Notes from the Founding President and BSV Update: October 2020
Hello to our global Bitcoin Association society!
After a whirlwind few months working to pull together the CoinGeek Live spectacular, I’m now back home catching up on sleep and enjoying the benefit of some time to reflect on what was one of our most challenging yet rewarding conferences to date.
For those that have never had the experience of seeing the innerworkings and preparations that go putting into a major conference together, it’s difficult to quantify just how much work and effort go in. The three days on stage – or rather, on screen – represent months of hard work by the events, marketing and media teams from Coin Geek, Ayre Media and Bitcoin Association. Nearly 100 speakers from just about every time zone on earth, all choreographed and broadcast live from a pair of studios and digital stages in New York and London – another first for all of us – is no mean feat! From my vantage point, it was a truly impressive production – one that I’m immensely proud to have been a part of.
With so much Bitcoin SV news to emerge from the conference, this month’s BSV Update has a decidedly CoinGeek Live feel! In this update, we look at:
- Steve Shadders’ presentation about 3 key Bitcoin SV infrastructure releases to enable Satoshi’s peer-to-peer vision for Bitcoin
- nChain leads $5.4M investment round in GeoSpock
- The Bayesian Group acquires Money Button
- An introduction to XR with Transmira/Omniscape
- Taking the Internet of Things on-chain
- And, much much more.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to remind everyone of the generous offer made to conference attendees by Blockchain Intelligence Group. BIG is now extending the offer period for Bitcoin Association members and affiliates. Until October 17, you can register for BIG’s 8-hour online Cryptocurrency Investigator Certification Course and receive a 60% discount by using code BSV60. With the course normally priced at $999, that’s a saving of almost a USD $600. Originally meant for U.S. law enforcement officers, the course has 5 modules and if you pass the final exam, you earn the credential of Certified Cryptocurrency Investigator from Blockchain Intelligence Group. To learn more about the programme and register, visit cryptoinvestigatortraining.com.
Finally, I’d like to extend my thanks and congratulations to all of the CoinGeek team for putting on what I think is the most impressive iteration of the conference to date. Transitioning from what is an always incredible in-person event to an entirely online offering was always going to be a tough proposition – particularly in what is now a rather crowded digital conference space – but the team found a way to not only deliver three incredible days, but create an experience that showcased the very best of our community while retaining the trademark CoinGeek feel. While I certainly hope that the next edition will see us back to our in-person best, I think we can all agree that CoinGeek Live was a spectacle none of us will soon forget.
As always, stay safe and believe in Satoshi Vision.
Jimmy Nguyen
Founding President
Bitcoin Association
3 key Bitcoin SV infrastructure releases to enable Satoshi’s peer-to-peer vision for Bitcoin
As has become tradition at CoinGeek conferences, nChain CTO and Technical Director of the Bitcoin SV Node (now Infrastructure) team, Steve Shadders, led off proceedings with a technical update for the Bitcoin SV network. In this edition, Shadders unveiled a trifecta of product releases which together finally realise Satoshi’s vision for peer-to-peer transactions: Bitcoin SV Node software v1.0.6; SPV Channels v1.0.0; and mAPI v1.2. Together, the three updates enable peer to peer transactions and Simplified Payment Verification as described in Satoshi’s white paper– essential elements for the Bitcoin network to massively scale. Read more about the update in CoinGeek coverage and in Steve Shadders’ blog post.Each of the three releases remains in beta, but are available via links on bitcoinsv.io (here) for developers and transaction processors (miners) to test immediately.
nChain leads $5.4M investment round in GeoSpock
Leading enterprise blockchain research and development firm, nChain, announced that they had closed a major investment in Cambridge-based extreme-scale data company GeoSpock. nChain led the $5.4M Series A investment round and is expected to work with GeoSpock on the transformation of data generated by the physical world, into actionable and understandable insights for decision-makers across a number of industries. Reflecting the wide impact of GeoSpock’s technology, other participants in the round included Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC) and leading technology investors in Asia – Global Brain and NTT DOCOMO.
