As more and more data is stored online, hacks and data breaches are becoming a daily occurrence. It is estimated that as many as 5,000,000 data records are hacked and stolen every day. Even large corporations with expensive cybersecurity solutions, like Deloitte and Uber, are not immune. Hackers are becoming more and more adept at stealing data which can then be sold off to competitors or held for ransom – at a huge cost to the owner.

In order to stay one step ahead of the hackers, it is pertinent that companies today employ the most advanced technologies currently available to guarantee data security at each and every step.

The Cryptyk Solution

Cryptyk is currently one of the most advanced and secure cloud storage solutions for enterprise security because it approaches the problem of data theft from a unique angle.

Rather than use common cybersecurity methods that hackers already know their way around, Cryptyk instead ensures that any data that is stolen is rendered completely useless. It achieves this through the age-old technique of splitting an object into several pieces and storing them separately so that no one piece is of any use on its own. By putting a modern spin on this procedure and with the use of some of today’s most advanced technologies, Cryptyk has created a ground-breaking data storage concept.

Cryptyk uses an encrypted and decentralized multi-vendor cloud storage system for data integrity combined with blockchain technology for an auditable and incorruptible record of access. The two processes are individually referred to as Vault and Sentry.

The Methodology Explained

When uploading data to the Cryptyk platform, a customer’s files are split into five separate pieces, or ‘shards’, which are then encrypted and stored on the servers of five independent datacentres around the world. This both removes the possibility of any single point of failure and makes any single piece of data useless. Cryptyk only uses provenly secure data storage companies, such as Google and Amazon, and creates multiple shared backups of each shard at various sites to ensure data is available 24/7 – even in the unlikely event of one provider going down.

To track and record the transactions of each and every file and shard, Cryptyk logs everything on an incorruptible blockchain ledger. This ensures no record can ever be fraudulently altered and is secure against both internal and external manipulation. Any illicit attempt to access a file will be recorded and made available so that both Cryptyk and the customer can view and track the transactions.

Not only is system highly secure, but it is also much faster than any other blockchain-based system that is currently available and costs less than half that of traditional cybersecurity solutions.

A Data Security Ecosystem

Above and beyond an enterprise cloud data storage solution, Cryptyk has also developed an open source cybersecurity economy. Utilizing the ERC-20 token technology of the Ethereum blockchain, Cryptyk has created its own cryptocurrency asset, CTK. This provides an avenue for security vendors, software developers, and cryptocurrency investors to get involved with ongoing developments of the Cryptyk project.

Head over to the Cryptyk Token Sale to take part: https://www.cryptyk.io/

Cryptyk is an official IBM Embedded Solutions Partner for blockchain and cloud services and the only blockchain company to be named in the Top 10 Enterprise Security Startups for 2018

Technical innovation is transforming industries. The development of the internet has completely changed the business models of media, entertainment and shopping, to give just a few examples. However, so far banks have remained relatively untouched by the information revolution. A new generation of innovative fintech companies could be about to change that.

Of particular importance is the emergence of blockchain technology. Blockchain offers security and transparency, both essential to any financial institution. New companies like Swiss firm Mt Pelerin are pointing to a new way of managing money.

Arnaud Salomon, the Founder and CEO or Mt Pelerin, explains that the power of the internet “has yet to translate into a new paradigm in the world of banking.” As the industry is “protected by heavy regulations”, the sector has “remained until now a walled garden hermetic to disruption.” Salomon aims to “build the bridge between our new digital society and the ageing banking industry, through a strong vision of transparence, performance and freedom.”

Despite the enormous advances in processing and sharing information, banks have clung to a high fee model. They have also continued to use customer funds on risky investments, further eroding customer confidence.

If the current model does not work for the majority of customers, how has it managed to survive so long? Banking is a highly regulated industry with extremely high barriers to entry: innovative competitors have been kept out of the market.

Blockchain revolution

Fortunately for consumers, new models are finally becoming available as a new generation of fintech companies challenge both the dominance of the big banks, and assumptions about how a bank should function.

