Blockchain is evolving rapidly with new innovations being added on a daily basis. Just wanted to share some of the promising projects that I came across recently. So without further ado let’s explore them.
Chainalysis
Compliance & Regulatory issues have been a sticking point for Blockchain startups & Cryptocurrencies for as long as they have been in existence. This is where Chainalysis comes in the picture – Although the AML (Anti Money Laundering) & KYC (Know your Client) software specialists have been in existence since 2014 but have recently gotten noticed in the blockchain space after the adoption of their software suite by the World’s biggest Crypto Exchange Binance. According to their website, they have a wide variety of clients from Governments, Financial institutions & Cryptocurrency Exchanges offering them an array of services in the following areas:
- Real-time Compliance
- Enhanced Due Diligence
- Cyber Threat Intelligence
- Suspect Identification
- Global Standards
The two specialized software suites called “Chainalysis Reactor” and “Chainalysis KYT” are primarily used by their clients for compliance purposes. Chainalysis KYT is a real-time transaction monitoring system for Cryptocurrencies generating real-time alerts on potential suspicious activity & customer risk profiles for further review & analysis. The software also utilizes advanced tools like Pattern recognition & Machine learning algorithms to identify & categorize hundreds of Cryptocurrencies. Flow of funds in individual transactions can be traced via a direct link to Chainalysis Reactor – which is more tailored towards law enforcement agencies & financial institutions in fishing out the bad players & illegal activity by providing in-depth analysis on the origin of Cryptocurrency transactions.
SPIN Protocol
Social media marketing is a hot commodity these days with the with an increasing number of suppliers choosing this channel to promote and/or sell their products. The size of this segment of the global e-commerce market is expected to balloon to $50 – $100 billion by 2020, according to the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency. But there are a couple of problems with the current scheme of things – one, the middleman eats away the share of the suppliers & influencers. Secondly, a lot of social media influencers have fake followers & since they get paid based on the size of their following, it isn’t a very transparent process considering fake followers could be bought.
This is where the Decentralized e-commerce system of the SPIN protocol provides a transparent and fair solution by connecting the suppliers & influencers through a smart contract, providing real-time transactional data about influencers to suppliers and payment, logistics, and customer service to sellers and/or influencers. The SPIN ecosystem will function on the native SPIN token which will be used to conduct all transactions by Sellers, Customers & Influencers. The token will also be used for incentivization. The protocol will be implemented in two stages where the first stage would see the testing of the economic model on the existing mainnets like Ethereum or EOS. The second stage would involve the development of a separate blockchain capable of processing large-scale data processing & high-speed transactions as required by the platform. SPIN has aligned itself with an impressive line of partners before public launch in 2019, with the most notable being Womanstalk – first video commerce platform in South Korea with a user base of over 1.5 million & an annual revenue growth of 300%.
Conflux Network
Yet another project aimed at providing the scalability solution for the blockchain networks to make them workable for real world use cases. The Conflux network intends to provide the users with decentralization, scalability with the added support of smart contracts & dApps. The project is being backed by big names like Sequoia Capital, IMO Ventures, FreesFund, Rong 360, Shunwei Capital, F2Pool & Huobi among others. Dr. Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, a Turing Award recipient and popularly known “godfather of computer science,” along with the fellow co-founder Fan Long (University of Toronto Professor) described the network in the following words:
“Conflux’s main idea is how to make the whole blockchain scalable. We’ve changed the structure of the blockchain so that it’s no longer a chain in the sense that it records each block based on what its parent block says […] Contrary to popular belief, true decentralization isn’t sacrificed to increase throughput.”
The network would utilize directed acyclic graph (DAG) combined with the Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm allowing multiple transactions to execute simultaneously thus reducing the processing time significantly. A similar process is already used by IOTA‘s tangle architecture. The team is proclaiming to have achieved the speed of 6,500 TPS on some 20,000 listed nodes in the initial dry runs. The testnet will be released by the end of Feb. 2019 followed by the mainnet release sometimes in Q3’ 2019. Waiting & Watching how these proclaimed highly scalable solutions perform in the real world scenarios with a few of them lined up for 2019 release.
Perpetual Swap Derivative
And finally something for the investors in the Crypto space, although a lot of them are on the sidelines with the current plunge in Cryptocurrencies , nonetheless, there is a new trading instrument being introduced by OKEx (world’s second largest exchange) in the shape of Perpetual Swap Derivative. The investment instrument is similar to Bitcoin futures contract which are already being traded on multiple platforms, the difference here is that there is no expiration on this derivative & it gets settled on a daily basis. It will be a Peer to Peer virtual exchange with the availability of margin & leverages, where users can speculate on the price of the digital asset – Each derivative contract would have a value of $100 Bitcoin equivalent. OKEx will start trading these Derivatives on December 11th. Keep in mind also that Huobi recently launched Huobi Derivative Market.
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