In his CoinGeek presentation, GeoSpock CEO Richard Baker detailed the scale of data being produced in the physical world – and that taking the next step requires a blockchain platform that scales, prompting the tie-up with nChain and Bitcoin SV.
The Bayesian Group acquires Money Button
In another major business story to emerge from CoinGeek Live, fintech conglomerate The Bayesian Group announced that it completed an acquisition of leading Bitcoin SV wallet, Money Button. The move brings a key infrastructure provider from the Bitcoin SV ecosystem into the Bayesian family of businesses, with Money Button CEO Ryan X. Charles set to join The Bayesian Group as Head of Engineering for the Fabriik Smart Wallet.
An introduction to XR with Transmira (Omniscape platform)
Experiential reality (XR) powered by Bitcoin SV made its public debut at CoinGeek Live with the introduction of Omniscape, an XR platform that monetises augmented reality (AR) for brands, businesses, and content creators by using location and blockchain-based features. The platform is provided by American XR company Transmira. Conference attendees were able to use a CoinGeek Conference and AR mobile app to engage with sponsors in all-new ways, including to collect virtual items that were tokens representing BSV coins. Audience voting for the 3rd Bitcoin SV Hackathon also took place through the mobile app. Transmira’s CEO Robert Rice spoke about how his company also seeks to develop projects in spatial computing and interactive visualization in AR and VR driven by data from IoT devices.
kompany takes RegTech on-chain
European RegTech business kompany made waves at CoinGeek Live with the first discussions of how their on-chain compliance platform, built to bring real-time KYC and KYB insights to businesses around the world, will use the Bitcoin SV blockchain. Its suite of compliance products will begin using the auditability and immutability of the Bitcoin SV blockchain to record history of KYC/KYB information gathering, and ultimately tokenize KYC/KYB information and create a marketplace for trading such information.
Fabriik Qualified Custody
TrustChains CEO Karen Wendel revealed during the conference that her company had partnered with The Bayesian Group to establish Fabriik Qualified Custody, a new service that will enable users to create digital forms of illiquid real-world assets kept in custody, and enable safe trading of such formerly illiquid assets through tokenization. The platform will open up the pathway for the use and creation of new liquidity for assets, backed by transparency, auditability, and immutability, all through the power of the Bitcoin SV blockchain.
Veridat
Following on from the running theme of trust that emerged during CoinGeek Live, neuroscientist Dr. Robert Huber of Juvatech and Phillip Runyan of Veridat, discussed how they were using the Bitcoin SV blockchain in an effort to restore trust in the pharmaceutical industry and other fields of clinical research. Using the immutability and audibility of the Bitcoin SV blockchain, Veridat’s flagship product Bench records and logs clinical research data, providing a method by which data can be independently verified in its totality and revealing when data has been changed.
Tokenized
James Belding, Founder and CEO of Tokenized, a platform for creating tokens and smart contracts on the Bitcoin SV blockchain, gave the first demonstration of its smart contract platform – soon to be available in closed beta. The Tokenized smart contact platform is designed to be an intuitive experience, with a straightforward interface for businesses to easily create a variety of different tokens and smart contracts.
Internet of Things
One session at CoinGeek Live which provided an array of announcements was the Internet of Things & Big Data session, featuring an all-Australian cast of representatives from Weather SV & Metastreme, Predict Ecology, and Elas Digital.
Paul Chiari, Founder of both Weather SV and the Metastreme high throughput wallet, revealed that Metastreme had been partnering with several different businesses – including a blockchain-based voting system in Australia – to test processing of large streams of data to the Bitcoin SV blockchain.
One of those Metastreme projects is Predict Ecology. Daniel Keane from Predict Ecology detailed his company’s data-driven efforts with the Bitcoin SV blockchain, discussing a project with Cairns City Council, which involves tokenizing individual trees in the city to track their condition (for example, with respect to carbon dioxide emission).
