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Last Week’s Updates:

Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.

The long awaited Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) had its official launch last week in New York City and was hosted by JP Morgan. There is some confusion around what EEA actually is. Generally speaking, it is a collaborative initiative that has brought together major incumbents and blockchain startups. The objective is to ensure interoperability between private implementations of the Ethereum network and the public Ethereum protocol. This suggests a move away from firms strictly limiting their use cases to private blockchains. Interoperability signifies that there is an appetite among large companies to use the public protocol to, for example, move traditional assets across the network. Here is a great piece that discusses how EEA is helping to break down the public vs private binary and another piece that talks about some of the use cases for a public Ethereum network that firms may be interested in exploring.

BTC and Eth keep pumping.

With the official announcement of EEA and the much anticipated SEC ruling on the Winkelvii’s Bitcoin ETF, both cryptocurrencies have been on a bull run. Bitcoin had reached all-time highs and is even worth more than an ounce of gold! To get an update on the current state of the Bitcoin-ETFs, of which there are three currently awaiting approval, Paul Vigna wrote a nice piece in the WSJ (read it here if you’re not subscribed!).

ICO report.

Coindesk came out with a report that takes a look at the growing phenomena of ICOs. What stood out from the report was the fact that ICOs have almost raised half of what VCs have invested in the space in 2016. Although ICOs are an exciting application of public blockchains with disruptive implications, it’s still an opaque market. There are admittedly some projects trying to raise money that appear rather illegitimate. There are major concerns around protecting investors and many anticipate a response from regulators is inevitable. For more info on ICOs check out these two articles.

Historial context.

Great piece by a favorite writer of ours, Vinya Gupta, who that puts blockchain technologies within a historical context. It’s important to take a long-term perspective on blockchain tech as it is still a nascent technology but one with huge implications which we believe will introduce a paradigm shift — something that doesn’t happen overnight. Comparing blockchain technologies to the internet revolution is a great example (even though it is overused!). Just as when Amazon first launched in 1995 (check out their very first website) they didn’t try to offer up all the services that they do now right from their inception. The internet still had many technological hurdles to overcome and its capabilities were limited. For example, it wasn’t initially possible to put your credit card information online because the necessary security standards didn’t yet exist. So Jeff Bezos worked with the existing capabilities of the internet of their time and slowly grew Amazon into what it is today.

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