Point Roberts, WA and Delta, BC - January 9, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Investorideas.com, a leader in Blockchain content with its Bitcoin and blockchain portals Bitcoinandblockchainstocks.com, Cryptocurrencyinvestorideas.com and Blockchaininvestorideas.com reports on blockchain technology potential, how it works and some of the publicly traded Canadian companies in the sector.
Garner Research says, "The Blockchain Revolution Promises to Touch Every Industry', so the recent flood of entries into the sector is no surprise.
Supporting the rise of blockchain, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Capital Markets analyst Mitch Steves said on Twitter on January 3rd that the "Crypto and blockchain technology market is a potential multi-trillion dollar opportunity."
https://twitter.com/NickatFP/status/948602145925926912
- NickatFP
Recent news and developments in the sector:
Upco International Inc. (CSE: UPCO) (Frankfurt: U06) announced in late December that it had commenced development of its E-Wallet to support Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum using Blockchain Technology. With the development of the Upco E-Wallet using Cryptocurrencies, users will be able to: send invoices, approve payments, and track transfers and payments. The user will be able to choose his or her preferred method of payment using either common currencies (fiat) or Cryptocurrencies.
Mr Andrea Pagani, CEO and President commented: "The market cap and acceptance of Cryptocurrencies has increased tremendously in the last year. The market cap of Bitcoin has surpassed US$300 billion and Ethereum is over US$75 billion. We are developing our E-Wallet that will allow our users to have common currencies (fiat) and cryptocurrencies in it. Once developed, this will allow our users their choice of currency to use on our system."
For investors trying to understand and differentiate between bitcoin and blockchain, one of the best resources is IBM's blockchain for Dummies.* Blockchain is the underlying technology of bitcoin but is now being used in multiple applications.
On December 29th HIVE Blockchain Technologies Ltd. (TSX.V: HIVE) a leading publicly listed blockchain infrastructure company, announced that it closed the final C$65 million tranche of its previously announced private placement of up to C$115 million.
"This financing provided us with a highly accretive growth opportunity - increasing our overall computing power by more than 150% (from 17.4 MW to 44.2 MW) with just 11% dilution to shareholders," said Harry Pokrandt, President, CEO and a Director at HIVE. "In addition to our fully funded projects in Sweden, we will now have a strong working capital balance of approximately US$50M and significant flexibility to explore further projects and acquisitions."
The net proceeds of the Offering are expected to be used to fund the completion of the 20.0 MW Sweden Bitcoin Data Centre and the 6.8 MW Phase 3 Expansion at the Sweden GPU Data Centre (as described in the Company's December 13, 2017 news release) and for general working capital purposes. The Company's first phase of expansion into Sweden is well underway with completion expected by mid-January. Upon completion of all phases, HIVE will have a total of 24.2 MW of GPU-based and 20.0 MW of ASIC-based mining capacity across Sweden and Iceland.
On January 4th BIG Blockchain Intelligence Group Inc (CSE: BIGG) (WKN: A2JSKG) (OTC: BBKCF) announce it had engaged Dr. Aaron Smith to establish and lead BIG's Artificial Intelligence (AI) department.
Dr. Smith will contribute strategic direction to identify areas most suited for the application and integration of Artificial Intelligence throughout the BIG crypto-data analytics infrastructure. He will also lead research and development of BIG's cognitive systems and machine learning, augmenting and building BIG's proprietary tools and specialized tracking algorithms for monitoring cryptocurrency transactions.
Lance Morginn, CEO of BIG, stated: "Dr. Aaron Smith is an expert and innovator in the field of analytics, Artificial Intelligence and cognitive systems design. Dr. Smith brings a wealth of knowledge and the applied experience of a practiced Data Scientist to strategically incorporate AI into the BIG framework. As the leaders in the monitoring and tracking of cryptocurrency, this strategic hire enables Blockchain Intelligence Group AI to create a suite of intelligent analytics products which would be unparalleled and at the edge of innovation in the blockchain cryptocurrency analytics space. By integrating AI into our technology we will continue to be seen as the financial regulatory technology ("Regtech") standard."
One of the largest and most well-known Canadian blockchain stocks, BTL GROUP LTD. (TSX VENTURE: BTL) grabbed attention in October when it announced that it has filed patents on its enterprise blockchain platform Interbit™. Interbit is a third generation blockchain platform with unique 'connecting' capability developed by BTL after it became apparent that second generation blockchains would not scale to meet enterprise demands as the technology matures. BTL confirmed through pre-commercial and confidential beta testing that its Interbit platform consistently exceeds customers' requirements in many sectors, including finance and energy.
"Interbit now has the capacity to operate and inter-connect many thousands of Interbit blockchains per server in a secure, private, and scalable manner. We realized very quickly that single blockchain solutions such as current generation two offerings would not allow blockchain technology to fully realize its transformative capabilities in the years ahead - we needed Interbit to scale far beyond what already exists in the blockchain space. Our new capabilities clearly define what generation three blockchains are capable of," said Tom Thompson, CTO of BTL. "During our successful pilots we have proven Interbit's privacy and scalability capabilities, securing it as a recognized enterprise grade blockchain platform. Interbit has also been designed for ease of use by customers, allowing it to be integrated into existing IT infrastructure in a quick and simple manner, not seen before in our industry."
In November the company announced a financing/offering with gross proceeds of approximately C$10.7 million.
*For investors trying to understand what blockchain technology is and how it differentiates from bitcoin, IBM for Dummies explains, "Blockchain is a shared, distributed ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets in a business network. An asset can be tangible — a house, a car, cash, land — or intangible like intellectual property, such as patents, copyrights, or branding. Virtually anything of value can be tracked and traded on a blockchain network, reducing risk and cutting costs for all involved.
Bitcoin is actually built on the foundation of blockchain, which serves as bitcoin's shared ledger. Think of blockchain as an operating system, such as Microsoft Windows or MacOS, and bitcoin
as only one of the many applications that can be run on that operating system. Blockchain provides the means for recording bitcoin transactions — the shared ledger — but this shared ledger can be used to record any transaction and track the movement of any asset whether tangible, intangible, or digital. For example, blockchain enables securities to be settled in minutes instead of days. It can also be used to help companies manage the flow of goods and related payments, or enable manufacturers to share production logs with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and regulators to reduce product recalls.
The takeaway lesson: Bitcoin and blockchain are not the same. Blockchain provides the means to record and store bitcoin transactions, but blockchain has many uses beyond bitcoin. Bitcoin is only the first use case for blockchain."
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