TWIBS — Cardano Adds Partner for Payment Processing, Litecoin Going Private with MW, IOTA Partners with FIWARE, Streamr Launching Data Unions, Ocean Protocol Upgrades to v1.1 Supporting IPFS
Every week we comb through hundreds of Blockfolio Signals to bring you the most significant team updates with brief analyses to help you understand the latest developments in blockchain.
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In this week’s issue:
- Cardano Partners with COTI in Payment Processing
- Litecoin Moves One Step Closer to Privacy MimbleWimble
- IOTA Collaborates with FIWARE to Build IoT Solutions
- Streamr Launching Data Unions for Users to Crowdsell Browser Data
- Ocean Protocol Updates to v1.1, Supporting IPFS
- Ardor Blockchain Can Now Run as a Full Node on Android Devices
Cardano Partners with COTI in Payment Processing
“Hello Everyone! Exciting News!
The Cardano Foundation has partnered with COTI network to offer an ada payment processing solution for merchants. The payment solution can be easily integrated directly into the merchant’s website via an adaPay button or a QR-based point of sale (PoS) system.
The offering will simplify accepting and settling ada payments, and enable merchants to manage all transactions in real-time.”
— Bakyt Azimkanov, Global PR, Communications and Marketing Director
Summary
- The Cardano Foundation and COTI, an enterprise-grade fintech platform, are to develop an ADA payment gateway. The offering — due to launch in November — will allow merchants to accept ADA payments with a near-instant settlement into 35 fiat currencies directly into their bank accounts.
- The payment solution will be easily integrated directly into a merchant’s website either with an adaPay button or a QR-based point of sale (PoS) system. The offering will simplify accepting and settling ADA payments, and enable merchants to manage all transactions in real-time
- As COTI Universal Payment Solution (UPS) is extended to provide other financial services, such as lending products and prepaid debit cards, these will also be made available to ADA merchants.
Significance
Cardano is busy setting up partnerships to increase the reach of their token. With this latest move, they are delivering a universal payment solution and expanding the COTI tech stack beyond their own ecosystem. It helps to further extend the utility use case for the token — both inside and outside of the Cardano ecosystem.
Price at the time of Blockfolio Signal: $0.037. View ADA on Blockfolio.
Litecoin Moves One Step Closer to Implementing Private Transactions with MimbleWimble
“The Litecoin MimbleWimble Extension Block Proposal has been published.”
— Franklyn Richards, Core Litecoin Team
Summary
- On 10/22, the long-awaited proposal for Litecoin’s MimbleWimble (MW) implementation was published to their Github as new pull requests under the Litecoin Improvement Protocol (LIP) titles LIP 2 & LIP 3.
- LIP 2 focuses on the Extension blocks (EB) implementation that would allow for not only MimbleWimble but an effective block size increase to be added without any consensus rule changes to the network.
- These Extension Blocks will run parallel alongside the main Litecoin blockchain. To differentiate the EB chain from the parent and ensure compatibility with existing rules a new witness program will be implemented. This new witness will use Bech32 (addresses starting with lc1) due to its efficiency over legacy (L) and standard segwit addresses (M), it will also mean lower transaction fees in comparison.
- LIP 3 deals with the actual MW proposal and the team's motivation. Now that the Full LIP details are public it is up to the community and other Litecoin Developers to review and offer feedback before coding begins and resources are committed to working on the implementation further.
- It will be up to the network to vote on the final code and whether or not to adopt the new technology, otherwise known as a soft fork.
Significance
Litecoin is the #6 cryptocurrency by market capitalization and one of the first cryptocurrencies to launch. The addition of private transactions via MW would make it the largest crypto to offer it. This is also a vote of confidence in MW as a privacy/scaling solution and could lead to the eventual integration of MW on the Bitcoin network. Not only does it hide the amount being sent, but the transactional history is also deleted from the ledger. This increases privacy by removing linked transactions as well as mitigating the growth in the size of the blockchain.
Price at the time of Blockfolio Signal: $54.50. View LTC on Blockfolio.
IOTA Collaborates with FIWARE to Build IoT Solutions for a Smart Digital Future
“As part of our strides toward open collaboration, today we announced our collaboration and MOU with FIWARE. The FIWARE Foundation has made dynamic progress in the space of smart solutions and integrations with high proliferation and adoption throughout Europe. The European Commission (EC) recently formally adopted the FIWARE Context Broker technology as a core CEF Building Block. As part of the collaboration, our core initial focus area through our collaboration with FIWARE will be enabling context-aware capabilities to proliferate over the Tangle through development of IOTA capabilities into the FIWARE Context Broker. IOTA co-founder, Dominik Schiener will also speak today at the FIWARE Global Summit in Berlin.”
— Cara Harbor, Director of Communications
Summary
- The Iota Foundation is making strides toward open collaboration, first with the Linux Foundation and now with the FIWARE Foundation.
- The IOTA Foundation and the FIWARE Foundation have signed a formal Memorandum of Understanding for initiating collaboration. IOTA’s Tangle technology will serve as an immutable, trusted audit trail for relevant context data transactions in “Powered by FIWARE” architectures.
