.

“By 2030 we are expecting over eight billion mobile phones to be in operations, many of those being smartphones that act as the touch point for people to use apps, conduct businesses. Essentially, in those mobile phones will be SIM cards. So, we’ve focused on linking the sim card to digital identity, linking the sim card to blockchains, and using the cryptography we have in those sim cards for that integration,” Palmer said during his interview.

The Vodafone official has projected that by 2030, around 5.6 billion digital wallets will be operational, acting as gateways between people and financial services. They would also be used to hold digital IDs and other credentials.

“We think about linking digital wallets to the SIM cards, which has the hardware needed, so for example the hardware secure module, public-private key encryption, and a symmetric key inscription that are absolutely critical. Because the wallets expand and hold identity and financial credentials, they will be a target for hackers and others,” Palmer added.

As part of its plans to give its business a Web3 twist, Vodafone is considering the use of public blockchain like Ethereum and Avalanche as well as private blockchains like Ripple and Hyperledger. The former, however, appears more interesting to Palmer especially the Layer-2 chains supported atop popular mother chains like Ethereum itself.

Overall, Vodafone’s plans to have a pro-Web3 approach towards revamping its operations could end up making its services interoperable with Web2 as well as Web3. This could wire-in a large influx of capital in the company’s treasury – giving it a strong position to arrange for a big loan of a whopping $1.8 billion for its India subsidiary – Vodafone Idea. The company reportedly seeks the loan to turn around its loss-ridden operations in India.

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Vietnam Debuts Academy of Blockchain, AI with Plans to Train a Million People in Emerging Tech

Vietnam is ramping up efforts to join other Asian nations like India, Japan, China, and South Korea in exploring the distributed ledger technology, also called the blockchain tech. The country recently launched its Academy of Blockchain and AI Innovation (ABAII) with the aim to train a million people in using these advanced technologies. The aim of this academy is to ‘universalise’ these emerging technologies – which would essentially result in the widespread experiment and adoption of Web3 and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

In the first leg of offering blockchain and AI training sessions, the ABAII will be collaborating with 30 universities from around the country. A total of 100,000 students from across these universities will form the first batch for this academy, Vietnam News has reported

The training sessions, as part of this initiative, will include workshops, idea creation competition, as well as the 2024 university tour programme (Unitour 2024) among other activities. Through the course of this initiative, Vietnam is looking to educate tech students on the potential use cases of blockchain and AI in sectors like banking data analysis as well as digital economy and finance.

Dao Trung Thanh, a veteran in Vietnam’s telecom and tech sector, has been appointed as the chief of the ABAII, his update on LinkedIn shows. This initiative is not the first pro-blockchain step that Vietnam has taken in recent times. In 2022, the Vietnam Blockchain Association (VBA) was formed and tasked with the responsibility of researching around blockchain as well as drafting legal guidelines for the Web3 community. Both, the VBA as well as the ABAII organised a meet-up with 500 students – addressing the advancements and challenges around AI and blockchain.

The global blockchain market is reportedly going to hit a whopping market size of $825.93 billion (roughly Rs. 68,95,330 crore) by 2032. China, India, Japan, and South Korea are also conducting informative discussions around blockchain with their respective student populations to give them an early nudge to consider Web3 development as a viable career path.

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Google Cloud Teams with Sui Blockchain to Improve Web3, AI in Advanced Tech Initiatives

The overall tech sector is presently on a boom with blockchain-based Web3 making an entry across verticals. In a fresh development, Google Cloud has teamed up with a Layer-1 blockchain platform Sui to integrate blockchain solutions with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other tech initiatives. As part of this partnership, Google is initiating another step in driving Web3 innovations on a global level. While Google Cloud is already a big name in the tech sector, the Sui platform was created by Mysten Labs, working to propel Web3 technologies into mainstream adoption.

Now that Google Cloud and Sui have struck a partnership, both have planned to work on improving the security and scalability of AI-powered Web3 applications. As far as Sui is concerned, the platform is hoping to stir engagement around its overall ecosystem and native token represented as SUI through this partnership with Google Cloud.

“Sui’s advanced blockchain technology and commitment to user-friendly experiences make them a valuable collaborator for delivering transformative applications that can be easily embraced by Web3 and Web2 developers,” Amit Zavery, VP and general manager, and Head of Platform, Google Cloud said in an official statement.

In recent days, Mysten Labs developed a fresh code auditing tool, powered by AI. This tool uses Google Cloud capabilities to identify vulnerabilities across Cloud-based security protocols. Previously, Sui has also put to use Google Cloud’s generative AI platform Vertex AI to help Web3 developers recognise and improve vulnerable codes.

