This isn’t surprising as Sony has been a household name since the early ‘90s and their current position at the top is just Sony’s natural spot. The Japanese company is heavily invested in several new technologies including blockchain and AI, and the speed at which their testing and investments in the space are rolled out is remarkable.
Last week it was announced that Sony have developed a high-speed processing technology that facilitates data transactions for a new breed of database platform called Blockchain Common Database (BCDB). The work was done as part of a transportation-focused Mobility as a Service (MaaS) initiative led by the Netherlands Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management back in 2019.
What makes this technology interesting is that they have achieved successful execution and storage of seven million transactions per day, simulating a real-world scenario where buses, cars, bikes and taxis all share their location and other metrics.
Sony, through their investments arm Sony Financial Ventures (SFV), have participated in the latest funding round of the Securitize platform. This platform, which specializes in digital securities, has a strong connection to Japan and Asia but their roadmap is focused globally.
With all the work and investments they are putting into the enterprise blockchain space, Sony will be a strong contender for next year’s 2021 Blockchain 50 list. The list has already welcomed the presence of one of Sony’s competitors, Samsung.
Overall, Sony is showing a strong desire and willingness to innovate in using blockchain technology for supplementing their existing infrastructure and business use cases. From those efforts, the net winners will be their consumers and partners, who will benefit from access to better and faster services at an eventually optimized price.
I am a blockchain architect based in New York. I have deep technical expertise in digital assets, crypto and blockchain protocols, and systems. My coverage includes opinions and research pieces on the latest trends in the crypto world.
In 2017, cryptocurrency exchange Binance created the first of a new kind of blockchain-minted digital asset: BNB coin, designed to reward customer behavior such as trading or referring friends to its own platform. “A model for building a scalable, and impactful cryptocurrency business,” heralded CoinDesk editor Pete Rizzo in 2019, after Binance moved the coin to its own proprietary blockchain. “Unbelievable brilliance.”
Today, the only unbelievable thing about the whole cloth of crypto inventions known as exchange tokens, like BNB, is that they have inflated to tens of billions of dollars in value and in large part have become the foundation upon which the fast-growing digital-assets markets rest.
The weakest link in former billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire was FTX’s own exchange token, which traded under the symbol FTT. According to Reuters, Bankman-Fried had lent his trading company, Alameda, billions of dollars in FTX customer funds, collateralized by these FTT tokens, which were essentially invented as a way to offer trading discounts and other perks.
“The way that FTT works,” said Bankman-Fried in an August 2022 interview with Forbes, “It is not that you get free FTT for doing things. The way to think about it is that you get free shit for having FTT. So, there’s a bunch of doo-hickeys.”
At the peak in 2021 FTT had a market value of $9.6 billion, but unlike a common stock, which represents legal ownership in the assets of a corporation, FTT does not represent any equity ownership in the FTX company. If FTT had any intrinsic value, it was in the form of discounts that FTX customers using these tokens could get trading on the exchange–as much as 60% for active traders.
You can think of these exchange tokens as being akin to loyalty or reward points you might get as a frequent customer of Starbucks or the UnitedMiles by flying on that airline. They have value, but it’s unlikely that a bank would allow you to use them as collateral if you wanted to purchase a home.
However, in the highly speculative and often bizarre world of digital assets, these loyalty tokens trade on numerous crypto exchanges just as stocks do on the New York Stock Exchange, and FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried reportedly used them as collateral for the loans his company made. Up until a week ago FTT traded at $26 and had a market capitalization of $3.5 billion.
But after Bankman-Fried’s rival Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s billionaire founder, went on Twitter to say he was planning to sell over $500 million of FTT, it sparked the crypto equivalent of a bank run. Today FTT sells for $2.70, and given FTX’s recent bankruptcy filing, it is likely headed to zero.
But the story of exchange tokens in cryptoland is far from over. Forbes counts more than 16 global crypto and DeFi (decentralized finance) exchanges currently using these tokens for a combined market value of no less than $62 billion.
In fact, so-called exchange tokens are an important underpinning to the crypto exchange ecosystem because they are effective in creating customer loyalty–especially when token prices are rising. Virtually all such tokens offer holders exchange-specific perks such as trading fee discounts, preferential margin loan terms, enhanced rewards for staking (lending) and exchange-branded cashback Visa cards.
Exchange tokens are also awarded to customers that refer new traders to a platform, in a system similar to multi-level marketing organizations like Amway. Exchange tokens function as the fuel for crypto’s self-fulfilling bubbles.