- It enables FIWARE to warrant the quality of data being stored in a distributed ledger (Tangle), such as food quality and animal welfare.
- FIWARE benefits from increased interoperability with IoT sensor integrations in mutual focal verticals and heightened security of the platform. IOTA benefits from increased exposure of their technology and the potential for large-scale adoption of IOTA.
Significance
This represents another step toward IOTA’s goal of Open Collaboration. They are relinquishing the development silo to enable cohesive contributions to external collaborative organizations. The bridging of each side’s existing ecosystems should be mutually beneficial in their work towards enabling the true open trust layer for the Internet of Things.
Price at the time of Blockfolio Signal: $0.25. View IOTA on Blockfolio.
Streamr Launching Data Unions for Users to Crowdsell Browser Data
“This Saturday, Streamr will hold the first demonstration of data unions, with a community built plugin for users to crowdsell their own browser data. Don’t miss this if you’re interested in the personal data economy!”
— Shiv Malik , Head of Communications
Summary
- Swash (formerly Surf-Streamr) is a new plugin available for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge (Chromium version), which allows users to monetize the data already generated whilst browsing.
- The data is sent to a “data union” where it is aggregated and sold on behalf of users on the Streamr Marketplace.
- The more people that join the data union, the greater the value that everyone can extract from buyers. The data union backend is powered by a platform created by the open-source project Streamr.
- Organizations that are interested in using that information can subscribe to the data firehose through the Streamr Marketplace, and that payment will be automatically distributed to all the users who participate in the data union. In essence, the buyer is directly paying users for information.
- Addressing privacy concerns, users are in full control of what data is shared and can block certain URLs entirely.
Significance
Only a handful of corporations really profit from all the data that is collected when users browse the internet. Giants like Facebook and Google derive the bulk of their revenues from selling this user data and the users get no monetary compensation other than free services.
Blockchain companies are looking to disrupt this inequitable model by rewarding individuals for sharing their data, rather than enriching the world’s largest corporations. Streamr will benefit by owning the marketplace where the data can be bought and sold while gaining goodwill for rewarding users and protecting their privacy in the process.
Price at the time of Blockfolio Signal: $0.01. View DATA on Blockfolio.
Ocean Protocol Updates to v1.1, Supporting IPFS
“The Ocean Protocol stack now supports IPFS, allowing users to take advantage of decentralized asset file hosting. Learn more about our latest tech development, how it’s used in the Commons Marketplace, and next possible iterations on our blog.”
— Trent McConaghy, Founder
Summary
- Ocean Protocol upgraded to v1.1, adding IPFS file hosting integration, new Events-Handler component, and Commons as default UI in Barge.
- The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) solves centralization, security and censorship issues with the goal of transforming the vastly centralized web into a distributed peer-to-peer network.
- The addition of IPFS in the Ocean Protocol network stack allows users to take advantage of decentralized asset file hosting. They can use native ipfs:// URLs when registering data set files and simple IPFS upload functionality in the publish flow in the Commons Marketplace.
Significance
While v1.1 may be a minor upgrade for the Ocean Protocol, the integration of IPFS is significant. It helps to further decentralize file hosting and other network operations, increasing security and eliminating censorship. They could be blazing the trail for others in the ecosystem to follow in regards to IPFS implementation.
Price at the time of Blockfolio Signal: $0.02. View OCEAN on Blockfolio.
Ardor Blockchain Can Now Run as a Full Node on Android Devices
“Ardor blockchain can now run as a full node on Android devices! We are proud to announce the native Android implementation of a full proof-of-stake blockchain node, supporting all platform features and generation of new blocks!
Be among the first to run Ardor on your mobile phone, and take part in our Blockchain Anywhere promotion!”— Kristina Kalcheva, Co-Founder and Managing Director
Summary
- Ardor released a new software package, allowing users to run a full node on Android devices.
- For the first time, a decentralized blockchain platform enables users to join the network and participate equally in the PoS consensus, creating new blocks and processing transactions, only using a mobile phone.
- Users no longer need to set up and maintain a server or leave a laptop running all the time, in order to forge new blocks.
- It becomes cost-efficient even for minor stakeholders to participate in the consensus, and earn forging fees.
- This new level of decentralization makes the public blockchain platform more resilient against external attacks.
Significance
Ardor is the first major blockchain platform to allow users to run a full node on a standard mobile phone. It comes as the HTC Exodus has just announced the ability to run a full Bitcoin node on their phone. This makes it more convenient to run a full node and earn rewards, while simultaneously helping to further decentralize the blockchain and increase security levels.
Price at the time of Blockfolio Signal: $0.05. View ARDR on Blockfolio.
Quote of the Week:
“I didn’t come forward to be safe. If I wanted to be safe, I would still be sitting in Hawaii, making a hell of a lot of money to spy on all of you.
Yeah, it is risky. Yeah, it is uncomfortable. But if we don’t do it, no one else will. There are no heroes, only heroic decisions.”
— Edward Snowden (via Joe Rogan podcast)
Thanks for joining us and we look forward to bringing you our top Blockfolio Signals again next week.
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Jason Hamlin
Ecosystem Insights & Development @ Blockfolio
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