Japan’s government is leading a global push to set up an international network for cryptocurrency payments, similar to the SWIFT network used by banks, in an effort to fight money laundering, a person familiar with the plan said on Thursday. Tokyo aims to have the network in place in the next few years, the person said, declining to be identified because the information has not been made public.

A team related to the inter-governmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF) will monitor its development and Japan will cooperate with other countries, the source said. It remains unclear how the cryptocurrency network would work. SWIFT is the international payments messaging system used by banks to send money around the world.

FATF in June approved the plan for establishing the new network, which was proposed by Japan’s Ministry of Finance and the Financial Services Agency (FSA) regulator, according to the person. Both the FSA and the Ministry of Finance declined to comment.

Tokyo has pushed to ensure the security of virtual currencies, hoping to leverage the fintech industry to stimulate economic growth. Japan became the first country in the world to regulate cryptocurrency exchanges at a national level, in 2017.

It remains unclear whether the network would meet resistance from users, given that the attraction of cryptocurrencies is, in part, in their unregulated nature. That lack of regulation is precisely what worries governments and central bankers.

Facebook’s recent announcement of plans to launch a digital coin has met with a chorus from regulators, central banks and governments insisting the tech giant must respect anti money-laundering rules and ensure the security of transactions and user data.

Digital currencies are also likely to be a topic at the G7 finance ministers meeting in France this week.

With the invention of bitcoin came a new, secure method of value transfer, via its underlying technology blockchain. Since bitcoin’s inception ten years ago, a plethora of mainstream entities have investigated various ways to channel blockchain’s potential. Automation giant Siemens is evaluating the technology for various enterprise use cases, including improving the carsharing market.

Siemens is following the trend of mainstream giants looking to incorporate blockchain. “We are in the space where we want to come up with industrial extensions of blockchain systems, […] blockchain systems for enterprises,” Siemens Corporate Technology head of cybersecurity and blockchain Andreas Kind said to me in an interview. Kind mentioned use cases pertaining to areas such as supply chain, mobility, manufacturing, etc.

When entities are interested in making the move toward blockchain, they generally undergo periods of testing and discovery before choosing the most effective and applicable use cases, Kind explained. “Siemens is exactly in this kind of phase,” he added. The company just completed a period of exploration, Kind said, adding, “Now we’re at the point where we’re really zoomed into a set of use cases that are related to Siemens’ business.” Siemens is looking toward permissioned blockchain usage in particular, Kind noted.

Blockchain In The Mobility Arena

The cybersecurity and blockchain head mentioned the area of mobility as one of Siemens’ particular blockchain application focuses. Siemens has a separate branch devoted to the mobility sector. Siemens Mobility, a daughter company of the German-based Siemens AG, works to provide “transport solutions,” relating to the movement of “people and goods” to various locations globally, according to its website.

Carsharing As An Option

Rather than dealing with some of the responsibilities associated with owning a car, such as parking, car payments and insurance, folks who live or work in larger urban areas may often rely on carsharing, Kind explained. Carsharing allows members of the service to use or rent a car for any period of time, even for as short as one hour, according to details on the Enterprise CarShare website. Zipcar is another example of a carsharing operation.

The numbers are in and fast-growing exchange BiKi.com is proving it is no flash in the pan. According to official reports, BiKi.com’s revenue figures in the second quarter exceeded USD 15 million, which is a 500% increase when compared to figures from the first quarter. This works out to one-eighth of leading exchange Binance’s reported Q2 revenues.

BiKi’s June trading fees is also currently 20% of OKEx’s. Its total registered users have now reached 1.5 million, with 130,000 daily active users, numbers which are comparable to top tier exchanges like Huobi. The trading platform now provides 220 trading pairs and ranks amongst the top 20 on exchange ranking sites such as  Feixiaohao and Mytoken.

BiKi.com has continued to forge an impressive progression since it began in June 2018 and this has attracted investments of nearly USD 10 million the past year from investment institutions and individuals the likes of Du Jun, Zhu Huaiyang (Genesis Capital), FBG Capital, and ChainUp.

Cryptocurrency exchanges generally operate within an extremely competitive environment and many exchanges undertake wash trading to maintain their competitive edge. BiKi.com claims it does not practice wash trading and attributes its success to two factors – project selection and how it gains and retains market share.

Project Selection

BiKi adopts an astute set of criteria when choosing projects to list and one of them requires that all listed projects have strong communities of token holders behind them. This is contrary to cryptocurrency exchanges who charge high listing fees and then have to rack their brains to bring in users to trade. As was the case with FCoin Exchange, the “Transaction Mining” mechanism devised by its team did indeed attract a huge user base within a short period of time. However, once the dividend period was over, it was simply a matter of time before its user base had all but dissipated.