Mt Pelerin aims to empower its customers by giving them control over their own funds as well as access to investment opportunities which are normally only available to investment banks and large corporations.

Strikingly, all customer funds will be held in reserve. Mt Pelerin will not lend out its customers’ deposits on risky investments. Indeed, it will not touch its customers money at all.

Instead Mt Pelerin will generate profits by creating product marketplaces which aggregate offers from many different providers. Not only will this offer customers greater choice, but the increased competition should lead to considerably lower charges to customers. Mt Pelerin will charge a small fee on each transaction, thus ensuring its continued survival.

This marketplace model is also extended to customers, who will be able to offer or request services. An example of this might be the loan marketplace, where a customer could suggest a loan deal at certain conditions, and another customer, if they accept those conditions, could lend the money.

This is made possible by the use of blockchain technology. All deposits and assets on the Mt Pelerin platform will be tokenized, which makes them easy to transfer, divide and manage. Due to the tokenization of assets, customers will have access to asset classes which are currently out of their reach.

The new technology also allows for innovative ways to create the marketplaces. They will be built as open platforms, onto which micro-services can be added from third parties. This open banking model is designed to benefit all users and foster innovation.

Mt Pelerin customers will be able to access basic services for free and will receive a multi-currency bank account and debit card. The company aims to receive all relevant Swiss banking licenses in late 2019.

Mt Pelerin is currently conducting a public sale of its tokenized share, the MPS token. Each MPS token is equivalent to one share in Mt Pelerin Group SA.

Many have said that knowledge is the oil of the 21st century, a vital commodity powering every industry. However, the economy has not yet reorganised around this fact. There are fundamental market failures preventing useful knowledge from getting to the people who need it most.

The research and development (R&D) market has been estimated to be worth $1.9 trillion worldwide. Only 7% of this knowledge makes its way to the business world. This is a hugely inefficient market which is ripe for disruption. Under the current system it is particularly difficult for smaller players to access and purchase small amounts of knowledge, for instance solutions which could be implemented quickly, if only the right expert could be found.

To extend the oil analogy, it is as if cars have no fuel, while pipelines pour oil into the sea.

Connecty

French ICO Connecty has identified this huge market opportunity. It has developed a blockchain platform focused on the Knowledge Economy, and connecting what it calls “the world of knowledge”, the scientists, researchers and experts, with the innovative world, companies that can use that knowledge to create new goods and services.

Connecty plans to make the interchange between those worlds much faster and more efficient.

The platform has three main features. First, an artificial intelligence engine which can translate between everyday and technical language. The buyers, the businesses, will be able to speak their non-technical language, while the experts can stay in the language of their expertise.

Second, a large pool of experts and scientists in fields as diverse as mathematics, economics, psychology and the physical sciences. These will provide the knowledge base for businesses to consult.  

Third, a blockchain-based processing and transaction system. Connecty have created the ERC20-compatible CTY token for use within the ecosystem, thereby keeping transactions secure, decentralized and cheap. CTY tokens will be used to buy knowledge from specialists in the field, as well as goods and services from the Connecty knowledge store. They can easily be converted into fiat, or alternatively used to finance further research.

Built on the Stellar blockchain, CTY tokens also allow for the implementation of smart contracts, automating various processes and adding other functionality such as trust-building and reputation management features.

With the goal of building a circular knowledge economy of 1 million users, the Connecty platform enables researchers and experts to be rewarded for their knowledge, while businesses will gain valuable information which will expand their capacity to innovate. Not only that, but consumers will benefit from better goods and services. If Connecty gets it right, everyone wins.

******

The Connecty pre-ICO is currently underway, with CTY tokens available at a 30% bonus. The next sale period will be during the first quarter of 2019, timed to coincide with the release of the beta version of the Connecty platform.

At Platio we are creating a banking solution for businesses that need to seamlessly and securely manage both crypto and traditional currencies. To do this we need blockchain technology which is secure, fast and reliable.