Binance–the largest crypto exchange in the world–has its own token, BNB, which by itself has a market capitalization of $45.9 billion, though it does not represent any equity in Changpeng Zhao’s company nor has it been registered as a security with the U.S. SEC.
Anyone who opens an account on Binance and starts trading can buy or earn these BNB tokens, which offer 25% discounts on spot and margin transaction fees and 10% on futures. If you refer friends, you can get up to 40% commission every time they make a trade on Binance. Also, because Binance has created its own blockchain that mints BNB coins, you can use BNB to pay for goods and services, book airfare and hotels on sites like Travala for instance, participate in exclusive token sales and even earn free tokens by completing surveys and tasks.
You can also put BNB to use by staking, earn a flexible percentage yield by depositing it on BNB Chain-based projects and apply for crypto loans. Notably, these digital assets are also essential for anyone who want to use Binance’s decentralized exchange (DEX), which theoretically can’t be shut down by U.S. regulators.
Unlike bitcoin, which is mined every ten minutes, all of the 350 million FTT tokens that would ever exist were created in what is known as a pre-mine. “There will never be any more minted,” said Bankman-Fried recently. In fact, over a period of about three months starting around June of 2019 almost all of FTT’s premined tokens were sold prior to getting listed on crypto exchanges. “Effectively, all of the FTT tokens were owned by a collection of people and entities,” said Bankman-Fried.
In order to create scarcity and essentially bolster the value of its exchange tokens, FTX and Binance conduct what are known as token burns. Periodically both exchanges send tokens to irretrievable addresses reducing the float, similarly to a share buyback, and thus increasing the value of the exchange tokens outstanding. Since 2019 FTX has burned 21 million FTT tokens.
In total, Binance has burned more than 42 million BNB, which would be worth $11.6 billion at today’s prices. CZ has said Binance doesn’t borrow money and has never used BNB as collateral on loans. He recently began advocating that exchanges undergo a “proof” of funds.
In terms of governance, exchange tokens, like loyalty reward programs, are completely under the control of the entity that issues or redeems them, even if they profess to stick to pre-arranged schedules for issuance or burning. DeFi tokens, by contrast, claim to offer holders the ability to propose and vote on platform changes. But in reality, many large DeFi platforms concentrate governance in the hands of big investors and founding teams.
Additionally, just as FTT did not give holders stakes in FTX, purchasing a DeFi token does not necessarily convey ownership rights into the underlying platform. The table below offers details on some 16 different cryptocurrency and DeFi-platform exchange tokens representing more than $60 billion in market value.
Conspicuously absent are Coinbase and Kraken, which are U.S.-based and have avoided issuing exchange tokens, presumably because they would likely be deemed securities by the SEC. All of the tokens listed trade on exchanges daily like stocks–most of them have plummeted in value in the last year—but not a single one offers any ownership in the companies that they are affiliated with. Buyer beware.
TOKEN VALUES
The 16 crypto and DeFi exchanges below created exchange tokens to attract and retain customers. Though they trade like stocks and have a value of over $60 billion, none represent ownership in their affiliated platforms.
I report on all things crypto and oversee the Forbes Crypto Confidential newsletter and the annual Forbes Blockchain 50 list which features billion-dollar leaders in distributed ledger
I write about digital assets trends and am a leading creator of the Forbes Digital Assets tools and functionality our viewers require. I support the generation of relevant, curated investor
Brex’s two twenty-something founders are now billionaires, thanks to a lofty new funding round announced this week that nearly doubled the valuation of their five-year-old fintech firm.
The San Francisco-based startup—which is aiming to overhaul the corporate credit card—confirmed on Tuesday that it has raised $300 million in a funding round led by investment firms Greenoaks Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), giving it a $12.3 billion valuation—a sizable jump from the $7.4 billion valuation it fetched just nine months ago.
Cofounders (and co-CEOs) Henrique Dubugras, 26, and Pedro Franceschi, 25, each hold a 14% stake in Brex, Forbes estimates, worth about $1.5 billion apiece. (Forbes discounts the value of privately held companies.) The pair declined to comment on Forbes’ estimates but Dubugras did speak with Forbes about his startup’s path to success.
The young fintech has made a name for itself with a corporate credit card tailored to the needs of startups. It remains Brex’s marquee product, and the interchange fees merchants pay when employees swipe Brex’s cards constitute nearly all of the company’s revenue.