BiKi chooses its projects wisely – listed projects on BiKi have large communities and frequent traders who possess diverse assets. Additionally, BiKi already has 5 Wechat community leaders with over 1 million followers who are community token holders and over 10 Wechat community leaders with over 100,000 followers, which contribute to 80% of the exchange’s traffic volume. By leveraging on the strengths of its projects and BiKi’s own strong Wechat communities, BiKi has managed to carve out a fast track to gaining liquidity and trading volume.

BiKi’s strategy of maintaining long term relationships with venture capitalists and investors ensures that BiKi has opportunities to either list top tier projects on a moment’s notice, or be the first exchange to list a certain project. As a result, BiKi’s users have access to a wide variety of high quality tokens to trade –  clearly a factor why BiKi has emerged as the industry dark horse.

Conversely, projects who list on BiKi see the exchange as a stepping stone to gain a new level of recognition in the industry. Listing on BiKi has become somewhat of a yardstick measure of project quality, aided in no small way by BiKi’s 130,000 daily active users who organically generate demand for their tokens.

Gaining and Retaining Market Share

The sustainability of an exchange is actually not dependent on its current profitability, but on its ability to retain its users and effectively recruit new ones. BiKi was the first exchange to acquire users through its ‘community fission’ model, which is a way of scaling communities using recommendations from present users to attract more users.

Blockchain projects cannot succeed without strong communities, and the network dynamics BiKi uses to acquire users are one of its core competitive advantages. Presently, BiKi has more than 200 official community groups, more than 100,000 community members, and is still growing at a rate of 300 new members per day.

Using its “Community Partners Programme” to attract new users daily, BiKi currently has over 1000 Community Partners and is increasing at a rate of 30 per day. BiKi’s targeted 10,000 Community Partners within 2019 is estimated to bring with them 500,000 new users to the exchange.

Similar to Chinese e-commerce platforms Yunji and Pinduoduo, BiKi’s Partner Program rewards Community Partners who introduce more active users to the platform. The ‘community fission’ model shifts the responsibility of customer acquisition to present customers themselves and its inherent network dynamics builds a base of new users that continues to ‘grow’ other users.

What is important to note, though, is that despite the program restricting the network to only two tiers of membership, the efficacy of this model speaks for itself – BiKi has managed to amass 130,000 daily active users and USD 15 million in Q2.

During a bear market, BiKi.com acquired 1.5 million registered users on the exchange, setting an industry precedent in user acquisition. BiKi’s strong base of relationships and users provides a clear value proposition that projects can tap into to reach their milestones. The exchange continues to welcome projects to join the growing community of choice projects currently listed on BiKi.com.

About BiKi.com

Headquartered in Singapore, BiKi.com is a global cryptocurrency exchange that provides a digital assets platform for trading more than 100 cryptocurrencies and 220 trading pairs. Since beginning operations in June 2018, BiKi.com is considered one of the fastest-growing cryptocurrency exchanges in the world with an accumulated 1.5 million registered users and 130,000 daily active users, ranking within the top 20 exchanges globally.

8th July, Singapore, Singapore – BiKi.com, while still a relatively new cryptocurrency exchange, managed to emerge tops on the Forbes Top 10 listing of blockchain companies to watch in 2019. The highly sought-after listing included 10 blockchain companies from all over the world that have made significant contributions to blockchain becoming more accessible, prominent and mainstream.

Founded in June 2018, BiKi.com began operations in Aug 2018, headquartered in Singapore. Co-founder of Huobi and CEO/founder of established media group Jinse Finance, Du Jun invested USD 5 million in personal funds and served as joint CEO of the infant exchange. The global digital currency trading platform has a strong technical and operations team, committed to creating the safest, most stable and efficient platform for users around the world. Presently, it supports languages ​​such as Chinese, English and Vietnamese, with more in the pipeline, and has served more than 1 million global users in nearly 100 countries and regions.

In under a year, BiKi.com has become one of the fastest growing exchanges in the world. With 1.5 million registered users, 100,000 daily active users and a daily trading volume of 70 million USDT, it has been steadily climbing up the rungs of the global crypto exchange ladder on popular sites like Coingecko, Feixiaohao, Mytoken, Aicoin and will soon join Coinmarketcap. It currently has more than 200 active WeChat communities out of a total of nearly 500 and a buoyant telegraph group. We look at the main factors contributing to BiKi’s rapid growth.