Brendan Lee, Founder of Elas Digital, announced that his company had acquired Probatus, the business behind Bitcoin SV projects Baemail and ProDesk. He also unveiled a suite of projects that combine big data and the Bitcoin SV blockchain, including Node RED – a control system management tool that handles data from Internet of Things devices; Moovement – a food provenance system used to track beef products from farm to plate; as well as a new project together with Cairns City Council for trading carbon credits. All of those projects work with Elas Digital tokens built on Bitcoin SV.
HandCash & Centi
Alex Agut, CEO of HandCash, announced that the HandCash Connect SDK will be made public later this month. The Connect SDK provides developers with a fast and flexible way of adding Bitcoin capabilities into their apps via a toolkit the contains the six basic components needed to create a Bitcoin app – instant payments, encryption, identity & login, promised payments, blockchain data, and ownership.
The news capped off a busy month of September for the Spanish company: HandCash had already announced that it was going keyless (designing a new system that no longer requires users to write down “seed words” that are commonly used to back-up Bitcoin wallets), as well as the news that it had partnered with Swiss retail payment infrastructure provider Centi, to make it easy for customers to make in-store payments with BSV to merchants.
Zumo
Another CoinGeek Live announcement came from UK smart payments company Zumo, who announced that they are adding support BSV integration to the company’s ZumoKit software development kit for digital currency/fiat wallet architecture.
Maxthon and NBdomain
Jeff Chen, founder and CEO of Maxthon and NBdomain, gave a speech at the top of CoinGeek Live’s second day. Speaking from Singapore, he walked the virtual audience through two of his companies, NBdomain, a blockchain-based domain registration system, and Maxthon, which has developed the world’s first browser integrated with the Bitcoin SV blockchain.
Chen then made two announcements. First, he announced the world’s first one-character top-level domain: .b – ‘there’s much love in B: it’s blockchain, it’s bitcoin, it’s BSV’. He also announced when sunrise registrations for .b domains were to begin: right after his presentation. Trademark owners can reserve their .b NBdomain at https://app.nbdomain.com.
TonicPow
TonicPow was present at this latest CoinGeek conference – and not for the first time, having been begun life as the second-place winner at the first Bitcoin SV Hackathon finals held at CoinGeek Toronto in May 2019. TonicPow connects digital advertisers and promoters to enable a more curated experience and better ROI for advertisers.
CEO Luke Rohenaz participated in a panel about Re-Inventing the Internet and gave an update on recent and upcoming additions to the TonicPow platform. Of particular note, he announced that TonicPow users will be able to search the platform for active campaigns. You will also be able to generate and extract widgets from the TonicPow platform, which can be shared elsewhere and generate revenue for the sharer. He also offered a look at TonicPow’s new dashboard, which provides detailed reporting and allows users to manage their campaigns, their API keys, and most importantly, link with 3rd party apps. This allows users to set criteria on which promoters they want to connect with based on the apps they have linked to their account.
Kronoverse/CryptoFights
Blockchain-based gaming company Kronoverse was also on hand to discuss the future of gaming solutions enabled by Bitcoin SV’s scalability, with CEO Adam Kling saying that he is excited about the new economies that it will enable: real-economies within games and the ability to for gamers to monetise their contributions as players, or vastly different games operating within the same shared space built on the blockchain.
He also discussed the open beta phase of their flagship competitive game, CryptoFights, and the next step is the launch of their single-player mode, which is expected next month. During his talk, Kling explained the game’s move from Ethereum to Bitcoin SV, as well as moving the game logic entirely on-chain, meaning that everything that occurs within a battle is transparent and auditable.
BitBoss
Matt Dickson, CEO of American gaming technology company BitBoss, was a panelist on the third day of CoinGeek Live, discussing new details about his company’s blockchain-based gaming offerings built on Bitcoin SV. Dickson discussed Bridge, a cashless casino system that uses a physical device connecting to physical slot machines and connecting to casino back-end systems to facilitate digital payment and play using a Bitcoin SV mobile wallet. BitBoss also detailed the progress being made across their additional suite of digital game offerings, which can be white-labeled by international game operators.