Based in London, Platio has been acquiring licensing which now spans to over 32 countries. On this regulatory foundation Platio is building the next generation of banking and financial services with the transparency and immutable trust that blockchain technology offers.

Finding the right blockchain technology

As you can imagine, a system of this scope and mission-critical gravity requires a blockchain infrastructure that can reliably and consistently meet the demand. Like many other blockchain-based ventures, the first solution we considered was Ethereum.

Ethereum capitalized on it’s first-mover-advantage in the dApp (decentralized application) space extremely well. Its brilliant, programmable extension of the blockchain technology pioneered by Bitcoin opened up a whole new world of possibilities.

In assessing the feasibility of Ethereum for Platio’s complex and vast use-case it became apparent very quickly that as innovative and widely adopted as it is, Ethereum simply does not have the transactional throughput or scalability that high-usage enterprise applications require.

Ethereum throughput is only 15 transactions per second. Transaction finality is at around 6 minutes which is very high latency.

Usage fees (Gas costs) are high and roughly 90% of the transactions on the Ethereum platform come from ICOs and payments – not dApps, which does not not bode well for a platform built specifically for dApps. These factors and more make Ethereum a less than optimal choose for building a financial ecosystem.

After careful analysis of other blockchain platforms across several criteria, Platio has adopted EOS as the underlying infrastructure for its smart banking ecosystem.

The case for EOS

Platio Chief Architect Charles Voltron explained why. “Ethereum has been a great platform for ICOs,” he said, “and can just about handle the trading of digital cats (Cryptokitties). But if you are looking to build real world, mission critical applications on the blockchain, EOS is the obvious choice for us”.

EOS is the brainchild of Dan Larimer, who has been around crypto long enough to have argued online with Satoshi Nakamoto over Bitcoin’s transaction processing speed. Dan went on to create the world’s first decentralized exchange (Bitshares) as well as a decentralized social media platform (Steemit) with an entirely new blockchain concept called Graphene.

Graphene’s innovative consensus mechanism known as DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake) has demonstrated 10-100k transactions per second in stress testing. The stated goal of EOS is to achieve 1 million transactions per second.

The EOS mainnet, launched in June of 2018, is achieving roughly 1200 transactions per second with very low latency. This is the kind of performance required by banking grade software such as the Platio ecosystem.

In choosing EOS, Platio is in good company. Bitfinex, ranked as one of the world’s top 5 cryptocurrency exchanges by volume, has announced plans to build the next version of its exchange on EOS.

The key to EOS’s performance is the DPoS consensus mechanism which, unlike Ethereum and Bitcoin, does not include every node on the network to validate transactions. Instead EOS token holders elect 21 “witness” nodes, incentivized by EOS token payments, to handle validation. This significantly reduces the time and processing needed to validate a transaction.

Another advantage of the EOS platform is that, unlike Ethereum, it allows for commission free transactions. This functionality allows Platio to create commission free products like Internal Transfers.

Development on EOS is also less cumbersome than with the Ethereum programming platform “Solidity”.

EOS is extensible to any programming language (currently available for C++ and Rust), so developers can bring their hard-earned experience in the language of their choice to build on EOS, rather than have to learn an entirely new language.

This developer-friendly approach also includes the ability to freeze malfunctioning applications which have already been deployed to the EOS blockchain, and fix bugs much more easily than with Ethereum’s Solidity.

Moreover, Platio Blockchain will be connected with the EOS Mainnet as a Sidechain, allowing the PGAS token to be used on both the Platio Blockchain and the EOS Mainnet. From a business point of view this makes sense as we can keep critical data both immutable, and highly available.

Due to the Turing completeness all the tokenised assets (crypto, fiat and stocks) we can use smart contracts to provide game-changing functionality, such as our our Smart Escrow and Asset Guard products, with complete transparency.

EOS has an active and growing developer community and Block.One, the company behind EOS, raised $4.2 Billion in a public crowdsale, making EOS the most capitalized blockchain project to date.  