Incremental Marketing

Using incremental marketing, BiKi.com has managed to amass many registered users in numerous third- to fifth- tier Chinese cities while simultaneously ushering in new market users from the Chinese and global internet. The exchange’s ‘transformative way of scaling communities’ has successfully accelerated growth in its user acquisition division. BiKi also helps its projects to increase its market users unlike other exchanges such as Huobi, Binance or OKEx.

Community Partner Program

BiKi’s attractive Community Partner Program has also been instrumental in boosting the influx of traffic to the platform. By simply holding at least 30,000 worth of BiKi locked-in for 1 year, users are eligible to become Community Partners who earn 10% interest like a time deposit and get 60% cashback on trading fees as well as bonus rewards and token airdrops.

Professional Services

BiKi has professional market-making strategies and a full range of service tools for users through a bull or bear market while providing media exposure support and assistance for partner projects.

Cost-Effective Platform

Compared to the current top exchanges that charge high listing fees, BiKi.com offers very affordable fees and value-added service fees, effectively buffering the effects of a bear market.

BiKi Platform Coin

BiKi’s platform coin creates a system of deflationary economics based on its principle of “mining, repurchasing and burning”. The initial token issuance of 1 billion will continuously be repurchased and burned till it decreases to 100 million. So far 100% of its platform fees have been used to repurchase and burn the platform currency, with 274 million already burned in the past 6 months. Next, the platform also has plans to launch the BiKi transaction pair, whereby projects will then raise funds in BiKi instead of ETH, again bringing value to the BiKi coin. With its business locks, institutional node locks and user financial locks, BiKi coin circulation is drastically reduced, thereby increasing the value of the BiKi coin.

From its starting price of $0.01384188 in mid April this year to its current price of 0.134539, BiKicoin has charted an impressive upward trajectory, representing an almost 10-fold increase In less than 3 months, a clear indication of investor demand and recognition of the coin’s value.

Committed to bringing digital assets to the mainstream market, it is not surprising that Forbes has ranked BiKi.com amongst its Top 10 Blockchain Companies to Watch in 2019. With BiKi’s continued focus on incremental marketing and global market expansion, together with improvements in services, community programs and also on its platform, BiKi appears poised to continue its ascent to the top flight of crypto exchanges.

About BiKi.com

Headquartered in Singapore, BiKi.com is a global cryptocurrency exchange that provides a digital assets platform for trading more than 100 cryptocurrencies and 127 trading pairs. Since beginning operations in Aug 2018, BiKi.com is considered one of the fastest-growing cryptocurrency exchanges in the world with an accumulated 1.5 million registered users and 100,000 daily active users, ranking within the top 30 exchanges globally.

The Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT), an arm of the Reserve Bank of India, is developing a model blockchain platform to cater to the needs of banks.

“We have been working on a model platform for blockchain applications for the government in banking. It will be documented and developed next year,” AS Ramasastri, Director, IDRBT, told BusinessLine.

The platform will put up all available blockchain applications with inter-operability, among others.

Though banks and financial institutions have been referring to blockchain of late, real deployment of its applications has not been attempted so far.

“While there is huge scope for deployment of blockchain applications, a cautious approach is very much needed,” Ramasastri said.

The apex institute for banking technology is also ramping up activities of the Fintech Forum launched a few months back with the main objective of providing a continuous innovative platform to fintech companies and banks, to enhance the co-innovation and to reduce the on-boarding time for new technologies.

“The dialogue is on and we are expecting good outcomes from this exercise,” the Director said. The focus areas of research and innovation include analytics, cyber security, blockchain and payments systems. “Fintech companies are accelerating and reshaping the financial services industry radically,” he said adding that banks and financial institutions are realising the value-addition in adopting and adapting various fintech innovations.

There has been lot of start-up innovation in the sector and such a collaboration between banks, research institutions and fintech players will tend to increase not only revenues, but also bring about innovation to benefit the customers, he added.

Graph Blockchain Inc. (“Graph” or “Company“) (CSE: GBLC) is pleased to announce that the Company has secured a contract through its in country partner for the Ministry of Transportation in Seoul, South Korea. The contract is for approximately $55,000 CAD and is a pilot project to store traffic data on the blockchain as part of the Smart City initiative.

“This is an exciting opportunity for our Company to introduce Graph Database Blockchain solutions to the Ministry of Transportation. We look forward to delivering a solution that will streamline and protect data for their smart city initiatives. The team is doing a fantastic job securing new business opportunities with multi-national corporations and government agencies, this will provide a strong foundation as we continue to search for gaming opportunities that will expand and diversify the Company for our shareholders,” says Jeff Stevens, CEO of the Company.