In recent years, Brex has also launched new software offerings like an expense management product and a business bill pay feature: “If you get an invoice in your email, you can just forward it to us and boom, it gets paid,” Dubugras tells Forbes on a Zoom call from his home office in Los Angeles. In May, the company rolled out one of the first crypto rewards programs for corporations.
Brex is not the only business attempting to disrupt the stodgy, spreadsheet-centric world of B2B payments. Today, its rivals include startup Ramp (founded in 2019 and valued at almost $4 billion after an August funding round) and publicly traded Bill.com (valued at some $21 billion), which bought expense reporting software fintech Divvy for $2.5 billion last spring.
But Brex has been able to attract a deluge of venture capital by offering a suite of products that extend beyond the corporate credit card. Dubugras maintains that he’s not too worried about competition. “The market is pretty big, and I think that there’s space for a lot of people,” he says. “Most B2B payments are still paper- and check-based.”
The 1,000-person startup can credit its existence to a lively Twitter exchange in December 2012 between Dubugras and Franceschi about the nuances of coding tools. At the time, they were high school seniors living in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, respectively. The 140-character tweet cap hindered the debate, so the two teens hopped on Skype to discuss further.
“On Skype, we couldn’t fight that much and became best friends,” says Dubugras.
In 2013, the pals launched a startup called Pagar.me that allowed Brazilian merchants to accept online payments. It was a 150-person outfit by the time they sold it three years later to a larger Brazil-based payments fintech called Stone. Dubugras won’t share the pair’s take, but says it was enough to pay for college—he and Franceschi are both Stanford computer science dropouts—and stow away some savings.
For their next act, the pair initially wanted to build bank accounts for U.S.-based startups, but settled on corporate credit cards as a more attainable route. (“What business would trust their money to these random 22-year-old Brazilians?” chuckles Dubugras. “With corporate cards…
We were giving them money instead of asking for their own money.”) Dubugras and Franceschi founded Brex in 2017 after quitting Stanford in the spring of their freshman year and, two years later, both earned spots on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Finance list. By then, Brex had raised $213 million and was valued at $1.1 billion. In 2019, Brex also rolled out its take on the business bank accounts that had enthralled its founders from the start.
(Brex is not a chartered bank itself, so it partners with LendingClub or JPMorgan Chase for the accounts.) All told, the duo has secured more than $1.1 billion in venture money from the likes of Tiger Global Management, Peter Thiel and Affirm founder Max Levchin.
The company says its revenue more than doubled over the past 12 months, though it won’t share specifics or comment on profitability; private markets data provider PitchBook estimates Brex generated about $320 million in revenue for 2021. Dubugras says that Brex counts “tens of thousands” of corporate customers today, including the likes of Carta and Classpass.
The startup wants to keep the ball rolling in the new year. With $300 million in fresh funding, Brex aims to increase its headcount by at least 50% while also keeping cash in the coffers in case there’s a market downturn. Brex originally set out to serve startups, but Dubugras says mid-market firms account for more than 60% of its customer base today. In 2022, he hopes to reel in large corporations as well.
“I think it’s easy for people to think that we’re already successful,” he says. “We are, and we aren’t. We’re obviously happy about what we’ve achieved, but there’s so much more to come.”
I’m a reporter on Forbes’ wealth team covering the world’s richest people and tracking their fortunes. I was previously an assistant editor for Forbes’ Money & Markets section…
Brex is a financial technology company that primarily offers a corporate credit card to early-stage companies. Furthermore, business owners can also create a bank account (called Brex Cash) and utilize the company’s various expense management tools for their business.
Brex makes money through a monthly account subscription, interchange fees, referral fees from cashback rewards, interest on loans, as well as interest on cash held in its customer accounts.
When you think of the most rewarding small-business credit cards, you might assume that you’ll need to shell out a sizable fee each year for the ability to rack up bonus points. The Brex Card, however, proves that assumption incorrect.
The Brex Card doesn’t charge an annual fee, and no personal guarantees or credit checks are required to be approved. Plus, new cardholders can earn 50,000 signup bonus points after spending $9,000+ in the first 30 days.
The Brex Card still packs a generous reward structure, which can be tailored to pay out more based on the type of business you run. Here’s a look at a standard rundown of earning potential:
8x on ride-sharing spending
5x on travel booked through the Brex portal
4x at restaurants
3x on eligible Apple purchases made through the Brex portal
1.5x on advertising
1x on all other purchases
There are a few key caveats to the rewards structure. Let’s start with the most important piece of the puzzle: You have to use the Brex Card exclusively to get in on all those bonus opportunities. After two months, you have to “ensure card exclusivity,” which I assume you do by linking your other bank accounts.