“Collaborating with Google Cloud helps us propel the development of secure, scalable, and user-centric Web3 experiences. Google Cloud’s AI capabilities complement Sui’s unique technological strengths, empowering all types of developers to create the next generation of decentralised applications on Sui,” Evan Cheng, CEO and co-founder of Mysten Labs added to the official statement.

For Google, Web3 has emerged as an area of focus for a while now. Back in 2022, Google launched its Blockchain Node Engine in Google Cloud – capable of deploying completely managed blockchain nodes in the Cloud.

Aiming to cater to the growing community of Web3 and cryptocurrencies, earlier this year Google decided to show balances of crypto wallets through a simple Google search of the wallet address.

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IIT Madras Moves Student Election Voting to Blockchain, Identifies Challenges

In a bid to test the use of blockchain in the governance sector, IIT Madras has moved its student election systems from servers to blockchain. As part of a college club dedicated to blockchain-related research work, students at the prestigious engineering college are attempting to test the technology along the themes of voting and IP protection, among others. In conversation with Gadgets 360, IIT Madras said that its experiments with blockchain should not be seen as ‘betting on crypto,’ rather as a pilot into exploring the distributed ledger technology on a wider scale.

Professors Prabhu Rajagopal and John Augustine from IIT Madras collaborated with the students on the project to introduce blockchain-based voting as part of their student election process.

Research and experiments at IIT Madras have shown that blockchains could improve the governance system by bringing down the costs considerably and enabling a verifiable and tamper-proof voting process.

“Blockchain offers a cost reduction to conduct and manage the overall voting process, which is otherwise not possible when conducting large-scale elections using other software based on servers. In addition, blockchain’s feature that prevents any changes to be made to the stored data brings an innate trust to the election process,” IIT Madras faculty members involved in the project told Gadgets 360. “Blockchain will be the backbone of many innovations in this decade and will radically change the functioning of various social institutions.”

Blockchain is a decentralised, distributed, time-stamped ledger used for maintaining a record of all transactions running on the network. This ledger, instead of being maintained by one person or organisation (which is the case in normal databases), is maintained by all the ‘nodes’ on the blockchain, resulting in political and power decentralisation, representing true democracy.

IIT Madras has been trying to incorporate blockchain into its internal election system since 2022. In the last two years, some of the country’s top engineering minds have identified some shortcomings associated with integrating blockchain in the voting systems.

“The transaction speed on blockchain is slower with current technologies and this has to be improved if the system has to be deployed on large scales; also, ensuring that the system is secure from cyber-attacks poses some challenges on a wider scale implementation,” Professor Prabhu Rajagopal, Advisor (Innovation and Entrepreneurship), IIT Madras, told Gadgets 360.

Rajagopal also noted that deploying the blockchain infrastructure to manage large scale databases might also come across as an eventual challenge that will need to be handled tactically.

This year, IIT-Madras has piloted a blockchain solution developed by Plenome, a startup headed by Rajagopal and consisting of blockchain-curious students.

“Voting technology is one such area which is the bedrock of a democratic system. We aim to make this process simple and accessible to people in their comfort while simultaneously improving security and reducing overall costs. Scaling up the elections will bring about new challenges which we will be eager to solve,” the institute officials noted.

The institute also recently initiated the work of drafting policies to oversee the metaverse sector in India as a reference that the government could access and utilise while deploying regulations on the national level.

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China Launches Public Blockchain Platform Despite Unfriendly Crypto Stance

China is accelerating efforts to establish a massive blockchain network, despite its strict anti-crypto stance. The goal is to allow the government of China to engage in blockchain-related activities, especially in a cross-border setting. The Chinese government has launched the ‘Ultra-Large Scale Blockchain Infrastructure Platform for the Belt and Road Initiative’. Announced in 2013, China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a development strategy for a global infrastructure through which it aims to connect continents across land and sea.

The project for the upcoming Chinese public blockchain platform is being spearheaded by Conflux Network, and the launch was announced on Sunday. A multichain blockchain system, the network is operated by the Conflux Foundation which is also called the Shanghai Tree-Graph Blockchain Research Institute.

The Conflux Network posted updates about the project on X (formerly Twitter), revealing that the platform would “provide the base for developing applications that showcase collaboration across borders.” Other details related to the project are yet to be announced.

This is not the first time that China is shown some interest in exploring the Web3 sector. The Chinese government recently hinted at its preparedness plan to address the growth of metaverse technology in the country.