About Graph Blockchain Inc.

The Company develops leading-edge private blockchain business intelligence and data management solutions and is a pure play in the graph database technology space. Graph leverages its proprietary integration of the AgensGraph Database engine with Hyperledger Fabric to create a transparent and immutable ledger with near real-time transactional data processing and intuitive data visualization. The Company has secured multiple prototype development contracts with multi-national conglomerates and sells across client subsidiaries as a full enterprise product.

Additional Information on the Company is available at: www.graphblockchain.com

The way in which global business owners and shareholders engage continues to adapt to changing market forces, technologies and fiscal appetites, however, the need for strong, stable and transparent investment processes remains key to the success of any project.

With counterparties often frustrated by a lack of transparency and accessibility, the need for a platform that bridges the gap between investor and investee is increasingly important.

Introducing the iOWN Platform – the Blockchain Powered Investment Platform

Whilst it is true that many investors favor a diversified risk portfolio with a range of industry assets, finding strong partners remains a problem – the solution for many lies in community crowdfunding.

Developed in the UAE, iOWN is a blockchain based crowdfunding investment platform that has been specifically designed to bridge the gap between financier and businesses seeking funding. Whether you are an experienced funder or complete beginner, the iOWN global network means that there are accessible opportunities for all with measured risk.

Registered users are able to use the iOWN Token to access the platform, where they will be able to invest into a range of industry sectors including Real Estate, IT, Industrials, Pharma & Healthcare and Energy to name a few.

Overcoming the Challenges of Traditional Investment Risk

iOWN addresses many of the issues currently faced by investors with existing on-the-market financial platforms by creating a secure, transparent and simple to use financial ecosystem that minimises risk through community funding.

Prospective backers are able to select opportunities based on their own preferences including; location, domain and expected ROI with the advantage of having direct access to vetted business opportunities.

iOWN Provides Market Changing Solution for Business Owners & Investors

Both business owners and investors of today will know just how hard it is to find trusted partners and viable projects – iOWN offers just such accessibility and with qualified portfolios, business owners can minimise the risk of time-loss and fundraising fees whilst retaining control of the sale.

The iOWN Token – the Investment Ecosystem

With the iOWN IEO being launched on June 25th, 2019 users will be able to access and invest into the platform with some 60,000,000 tokens being sold on LATOKEN – with low fees and instant transactions, the token is also fully compliant to all international standards.

With a bonus structure of up to 20% and valued at $0.01- tokens are offered for purchase with ETH, BTC, and ERC-20. As an added benefit, iOWN token holders will also be able to use tokens after the IEO to pay for services within the platform.

Smart-Contracts and a cutting edge blockchain powered platform make the iOWN system a one-off – a unique investment platform that offers stability, accessibility and minimises risk.

From startup to established business, iOWN offers unrivaled investment opportunities with measured risk whilst maximising ROI.

About iOWN: iOWN Group is a privately-owned holding company focused on providing a platform for identifying long term investments in the funding process as well as the execution of the funding process, to business owners and investors. For more information please visit our homepage.

Several U.S. banks and global financial institutions have dipped their toes into the blockchain world this year by implementing systems on permissioned ledgers that only invited members can join. Now, one of Poland’s 10 largest banks is taking it a step further.

Warsaw-based Alior announced that it is beginning to offer a feature that will allow customers to check on the authentication and integrity of official documents they receive using the public ethereum blockchain that supports the ether cryptocurrency valued at more than $27 billion. While financial institutions have been historically more open to working with permissioned, private blockchains that they have more control over, this use of a public blockchain is among the very first.

“Our mission is to be disruptive, so we want to provide innovative solutions, and we want other banks to follow us as well. We welcome if somebody copied our solution,” says blockchain strategy lead Tomasz Sienicki. “We are showing that it’s possible to use public blockchain even if some people think it’s impossible.”

The reason for the unusual position is that Poland has regulations that require banks to provide customers access to documents in the form of a durable medium, and its Office of Competition and Consumer Protection ruled in 2017 that a page on a bank’s website which can be easily changed doesn’t qualify.

That interpretation pushed Alior to explore new solutions to serve customers, and it established what it calls the Blockchain Center of Excellence last October to complete the project. Sienicki, who worked at the bank as a trader since its inception in 2008 before transitioning to lead the blockchain team, said the blockchain-based system complies with all federal regulations.