If you’re using other small-business credit cards, your rewards dip to a measly 1 point per dollar, plus 3x for eligible Apple purchases — a rewards structure not worth celebrating. So, this credit card is only for business owners who aren’t afraid of a serious commitment and who are willing to break up with their other cards.
Now, if you can make it your exclusive card, Brex offers some additional options to make the card more rewarding based on your spending routine. For example, if your company calls itself a tech company, you’ll earn 3x on recurring software purchases. If your company works in the life sciences, your highest payout — 8x — comes on conference tickets. So, if five of your employees are registering for that big annual meeting on biomedicine with a fee of $2,000 per ticket, that payout can come in handy. You’ll also learn 2x on lab supplies.
Another big differentiator is that Brex rewards you more if you pay your bill on a daily basis, similar to a debit card. To do that, you deposit money into a Brex cash account, and each day, your bill is automatically paid from those funds. If you pay your bill on a monthly basis, your rewards are a bit less: The highest payout is 7x.
As companies increase their reliance on cloud providers to store vital data, a rash of AWS outages has riled clients, with some looking to hedge their bets with access to other platforms.
When Amazon Web Services suffered its third major outage in a matter of weeks last month – affecting millions of people, from Citi Bike riders to Disney+ viewers and Delta Airlines customers – almost none of its corporate clients expressed frustration publicly.
But within boardrooms and corner offices, the most recent outage on December 22 was the latest reminder of the risks of relying on a single cloud vendor. “The AWS outages were a black eye for the company as more enterprises race to the cloud,” says Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities.
AWS has long been the cloud leader, holding 41% of the global cloud infrastructure market, and generated $16 billion revenue in the third quarter of 2021. Though as a first-mover cloud vendor since it launched in 2006 – becoming essential for small and medium businesses looking to outsource their networks – AWS has been fending off tough competition from Microsoft, which Gartner says grew twice as fast as AWS in 2020 as it moved to secure large corporations.
Microsoft doesn’t break out its public cloud revenue, but the most recent comparable figures from Gartner show that in 2020, Azure generated $12 billion revenue from public cloud infrastructure services, compared to $26 billion by AWS. (Google Cloud trailed at $4 billion).
Now that outages have reinforced the risks of relying on one vendor, signs that corporations are increasingly turning to Microsoft are starting to emerge. Research published this month by Bank of America shows that 23% of chief information officers at 185 large companies around the world expect to spend most of their cloud budgets over the next 12 months on Microsoft Azure, compared with 11% for Amazon AWS.
A spokesperson for AWS contended that the company has a better track record of reliability than any other cloud provider. “Pioneering this level of reliability at the scale of AWS is an unprecedented engineering accomplishment,” the spokesperson said in an email. “However, we understand how critical our services are for customers and their end users, and we’re not satisfied unless performance is indistinguishable from perfect.”
AWS also said it believed clients should stick to multiple cloud regions within AWS, rather than entering multi-cloud agreements with other vendors to manage exposure to outages. “A multi-cloud architecture is technically complex, creates increased latency, and results in lower actual availability and resiliency than architecting for high-availability on AWS,” the spokesperson said.
Microsoft declined to comment.
Companies are typically reluctant to talk publicly about their cloud strategies and how much they spend, especially if it relates to a single vendor. Forbes asked 45 companies affected by the AWS outages – including McDonald’s, Toyota and Coinbase – whether they use multiple cloud vendors or were considering doing so, and whether the recent AWS outages had prompted them to change their cloud strategy.
Ride-sharing service Lyft previously made perhaps the boldest statement against Amazon after the most recent AWS outage turned off the Citi Bike stations it operates in New York and New Jersey, saying “we’re as frustrated as our riders.” Lyft, which had said it planned to “build redundancy” into its system, declined to comment further, or say whether it was considering moving to another cloud vendor.
When asked about whether the AWS outages had prompted a rethink of its reliance on AWS, a spokesperson for Toyota underscored the need for companies to review their strategies when the system fails, and that for larger companies, it “may mean a more complex build-out utilizing more than one cloud vendor.”
American Express, another AWS customer, echoed the need for access to multiple clouds. Evan Kotsovinos, American Express’ global head of infrastructure, wouldn’t say whether Amex was affected by the AWS outages, but says the company has resiliency built in across its network because it has agreements with multiple vendors, in multiple regions. Amex has been building out its relationship with Oracle, for instance.