With EOS’s proven technical innovation, massive funding and zealous developer community, Platio’s revolutionary smart banking ecosystem moves from the realm of possibility to an exciting opportunity. Together we will empower our users to take advantage of the best of both crypto and mainstream finance, increasing confidence in crypto as an asset and driving its global adoption.

To learn more about these and other exciting features of the Platio ecosystem please visit platio.io.

One of the big advantages of blockchain-based applications is the opportunity they offer for decentralization. Online gambling is just one of the industries facing a revolution in the way it functions, thanks to the decentralizing properties of blockchain technology.

Online gambling is dominated by large companies, each of which holds the personal data of millions of users. This creates huge “honeypot” targets for hackers. These big companies are also vulnerable to changes in government regulation, or public pressure. Account holders have found their funds frozen or winnings not paid out due to policy changes.

The centralized model also means that gambling platforms must maintain large reserves to pay winnings, as well as charge extra fees for third party payment processing. These costs are all passed on to the customer.

Canadian betting app Mevu has already solved many of these issues. Powered by blockchain, its users are able to bet directly with each other, rather than against “the house”. Both parties to a bet will have their funds held in escrow. Once the bet has been settled the funds will be transferred directly to the winner.

Decentralizing Truth

In settling the bet, Mevu has come up with another innovation: “decentralizing truth” through its Oracles.  As co-founder and technical lead Tim McCulloch says, “we don’t use any third party APIs to retrieve information as to the results of the bets on our platform.” Instead of relying on an external (and centralized) system to determine truth, Mevu uses “Oracles”.

What’s MEVU? from meVu.bet on Vimeo.

McCulloch describes Oracles as “users that hold our token and decide to stake some of it on our platform to determine who actually won the bet.” The information from these Oracles is used by Mevu to settle any disputes over who won each bet. Oracles who are “found to be against the consensus of the correct result will have to forfeit half of their stake to the oracles who were with consensus.” In this way all parties are incentivized to correctly report the result.

For McCulloch and the Mevu team, this decentralizing of truth follows from the “philosophy of unstoppable apps that actually founded Ethereum.” As well as the MVU token, users will also be able to bet in ETH, the world’s second most widely adopted token, thus improving volume and liquidity across the platform.

The benefits of cryptocurrencies are clear. They create a new kind of money which is free from government manipulation. They offer a way for people to store wealth in their heads by memorising their seed phrases. Perhaps most importantly, they let people transfer value across borders quickly and cheaply by enabling sender and receiver to interact with each other directly, without having to rely on middlemen.

However, many of the distinctive features of cryptocurrencies are actually holding back their use by the mainstream. Crypto markets are highly volatile, making all but the most risk-friendly reluctant to use them as a store of wealth.

Further risks are created by cryptocurrencies’ decentralized peer-to-peer nature. People are worried about losing private keys, as if they do, they lose all their assets. There is no way to prove your identity and restore your funds. 4 million Bitcoin, worth 26 billion dollars, have been lost this way, and they’ll never be recovered.

There are also problems with using cryptocurrency for commercial transactions. Transferring funds quickly and directly between buyer and seller means that there is less incentive for the seller to deliver on its promises. It can easily accept the payment and not provide the good or service.

Sellers may also be wary to accept cryptocurrency due to price volatility. Video game platform Steam stopped accepting Bitcoin in December as its value was moving so quickly that by the time transactions had settled, payments were no longer worth the same as the prices of the products sold.

Platio’s Smart Banking Ecosystem

Platio, a London headquartered fintech firm, is developing its Smart Banking Ecosystem to address these very issues and so solve the crypto world’s main challenges.

Platio CEO Dima Okhrimchuk says that his team believes that, “all financial assets will be tokenized and run on Blockchain” and that this will amount to “a revolution which will completely transform the international financial system.”

However, for that to happen, people need to be able to trust cryptocurrency. Platio sees “a great opportunity in this transition” and is building “application for personal users and businesses to make the move into crypto as smooth and legitimate as it can be.”