In January 2024, the Chinese government set up a special body tasked with the responsibility of setting the standards for the use of the metaverse tech in China. This group consists of several Chinese tech majors including Tencent, Baidu, and Ant Group.

China also leads the Asian market in conducting CBDC trials into advanced phases with international banks such as Standard Chartered participating in the trials.

While Beijing imposed a blanket ban on crypto-related activities in September 2021 owing to electricity shortages, an underground network of crypto traders has managed to keep the trading operations running. A December 2023 report by Vietnamese investment capital firm Kyros Ventures claimed stablecoins are particularly popular in China with 33.3 percent of Chinese investors holding those digital currencies.

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Apple to Introduce Entry-Level AirPods Lite TWS Earphones in H2 2024, Analyst Says



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Solana Blockchain Beats Ethereum on Popularity Quotient, Memecoins Contribute

Crypto enthusiasts are seemingly taking advantage of the ongoing bull run, generating major activities across blockchain networks. The eco-friendly Solana blockchain, on the scale of most popular, has managed to defeat Ethereum in recent days. The credit for this goes to the frenzy of Solana-based NFTs and memecoins that have captured the attention of the members of the global Web3 community. As per data collected by Coinbase, in the last 24 hours alone the Solana blockchain saw transactions worth $11 billon (roughly Rs. 91,703 crore) with people purchasing small tokens and memecoins based on the network.

In a recently published analysis, CoinGecko ranked Solana number one on the list of most popular blockchains. As per its data, Solana commands 49.3 percent of global crypto investor interest.

Solana was launched in 2020 by Solana Labs, which was founded by Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal in 2018. At the time of its launch SOL, the native token of Solana was priced at $0.22 (roughly Rs. 18). Now, with the spike in Solana-based activities, the price of its token is also on a surge. This week, the price of the SOL token breached the mark of $200 (roughly Rs. 16,700) for the first time since its inception. After undergoing a slight price correction period, SOL is presently trading at $175 (roughly Rs. 14,600). In fact, in the last one year, the value of SOL has escalated by a remarkable 700 percent.

The Solana blockchain has reportedly managed to garner $150 million (roughly Rs. 1,252 crore) through the sale of memecoins like Bonk and Slerf. Subsequently, the transaction fees on Solana has also witnessed a spike in recent months despite the blockchain being famous for having comparatively cheaper gas fee charges.

“Solana has shown immense strength. The total trading volume of DEXes also has been largely skewed towards SOL with a total volume of more than $6 billion (roughly Rs. 50,190 crore) on the Solana chain in the last 24 hours; it has been only close to $2.1 billion (roughly Rs. 17,566 crore) in the case of Ethereum. Memecoin mania is the biggest driver of the on-chain trading that we are seeing today,” the CoinSwitch Markets Desk told Gadgets360.

As far as Ethereum is concerned, the blockchain did undergo an important update called Dencun earlier this year. On the sidelines of this, the Ethereum blockchain has secured the second rank on the most popular blockchains list compiled by CoinGecko. Ethereum holds 12.73 percent of the global traffic share between January 1 and March 18, 2024.

“This is likely because Ethereum is already well-established as an ecosystem and familiar to investors, such that it is no longer considered a new, trending crypto narrative,” the analysis noted.

The BNB Chain, Cosmos, Avalanche, and Arbitrum secured ranks third to sixth on CoinGecko’s list.

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BlackRock Files With SEC to Offer Fund With Tokenization Firm Securitize

BlackRock Inc. is preparing to offer a fund through a partnership with digital-asset specialist Securitize, making it the latest Wall Street behemoth to experiment with putting money on blockchains.

The world’s largest asset manager said it plans to launch “BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund Ltd.” with Securitize, a digital-asset firm specializing in tokenization, according to a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission dated on March 14 that was listed on the agency’s website Monday.

The minimum investment accepted from any outside investors is set at $100,000, according to the filing. There are few details in the filing regarding the fund, but Securitize already is working with KKR, Hamilton Lane and others for tokenized funds. Crypto sleuths say they’ve already found an unconfirmed digital wallet on the Ethereum blockchain marked as for BlackRock’s tokenized fund. Representatives at BlackRock and Securitize did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Tokenization is a method of purchasing securities in the form of digital assets using blockchains. The process has been promoted heavily recently as one of the few viable use cases for blockchains. Before BlackRock, other financial heavyweights including Brevan Howard, and KKR all have announced efforts to tokenize certain parts of their funds. Citigroup has estimated the tokenization market could swell to $5 trillion by 2030.

© 2024 Bloomberg L.P.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 Tipped to Feature Same Processor as International Galaxy S24 Series Models



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