“Different clouds have different strengths,” says Kotsovinos. “And so if you really want to get the maximum value out of the clouds, you’ve got to put the right applications in the right cloud.” Others, meanwhile, affirmed their loyalty to AWS, despite the outages. Atlassian, which runs all of its products on top of AWS, told Forbes that it is not considering other cloud vendors.
Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath added that the company is unconcerned by the AWS hiccups. “Our engineering teams regularly war-games downtime scenarios,” Viswanath said in a statement. “So when the AWS outage happened, we had mitigation plans in place and were able to limit the overall impact to our customers.”
1Password, a password management company valued at $6.8 billion after a funding round this month, confirmed it uses a single AWS region, but said it offsets the risks of outages by encrypting its clients’ data locally.
“At the end of the day, our decisions are made based on best-in-class infrastructure providers, and our choices aren’t triggered by any single event,” 1Password’s CTO Pedro Canahuati said in a statement. And a spokesperson for Slack said “our strategy for cloud platform partners has not changed and we look forward to continuing our work with AWS.”
To be clear, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud also encounter outages. In October, Azure customers were unable to access a suite of services for eight hours. And in November, company websites of Snap, Home Depot and Spotify and others were down after Google Cloud experienced an outage caused by a network configuration glitch. Outages also occur as a result of issues with edge cloud services, which often provide “last-mile” connections from the vendors, such as Akamai and Fastly.
And a major migration to multi-cloud environments – where large companies use more than one vendor – has been underway since 2019, a movement accelerated by the pandemic, which forced companies to outsource their networks as their employees worked from home. A survey by cloud-research firm Futuriom published in October found that 55% of large companies were currently using two or more cloud vendors, while 83% were assessing multi-cloud networking.
Amazon’s efforts to keep cloud customers loyal has been increasingly suffering from the perception it may compete with them. Capital One, among AWS’ largest clients, announced at the annual AWS re:Invent conference in November 2020 that it was “going all in on the cloud” by closing all of its data centers and had migrated its networks to AWS. But Capital One told Forbes it has signed agreements with other cloud vendors, which it says it leverages “for niche use cases.”
Given Amazon’s lofty ambitions in the financial services sector, Capital One’s niche agreements with other vendors are likely to grow, says Steve Mullaney, the CEO of Aviatrix, which helps companies including Capital One manage multiple cloud environments. “What’s in your wallet?” Mullaney says, echoing the bank’s tagline. “Well, guess what: Maybe an Amazon card.”
For now, the outages are the most recent reminder for large corporations of the risk of relying on one cloud, Mullaney says. The AWS outages were “gasoline on the fire,” Mullaney says. “The last remnants – the laggards – it probably accelerated those people” to go multi-cloud.
A consistent thread about bitcoin has been that if it succeeds, it will inevitably invite government legislation and regulation to shut it down. This has been a backhanded critique of sorts advanced by investors like Ray Dalio who are “on bitcoin’s side”, but worry about its success attracting the attention of the state powers that be.
This isn’t an altogether surprising or irrational fear. We live centuries after the establishment of the nation-state as all-powerful welfare state, military, and taxation hub. It’s clear that state powers are often only reined in by “political” constraints (rather than physical or technical ones). Could governments shut down bitcoin if they wanted to?
This is probably a lot harder than one might think. Bitcoin is somewhat resilient to government crackdowns because of its origin, and the way the network is built. While states, if focused enough, could probably inflict some damage to bitcoin if it was a central state objective across the board, there are many factors for why a “government crackdown” on bitcoin is overrated for destroying the network.
1- It requires large-scale coordination among many different multilateral bodies and states
Since bitcoin is internationalized, it would require consent and coordination among almost every nation-state in order to effectively crack down on bitcoin. While the major world powers (such as the United States and China) have a bloc-like effect, and whereas there has been more coordination (often US-led) on issues such as climate change and corporate tax rates, when you look at issues as diverse as COVID-19 and the tit-for-tats of “strategic rivals” and Olympic boycotts — it is still difficult to see countries focusing on bitcoin in unison.
Large-scale coordination would be required to shut down the network in any meaningful way: otherwise, people could transact and support the bitcoin network in other nations or even in space. A slow nation-by-nation ban can affect the network: at an extreme, an unlikely state-led ban in the United States might choke off bitcoin from American-led financial systems and markets with near-total global reach. Yet, so long as bitcoin was trans-actable across other states, a “global ban” could not be accomplished nor a “government crackdown”.
