Blockchain and Bitcoin round-up: 14 November 2017
Hot on the heels of yesterday’s (13 November) action, here’s our latest blockchain and Bitcoin round-up. Featuring Bitcoin Gold, OTC Exchange Network, Deloitte and Github.
Bitcoin Gold (BTG), the newest fork of the Bitcoin blockchain, has officially gone live. It’s not the first to breakaway from Bitcoin, as previously in August, Bitcoin Cash (BCC) launched. However, unlike Bitcoin Cash which occurred because the community did not want to approve of the SegWit2x proposal. Bitcoin Gold is instead an attempt to counter Bitcoin’s mining centralisation.
With this focus, Bitcoin Gold is designed to change how mining works, meaning powerful machines, known as ASICs can no longer be used to mine. The result is, instead of scaling Bitcoin to allow for more users, Bitcoin Gold modifies existing Bitcoin to try and make it decentralised.
Blockchain for FX
Onto partnership news, and blockchain technology provider OTC Exchange Network (OTCXN) has revealed that Dmalink, a London-based electronic trading venue has joined OTCXN’s early adopter programme as a liquidity provider. Dealing with the FX spot market, Dmalink provides liquidity access with a focus on emerging cryptocurrency markets.
As part of the partnership, Dmalink’s ECN ecosystem is to be powered by OTCXN clearing services. Ashwind Soonarane, managing partner and global head of liquidity management, Dmalink, says: “OTCXN’s approach addresses fundamental issues relating to scalability, time-to-market, pre-trade, post-trade, counterparty risk and clearing within a fragmented credit intermediation space.”
Deloitte has revealed a new and lengthy study of the global open-source platform, GitHub, offering insight on blockchain development – such as how projects have grown, what’s likely to come next, and the implications for financial services firms. According to Deloitte, GitHub has more than 68 million projects and 24 million participants. It says the core code supporting Bitcoin was published in April 2009. Since then, the number of projects on GitHub related to blockchain has “grown significantly”, averaging more than 8,600 new projects a year. In 2016 alone, there were almost 27,000 new projects
In analysing blockchain repositories and their content, it says in 2010, organisations developed less than 1% of all projects. By 2017, their blockchain projects accounted for 11%. However, the “stark reality” of open-source projects is that most are abandoned or “do not achieve meaningful scale”. Its analysis found that only 8% of projects are active, which it defines as being updated at least once in the last six months. Here, organisations are a “positive differentiator”; while 7% of projects developed by users are active, 15% of projects developed by organisations are active. It seems some people can’t finish things. Unlike this round-up… which ends here.