Platio allows users to manage their fiat, cryptocurrency and stock assets from within a single platform. Powered by EOS blockchain technology, it hopes to “increase confidence in crypto as an asset and drive its global adoption.”

Perhaps its most important innovations are its Smart Escrow and Asset Guard products.

Smart Escrow will allow buyers and sellers to confidently transact with each other in cryptocurrency, particularly on high value deals. This smart contract powered product will hold the buyer’s funds in escrow until both parties are satisfied that the deal has been completed. Should any dispute arise, Platio will step in to arbitrate.

Platio’s merchant services will also allow sellers to receive payment in fiat, even if the buyer has paid in cryptocurrency, thus freeing sellers from unwanted exposure to crypto market volatility.

Asset Guard also offers protection from volatility. Platio customers will be able to set up their accounts to make automatic transactions should fiat, stock or crypto markets behave in certain predefined ways. As Okhrimchuk says, “even in the notoriously unpredictable crypto markets, our customers can relax, knowing their funds are being looked after.”

The Asset Guard product will also provide an ingenious solution to the problem of lost private keys. If users do not interact with their accounts for a selected period of time, Platio will transfer their assets, whether stocks, crypto or fiat, to a previously nominated account in either cryptocurrency or fiat. In this way users can be certain that they will not lose access to their funds.

It certainly seems that Platio’s message is landing. This week it was named as a joint winner of the ICO pitch award at the World Blockchain Forum in London.

Congratulations to our winning ICO’s who split a huge $150,000 from @victorysquaretechnologies: @alphanetworkstv , Platio and @cognida Amazing work and congratulations! pic.twitter.com/RYdXycQ4pm

— Keynote (@keynote_ae) September 5, 2018

If Platio can achieve its goals then we may finally have the “revolution” in finance that we’ve been waiting for.  

Platio’s is currently conducting its private pre-sale. The public sale of its PGAS token will begin on the 22nd October.

Online betting has become one of the internet’s big success stories. Any stigma associated with gambling has completely evaporated and it is now a huge mainstream market, predicted to grow to $60 billion per year by 2020.

It should therefore come as no surprise that ICOs have sprung up hoping to deliver the next evolution in the industry: decentralized online gambling platforms.

By harnessing blockchain technology it is possible to create peer-to-peer bets. Rather than going through a centralized system which controls your funds, and the paying out of those funds, a decentralized platform would enable you to place a bet directly with another individual, anywhere in the world. Once the bet was completed, funds would be transferred directly and instantly from the loser to the winner, with no intermediaries.

However, as discovered by Augur, one of the first decentralized platforms to be launched, there are still significant problems with the model.

The problems with decentralized gambling

The first issue is that by allowing people to create their own betting markets, you allow them to put money on things which may be morally suspect. Within days of Augur going live there were multiple “assassination markets” up and running. These are prediction markets where people can lay bets on the life chances of third parties.

Many have argued that allowing a mechanism to profit by another’s death makes that death more likely. A betting market around a football game should not affect the result, but a market around a death may precipitate that death.

Augur says that any such bet would not pay out winnings as it would be marked as unethical. However, by that point it may be too late, either for the figure in the assassination market, or for the platform to avoid the attention from legal authorities that such a market would inevitably bring.

Another issue faced by potential customers of Augur, and other similar applications, is the requirement to run an Ethereum node to use the service, entailing a download of the entire Ethereum blockchain. For the average user, even the relatively tech-savvy, this may prove to be too great a barrier to entry, which means fewer users, and less liquid betting markets.

Everyone expects decentralised gambling to be huge, but someone needs to figure a way around these problems.

Mevu

Canadian gambling platform Mevu believes it found a way forward for the industry.

When it comes to the ethics of allowing user-created bets, Mevu says that it will ensure that any unsavoury markets are not promoted within the platform. There are also blocks on specific keywords which will be prohibited from use.

As for accessibility, MEVU does not require access to an Ethereum node. Instead users only need ETH and the ability to send it to a smart contract address.