“It was born in our innovation lab, but later on, we managed to convince our management that a dedicated team should be set up on just blockchain issues,” Sienicki says. “Everybody can copy this code and use it for his or her purposes. We encourage people to do so.”

Signature Bank in the U.S. launched its Signet system in December and JPMorgan, America’s largest bank, followed suit a couple months later by creating the similar JPM Coin. Both are blockchain-based features to enable real-time payments between institutional clients, but they run on a private ethereum blockchain that limits access to people with special permission to use it. Alior’s feature is different in that anybody can join the network, making it more transparent.

“We want people to verify that we did everything right and we don’t conceal anything. If we say the documents are actually verified and authentic, everybody can check it and confirm,” Sienicki says. “That’s not possible using a private blockchain.”

Societe Generale, a major French investment bank, issued a $112 million bond in security tokens on the public ethereum blockchain in April, but Alior’s management believes it is the first bank to use a public blockchain for a direct customer service solution.

The feature uses a smart contract that stores hashes of documents — a digital signature that maps documents to a unique value — and links them with their name and the block number in which they were published on the blockchain. Customers can search documents they have received on Alior’s servers and browse their history to find where those documents are located on the blockchain to ensure that they have not been changed by the bank since they were published.

“We know exactly in which block of ethereum the document with a given hash is published. If we know the block number, we also know the timestamp,” says Piotr Adamczyk, Alior’s blockchain technology lead who was in charge of writing the code for the project. “We know that the document was published some time ago and hasn’t been changed in that time [if the hash stored on the blockchain is identical to the hash calculated from the document], so we can prove it hasn’t been replaced on our servers.”

A bear market casts a long shadow. Crypto’s total value may have doubled since December, but it turns out that some companies in the space are still reeling from the downturn.

One such company is blockchain-agnostic solutions provider, Dispatch Labs, which Crypto Briefing has learned has been running very low on operational capital for months. The company has now been forced to attempt an additional raise so it can bring a working product to market.

The Bay-Area company has twenty members of staff, and CEO Matt McGraw admitted: [W]e are on life support.”

It all started so well. Dispatch received initial funding from the executive team; a year later the company raised more than $13M in a series of private rounds from professional investors, including Fenbushi Capital, during the first half of 2018.

But complications arose almost immediately afterwards. The value of their raise dropped considerably in the market downturn in the first quarter of the year. One significant investor provided capital in a coin – he wouldn’t name which – that proved very difficult to liquidate.

Although the team quickly recognized the imminent threat posed by the downturn, McGraw claims there simply wasn’t the market infrastructure or sufficient OTC availability for them to easily liquidate millions of dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency.

“We’ve been quite open about the financials”, McGraw said. But by the time they had successfully converted completely from digital assets, their total remaining investment had fallen by more than half, from $13M to around $6.5M.

Dispatch isn’t the first blockchain company to suffer from the market downturn. The crash destroyed the finances of lead Ethereum Classic developer, ETCDev, which was forced to shut up shop in December. ConsenSys drastically cut back the financial support it gave to spokes, spinning out those that wouldn’t be able to become revenue-earning fast enough.

Dispatch now wants to raise an additional $600,000 in order to finalize the product and bring it to market. Once they have a full product, McGraw is “mildly confident” the additional revenue will make them cash flow neutral within the next couple of years.

But there’s still doubt. Although investor appetite for a protocol is far higher than it was last year, McGraw admitted that it’s not a certainty they’ll raise the funding. “It’s absolutely possible that we could go out of business”, he said.

McGraw also spoke about the regret in not trying to raise more money, “We could have raised $100M if we went there”, he explained. Although he still maintains their funding target was the “responsible choice”, he admitted that if they had raised more, Dispatch may not now be in its current position.

Wheaton Precious Metals (NYSE: WPM), one of the world’s largest precious metals streaming companies, has hired Blockhead Technologies, a software company that creates blockchain-enabled solutions for the global mining sector.

Wheaton will be leveraging Blockhead’s technology as part of the streamlining of its metal accounting processes. With a market cap of approximately $9.5 billion, Wheaton has streaming agreements relating to 19 operating mines and nine development projects and produced over 680,000 gold equivalent ounces in 2018.

Blockhead’s flagship platform, STAMP, aims to bring secure tracking and source certification into mining value chains. The platform, which the company says is the future of mining technology, enables companies to have greater control over their current data, can integrate with any existing system with a supply chain.

Blockhead implements solutions for simplifying the data management process and provides access to instant data analysis.

Blockhead Technologies has headquarters in Vancouver, Canada, and Perth, Western Australia.