Some updates from the last two weeks to help you stay in the loop!

Enjoy,

Filip

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The UN tests Ethereum

A pilot project being tested by the UN in partnership with a number of blockchain and other technology companies will see thousands of refugees in Jordan receive cryptographically backed coupons holding an undisclosed amount of Jordanian dinars. International aid payments using blockchain technologies has long been discussed as a promising use case. Its inherently difficult to track international payments that go through several middlemen and which eventually pay out in cash to individuals in developing countries. There is plenty of room for error and corruption. As Balaji Srinivasan has always argued, “digital currenc[ies] relative to the existing payment system is really good for payments that are very large, very small, very fast, very international, and very automated, or some combination thereof.” While in this case in particular, very traceable value transfers solve a major problem for organizations like the UN.

Srinivasan and 21.co

A greater interview with Srinivasan who has always been provided great analogies when giving his analysis of the blockchain space. He discusses his micro-payments company, 21.co, which raised over a hundred million from a number of prominent venture capital firms. He believes Bitcoin will enable the monetization of micro-tasks in a manner never seen before. Srinivasan suggests that just how in the Internet era we can’t keep track of the number of communications you’ve had in a day, the number of micro-transactions we’ve sent and received in a day will become just as ubiquitous. 21.co’s email service went live today to the general public.

Maturing and evolving ICO’s?

Last two weeks we have seen some interesting developments with the novel and emerging crowdfunding model of Initial Coin Offerings. Even The Economist has commentated on the phenomena. A venture fund called Blockchain Capital lead by Brock Pierce, a long time advocate and early adopter of Bitcoin, recently completed their ICO in a very unique manner. They formally approached the SEC which allowed the firm to sell their BCAP token to 1,000 investors of which 99 could be accredited US investors and the rest overseas investors. The firm raised USD $10 million in this manner with the tokens representing a stake in the firm. A great interview with Blockchain Capital can be found here. Another ICO worthy of mention was the Gnosis ICO which decided to use the reverse Dutch model. This was highly criticised by the community as the total supply of GNO token that was to be sold off was undetermined and was based on how quickly the sale met its cap of USD $12.5 million in Ether. The crowdsale ended in ten minutes and saw only 4% of the total supply being sold off. The Gnosis team retained ownership of the rest of the supply but have committed to not selling any for a single year. This drastically compared to most ICOs we have seen. Although, this level of ownership isn’t unheard of when compared to traditional early seed round where the startup still holds the majority of the stake in the firm. Gnosis says they will use the tokens to pay staff and plans to sell more in the future. Whether this will be another crowsale or sold to institutional investors is yet to be determined.

The unstoppable App.

Cryptiv published a short piece on decentralized applications, how they work, and why they are beginning to challenge our traditional understanding of the modern corporations and even applications themselves. Check it out here!

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