This functional approach particularly suits the gambling demographic that Mevu are targeting: specifically males between 18 and 34. Such an audience has grown up with social media and web interactivity. They want their platforms interactive, and easily accessible. Realising this, Mevu has embedded social functionality throughout the user experience, including leaderboards and inter-user chat,  “which allow banter and more competition.”

According to ESPN the average online gambler is “a 30-year-old  married guy living  in the suburbs, with  a household income of $74,000  a year.” If Mevu have found a way to engage this customer then we may finally be able to say that decentralized betting has arrived.

What does it mean for your data to be safe? Perhaps more importantly, what does it mean for you to have “data sovereignty”, or complete ownership of your data?

For data sovereignty to be achieved you must have full access to your data at all times. It must be safe from hackers and viruses. It must be imperishable and free from any threat of loss. It must also be private. If other people or agencies have access to your data, then it is not under your sovereignty.

Decentralized cloud security platform Cryptyk describes it as, “when you have complete ownership of your own information and data, free from unwanted access by external actors or the danger of erasure or loss.” You must be able to access your data at any time, from any location, without fear of it being compromised or lost.

If such a situation is appealing to individuals, it is critical for businesses, particularly those which deal with highly sensitive and confidential data, such as finance, health and security services.

Though cloud storage was developed as a way to safely backup a user’s documents, it has become the only viable way to ensure full access to files without fear of their loss through hardware failure or damage. Any solution to the data sovereignty issue will involve cloud storage; the problem is that the current generation of providers are neither secure nor reliable enough to fit the needs of users, particularly enterprise clients.

The problem with cloud storage

Cloud storage providers must protect their clients’ data from both viruses and hackers. The centralized nature of current solutions means that viruses may spread to infect whole platforms. Furthermore, they present huge “honeypot” targets for determined hackers, leading to massive data breaches such as the Equifax and Netflix hacks.

Companies which store user data in the cloud must also ensure uptime of their servers. Sites hosted on the cloud are still vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) when thousands of infected devices attack a site together. This sudden increase in traffic prevents legitimate users from accessing the site. Hardware may also fail. A human error caused Amazon Web Service’s S3 system to go down for 4 hours in 2017, costing $150 million dollars in lost revenue for websites such as Netflix and Slack.

Furthermore there is the issue of trust. Currently we trust providers like Google, Amazon and Dropbox to look after our data and we assume they do not access it or monitor it. However, the technology provides no guarantees. There is no good reason to assume that our data will always be safe from rogue actors within these companies, or government agencies requesting secret access.

Solving cloud storage through blockchain technology

Cryptyk address these issues at the most fundamental level: the technology itself. Central to its solution are two decentralized platforms, VAULT and SENTRY.

VAULT encrypts files, splits them into five different pieces, encrypts each piece once more, and then stores each with a different storage provider: Amazon, Box, Google, IBM or Rackspace. The only way the original file can be reconstructed is by a user with the particular keys, stored offline.

Running in parallel, SENTRY uses blockchain technology to control all permissions and record user activity and access. Every time a file is accessed an immutable record is recorded to blockchain. An AI constantly checks file activity, and any unusual events are flagged. All access to VAULT is controlled through SENTRY, and SENTRY is only accessible through offline keys, stored on fingerprinted hardware devices.

In case this all sounds complicated and time-consuming, Cryptyk promises a less than 200 millisecond latency to access files. By using their blockchain-based technology, Cryptk allows users to feel confident that hackers will never be able to access their data. Even if the cloud storage providers were all compromised simultaneously, the user’s data could not be reconstructed without access to the offline private keys.

Uptime is also guaranteed by storing backups of each shard among the other storage nodes. If one of the nodes fails, its data shard can be reconstructed from these backups, ensuring the user has access to their data at all times.

Cryptyk says that it has achieved something truly unique: the very first provider of total data sovereignty with no latency in access times. For the first time cloud storage is truly secure, finally made possible through blockchain technology.