Highlights: The U.S. House holds crypto hearings, Parity rebrands for the 2.0 release, and we’ve launched a new dapp for the community.
Source: YouTube - Dept. of Agriculture
The U.S. House holds two committee meetings today on cryptocurrencies and other digital assets. The first is from the House Committee on Agriculture. The full video is above, and CoinDesk live-tweeted it here. The next will be from the House Committee on Financial Services and will address “The Future of Money: Digital Currency.” For a more in-depth account and a fantastic quote from this morning’s session, check out the segment in our video news.
Source: Civic
Civic has announced that its decentralized identity management solutions will be available on Identity.com “in early August.” The site will host identity verification services powered by the Civic token (CVC). In addition, they will be making the source code for the platform available in Q4 of this year.
Source: Crypto Is Coming
The newly-formed Indian state of Andhra Pradesh plans to make its capital city a smart one. Having already leveraged blockchain technology in the development of the city and the allotment of the land, officials are gathering landowner support to host administrative activities like land registration there as well. They hope the blockchain solutions will streamline city operations and prevent fraud and other data-tampering.
Source: Boeing
Boeing will partner with SparkCognition, a developer of AI tech, to track “unmanned air vehicles in flight and allocate traffic corridors and routes to ensure safe, secure transportation” and track commercial activity like package delivery. In other words, self-flying planes. While that concept fills this writer with an abject terror not felt since Arachnophobia was released in high-definition, Boeing clearly has no such reservations. It also plans to launch a new organization, Boeing NeXt, to develop solutions based on research and development into these technologies for smart cities and other opportunities.
Source: Parity
The Parity 2.0 client has been released, along with some major changes. The client has been rebranded to separate itself from end-user software. They’ve removed the UI and the installers, which immediately makes the client less accessible to novice users, and have clarified that the intended use case of the client is infrastructure and service provision. A “minimally-maintained” standalone Parity wallet is still available on Github, with plans for an upcoming alternative called Parity Fether.
Source: AFR
Decentralized Capital has teamed up with Custodian Vaults, a safety deposit box group, to offer Australia’s first “insured cryptocurrency vault.” The vault utilizes a number of security protocols, including biometrics and surveillance, and will target investors with a lot of wealth - exchanges, institutions, ICOs, and private citizens.
Source: Medium
Ledger has partnered with the Switcheo Network, a DEX built on the NEO blockchain. They will work together to enable trading on the DEX directly from hardware wallets. Switcheo has plans to support additional blockchains, and ultimately cross-chain swapping, in the future.
Source: 0x
The 0x Project has launched a new Portal service. The Portal lists all supported exchanges and the wallet information for the current user. It also offers some helpful explanations of common terminology within the space.
Source: Bloomberg
Coinbase has clarified statements it made to Bloomberg news on Monday regarding its acquisition of three financial firms. While the original article said that Coinbase had received SEC approval to move forward with the deal, the exchange has clarified that it neither received nor needed any such approval. A spokeswoman for the SEC confirmed that they had not given any explicit approval.
Source: CNBC
A VP for Coinbase says there is “increased interest among institutional investors” in the digital currency space. These investors, he says, want to know three things before putting their money into any cryptocurrency project: that "it’s transparent; it’s compliant; and the regulators are on board." Coinbase claims to be working on all three points, which it hopes will then drive the influx of institutional money.
Source: Medium
iExec, a cloud marketplace for computing power, is organizing three “Workerdrops,” inviting users to connect to a public worker pool to earn RLC tokens. The first two Workerdrops will not require any staking of the RLC token to participate, but the third will. The first drop begins on July 20th, 2018. For details on how to participate, see the source link above.
We at Hardly Difficult are first and foremost content creators, and we’re excited today to offer a new way for the community to help define that content. We’ve launched a dapp called Review This Please, an easy way to support the content you’d like to see.
RTP is a simple dapp that allows you to request and contribute to content ideas you’d like to see us produce.
Pretty much anything. We’re a team of varied interests and skills. We’ll consider requests including, but certainly not limited to:
We produce both video and written content.
If you have a request for content, you pay a small amount - at the time of this writing, .02 ETH (~$10) - and submit your idea through the dapp. We currently support both Metamask and Ledger for payment. You can also add support for existing suggestions on the site, making this a truly community-driven initiative.
All funds support content creation.
Funding is held in escrow by the smart contract. You are free to have your contributions refunded at any time before we accept or decline the request.
If we accept your request, the funding is transferred to us. If we decline it, it goes right back to you.
Disclaimer: This is not an shilling service! If you'd like us to review your ICO, we'll be happy to take a look, but we will not promise a positive review.
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