Last week Panasonic announced a project to explore using the DCJPY digital currency for tourist passes. DCJPY is the tokenized deposit initiative backed by Japan’s largest firms, which plans to launch in mid 2024. The core of the experiment will involve sightseeing passes that allow tourists unlimited travel on trains and buses for a fixed fee, plus discounts at stores, restaurants and other recreation destinations. The goal is to divide the proceeds of the tourist’s payment using smart contracts. Other project participants will include DeCurret, the company behind DCJPY; au Financial, a subsidiary of KDDI Telecom (a top 20 Japanese company by market cap); IT consultancy TIS;…
Author: Tokenized Toast Club
MOBI, the mobility web3 consortium, has completed the first phase of the minimum viable product (MVP) for its global battery passport. This involved nine members including DENSO, Honda, Mazda, and Nissan exchanging battery identity and data using open standards. Stepping back, if batteries are to achieve the hoped for environmental impact, how they’re manufactured and recycled is a critical part of the process. Hence the need to keep track of battery lifecycles as mandated in the US and Europe. Digital credentials can include the battery’s composition, status and history. What MOBI is trying to sidestep is the need for costly one off…
The International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA) recently published a report exploring EU consortia and global trends in industrial blockchains. It’s a broad report that looks at both public consortia such as Europe’s EBSI/Europeum and private consortia across several industry sectors. Blockchain has been embraced far more in some sectors than in others. It’s strong in mobility, energy and circularity. The surprising area where DLT appears to have less traction is supply chain and digital product passports. However, this is at the level of consortia. In many cases, individual companies are making strong headway. One observation we’d add is that there are a lot of European…
Earlier this week, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) announced plans to integrate digital currencies with its settlement system, starting with the digital renminbi, China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC). IATA is the global airline trade association representing 330 airlines. “China is one of the most advanced countries in the world in the adoption of digital currency. Recognizing the trend, IATA’s China Airline Committee requested for the digital Renminbi to be included in the BSP,” said Muhammad Albakri, IATA’s SVP for Financial Settlement and Distribution Services. “This is an important development and IATA will accommodate the digital Renminbi by year-end.” The…
Korea’s Financial Services Commission (FSC) has designated Kyobo Life as a trust business for the purposes of issuance of security tokens to finance aircraft engines. It aims to fractionalize the cost of acquiring aircraft engines. The company will act as the trustee responsible for the real world assets (RWA), in this case the aircraft engine, and will issue trust beneficiary certificates. Galaxia Money Tree will then tokenize these certificates on its tokenization platform as part of a security token offering (STO). Hence, instead of aircraft engine financing that is syndicated to a few institutional investors, there will be small investments by private…
On Friday the Bybit cryptocurrency exchange suffered a hack in which a transaction for a cold wallet was intercepted, rerouting $1.4 billion in funds to hackers. Today Chainalysis, which is a Bybit partner, confirmed that the hack included a phishing attack. Plus, crypto custody tech firm Galaxy GK8 explored how it worked and how to prevent this sort of attack. Crypto sleuth ZachXBT quickly named North Korea’s Lazarus Group as the culprit because funds were mixed with those from previous hacks. Chainalysis confirmed this today. According to Chainalysis, the initial compromise was via social engineering. “The hackers gained access to Bybit’s user interface by executing…
It has been two weeks since Bybit was hacked to the tune of $1.4 billion by North Korea’s TraderTraitor. Five days later, it was confirmed that the hackers compromised a SAFE Wallet developer, allowing them to alter the wallet’s user interface source code. Now SAFE has released its own preliminary investigation, reconfirming that the wallet smart contract was never compromised, but the user interface was. SAFE hired Mandiant, the security firm acquired three years ago by Google Cloud for $5.4 billion. The wallet organization also outlined a number of steps it’s taking to shore up security, with Mandiant’s help. As previously noted, the hackers injected…
Siemens Cre8Ventures announced a partnership with the Minima blockchain for its digital twin marketplace. Minima is a so-called embedded blockchain that supports a full node running on an IoT device. Cre8Ventures is the Electronic Design Automation division of the German giant. Siemens sees blockchain as enabling security for the robotics, automotive, energy, and healthcare equipment industries. The Cre8Ventures Digital Twin Marketplace sounds rather like an incubation initiative, although Siemens doesn’t describe it like that. It enables large companies in the mentioned industries to test and validate new technologies in a low risk manner. In addition to helping Minima to develop solutions to meet certain…
Blockdaemon, the blockchain infrastructure firm backed by Citi, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, has bought expand.network, its fifth acquisition. Expand provides a unified API to access all sorts of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, including a wide range of decentralized exchanges (DEXs) as well as staking and lending protocols. Expand.network was incubated by Cumberland Labs, which was co-founded by DRW. Meanwhile, Blockdaemon provides blockchain node infrastructure, staking and MPC wallet solutions to more than 400 institutions. The expand.network APIs are not purely transactional. They also include pre trade DeFi support such as analytics for liquidity pools and pricing data, and transaction reconciliation post…
Hashgraph (formerly Swirlds Labs), the founder of the Hedera Hashgraph distributed ledger, is expecting to launch a permissioned DLT, HashSphere, in Q3. One of the current beta testers is Australia Payments Plus, which operates key Australian payment infrastructures and is a long standing governing council member of Hedera. The DLT company sees a gap with the current permissionless and permissioned offerings. On the one hand, the challenge with permissionless chains for institutions is the need to repeat KYC and compliance steps that their clients have already done internally. Additionally, institutions want greater privacy and control. At the same time, many are…