Credits Becomes UK's First Official Blockchain Provider for Public Services
Credits, the London-based Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) Platform is now under the G-Cloud 8 framework agreement for use in the UK public sector, meaning that organizations like schools, hospitals, governments, charities and emergency services will be able to use Credits to build Blockchain solutions, which can be used by these services to become more efficient.
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Bitcoin Browser Provides an Alternative to Online Ads
Brave, a Bitcoin-fueled browser has raised $4.5M as an alternative to online ads and ad blockers. Brave offers an alternative solution by connecting users and publishers directly by allowing users to send micropayments to their favorite websites. This system allows users to have an ad-free experience while still rewarding content creators and publishers. Brave Software founder and CEO Brendan Eich said:
"We want win-win for users and publishers. We put users first, but we want publishers to earn a better share than what they receive with traditional ad blocking."
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Bolt will make Micropayment Channels Anonymous
Matthew Green and Ian Miers, members of the ZCash team, have released a whitepaper detailing an anonymous solution to off-chain payments. Although proposals like Thunder and Lightning Network allow a scalable solution for off-chain transactions, they do not provide a high degree of anonymity. The same goes for ZCash's off-chain payment channels, which are not as well protected as the zero knowledge blockchain itself. A new Bolt blog post explains:
"These IOUs form a unique identifier which can be used to track Alice much like a cookie. Anyone who observes >these (eg the Tor exit node) will not a priori know who the identifier belongs to – her actual identity is still protected >by the anonymity service – but they can still observe page views and patterns because multiple payments on a payment channel are inherently linkable."
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