2- There is no central node that states can really pressure
One of the most unique points about bitcoin is that there is no central leader figure to pin down. Satoshi’s disappearance, and Hal Finney’s untimely death, have led to a situation where there isn’t a “company CEO” or some other central leader to go after. While there are pressure points nation-states can use to pursue their objectives (for example, physical concentration of miners, key technical contributors still constrained by borders), there isn’t a central one, but rather a set of diffused ones.
We saw this when the Chinese state banned bitcoin mining in its territory: did that spell the end of bitcoin? No: miners simply shifted their equipment elsewhere, and within a few months, hash rate was as high if not higher than what it was before.
States are not used to dealing with organizations like this: they are used to dealing with multinational corporations to a certain extent, but there are usually a set of central pressure points and leadership that a state can lean on to get that corporation to adhere to certain rules and regulations. That, due to bitcoin’s unique creation story, is very unlikely to happen with any attacks on the bitcoin network.
3- Code is speech
In the United States, code is regarded as “protected” speech — software source code which powers bitcoin is protected by the First Amendment. In order to attack the distribution of code that powers bitcoin, countries like the United States would have to fundamentally change themselves and subvert long-held covenants of limited powers and the rule of law. This is not impossible (bitcoin, over a decades and even centuries long time horizon is a bet that (some) technical constraints are better than purely political ones for maintaining rule of law) but would be very out of character, and probably politically untenable.
4- States can be induced by bitcoin for commercial and other reasons
The Internet may never have been encrypted at all — export controls were initially placed on encryption, and commercial uses were seen skeptically. However, states partially relented when the commercial possibility of the Internet became clear. Now encryption powers communications as well as online banking and e-commerce sales.
This is not something states like: the Five Eyes and allied countries want to subvert end-to-end encryption and authoritarian states like the Chinese state either have backdoors or other mechanisms to promote social control. Yet it shows that, when faced with something that might threaten national security, the need for states to show GDP outcomes and to deliver wealth to their peoples might override their preferences in other areas.
As more and more countries adapt bitcoin in some fashion, this pressure will become larger until perhaps one day, we might see a bitcoin-friendly bloc of nations emerge similar to the Cairns Group for agriculture. Some will find that their domestic power-generation is more efficiently parsed through open-source bitcoin rather than supporting the fractional reserves of other countries. The more states are turned over to supporting the bitcoin network, the harder it will be for other states to attack it.
5- Bitcoin’s threat model has long included state-level powers
The way bitcoin is implemented makes it (more) prohibitive for any centralized collection of computers to disrupt the system. With more than 170,000 PH/s of hash rate securing the system (as of the date of writing) from a coordinated 51% attack (where an attacker could take over the system and propogate invalid spends in order to down the system for legitimate users, or to benefit monetarily from it), a projected security budget of around $45-60mn a day, and enough stakeholders .
(From investors, code contributors, analytics firms, miners and businesses — and now governments — that accept bitcoin) who have placed their financial livelihoods on monitoring the chain such that bitcoin could be secure beyond its fundamental dynamics — bitcoin is large enough to warrant significant resources for any attack, resources that wouldn’t be available for just any nation-state, and which would have to be continually deployed in a way that would make it hard to obscure who the attacker was.
We live in a heady time where “magic Internet money” has suddenly become the concern of Clausewitz readers around the world. As bitcoin grows more prominent, the possibility that it attracts state powers to disrupt or fully coopt it grows — yet those who play some part in the network, either from investing, transacting or supporting its infrastructure, can rest assured that the system has some inherent properties that make it more resilient than you might expect to even the strongest of attacks.
I was one of the first writers in 2014 to write about the intersection of cryptocurrencies in remittance payments and drug policy with VentureBeat and TechCrunch.
Bitcoin: Market, economics and regulation”(PDF). European Parliamentary Research Service. Annex B: Bitcoin regulation or plans therefor in selected countries. Members’ Research Service. p. 9. Retrieved 18 February 2015.
Sony Corporation Chairman Kaz Hirai..Visual China Group via Getty Images
Last week it was announced that Sony have developed a high-speed processing technology that facilitates data transactions for a new breed of database platform called Blockchain Common Database (BCDB). The work was done as part of a transportation-focused Mobility as a Service (MaaS) initiative led by the Netherlands Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management back in 2019.
Sony, through their investments arm Sony Financial Ventures (SFV), have participated in the latest funding round of the Securitize platform. This platform, which specializes in digital securities, has a strong connection to Japan and Asia but their roadmap is focused globally.
Rasta Beach Club – The Free Mint NFT collection expected to light up the Ethereum Blockchain
