Alkesh Shah, a digital asset strategist at Bank of America has revealed he believes Solana ($SOL) has the potential to “become the Visa” of the cryptocurrency space as it focuses on scalability, low transaction fees, and ease of use. As reported by Business Insider, Shah has pointed out that Solana has settled over 50 billion […]

Global investment bank JPMorgan has asked its clients what they think the price of bitcoin will be by year-end. Among the bank’s clients who responded, 55% expect the price of bitcoin to end the year at $60K or higher. What JPMorgan’s Clients Expect the Price of Bitcoin to Be by Year-End JPMorgan has conducted […]

DUBLIN–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The “Global Genetic Testing Market Forecasts for Applications and Technologies 2021-2025 – COVID-19 Pandemic Impact Updates with Executive and Consultant Guides” report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com’s offering. This report forecasts the market size out to 2025. The report includes detailed breakouts for 14 countries and 5 regions. Is genomic cancer testing bouncing back? […]

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DUBLIN–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The “EMS and ODM – Global Market Trajectory & Analytics” report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com’s offering. Amid the COVID-19 crisis, the global market for EMS and ODM estimated at US$588.7 Billion in the year 2020, is projected to reach a revised size of US$958.6 Billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 8.5% […]

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The proof is in the pudding when it comes to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work mechanism versus a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism debate.

The software platform Cardano has entered the third stage of its roadmap, the Basho era. It promises to improve the network’s performance and scalability. Cardano’s roadmap is “a summary of Cardano development” divided into five eras to deliver improvements in diverse functionalities of the network that are “delivered across multiple code releases”. Now that the platform’s core smart contract capability Plutus has been deployed, the launch of the Basho era focuses on scaling Cardano, promising “Parameter adjustments, improvements, enhancements and other innovations” supposed to increase the network’s capacity. They also call it “an era of optimization”, promising to enhance the performance and interoperability “to better support growth and adoption for applications with high transaction volume.” It is supposed to bring high performance, resiliency, and flexibility to the network. Related Reading | Cardano Foundation Completes Funding To Plant 1 Million Trees Scalability And Interoperability Scalability and interoperability are some of the main solutions that Cardano wants to offer as the “ethereum killer”. While the Ethereum network is working to handle up to 100,000 transactions per second (tps), Cardano plans to reach millions of tps through the second-layer solution Hydra. On the interoperability’s side, the Basho stage will introduce the sidechains, “new blockchains, interoperable with the main Cardano chain”, which eventually intends to allow the blockchains, with different architectures and codes, to be able to communicate: interoperate. The Cardano Roadmap explains that “Sidechains can be used as a sharding mechanism by off-loading work from the main chain onto a sidechain to increase the capacity of the network. They can also be used to introduce experimental features without affecting the security of the main blockchain.” Similarly, this stage will also introduce parallel accounting styles: “the ability to support and switch between UTXO and account-based models will be added using sidechains.” This is also meant to enhance interoperability and “support new kinds of use cases on the network.” “Building on these foundations, and steadily increasing capacity and throughput to deal with the growth in the DApp ecosystem and onboard first hundreds of thousands, then millions of new users. From DeFi degens to citizens of developing nations.” Cardano has been widely criticized for its slow start. Many people thought the platform was lagging behind, noting it took a long time to deploy its first smart contract. However, the CEO of the Cardano Foundation Frederik Gregaard argues that they take a careful approach to launch functions, with rigorous testing and peer review. This time around, the Basho stage’s launch report noted that they expect “periods of high demand, network congestion at times”, but they see it as part of the ‘journey’ and added that they will be maintaining a “considered, safe approach”. “We’re on an exciting journey and usage will be high. While we may at times feel impatient, this is the way. Here’s how we will optimize and scale as we grow.” What The Basho Era Promises To Solve The optimization and scalability improvements have been divided in the report between “on-chain solutions” and “off-chain solutions”. Here is what they intend to solve: For on-chain solutions: Block size increase: the network recently increased the block size by 12.5% to 72KB and “further increases will be applied over time”. Pipelining: intends to propagate blocks “to at least 95% of peers within five seconds” to provide “the headroom to make more aggressive scaling changes”. Input Endorsers: “This improves the consistency of block propagation times and allows higher transaction rates.” Memory /CPU parameters for Plutus: improves the efficiency of memory usage across the chain. Plutus script enhancements: a “more effective usage of the powerful EUTXO model through smart contract optimization,” Node enhancements: intends to “help even distribution of stake and reward computations across the epochs”. The new node version “reduces peak load at critical points,” On-disk storage: “RAM-constrained systems will be able to run nodes (…) and memory will no longer be a bottleneck on scalability.” For off-chain solutions: Sidechains: “Assets can be moved between chains as needed.” Hydra: “provides a more efficient means to process transactions off-chain,” Off-chain computing: “Transactions occur outside of the blockchain itself, yet can offer fast, cheap transactions via a trust model.” Mithril: results in “Multi-signature aggregation that is fast and efficient without compromising security features.” Related Reading | Cardano’s Ecosystem Explodes, Why ADA Could Be Quick To Resume Bullish Trend ADA’s Price ADA trades at $1,28 at the time of writing, up 3.74% in the last 24 hours, but 59.1% down from its last peak in September 2021. ADA trading at $1,28 in the daily chart | Source: ADAUSD on TradingView.com

The trend of blockchain adoption is set to continue in 2022. Here are three sectors that are likely to pivot toward DLT solutions.

Latin American payments company EBANX is doubling down on its commitment to its business in Mexico, opening its first office in Mexico City and introducing a range of solutions designed to help Mexican companies offer new payment experiences for their customers in-country. These solutions include credit and debit cards, installments, OXXO and OXXOPay, SPEI, and Read more...

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Timing of the move has evoked at least some skepticism from security experts about the country's true motives.

IOTA was selected as one of the projects that will take part in the European Union Blockchain Pre-Commercial Procurement. The platform will be competing with four projects in a second round for this EU program for a chance at improving the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI). Related Reading | IOTA Smart Contracts Enter Beta Phase To Circumvent Network Flaws Announced by the IOTA Foundation (IF), the network has reached stage two out of three after it was selected from around 35 applicants. This second phase will last around six months, per the announcement, and will have a special focus on research, development, and lab testing. The IOTA Foundation will receive support from the European Commission in order to investigate and develop “blockchain innovations in the context of testing how future evolutions of EBSI could evolve towards a more scalable, energy-efficient, secure and interoperable architecture”. In that sense, the IOTA Foundation revealed that it will partner with Software AG to implement the developed solution. After, the EU Commission will launch an evaluation phase to test the results of its program’s second phase and the progress each participant has accomplished. The IF added the following: (…) based on this evaluation, a minimum of three projects will be selected to move on to Phase 2B, final solutions development and field testing, which is expected to last another year. Therefore, the non-profit organization will start testing blockchain solutions based on IOTA, specifically they will test a use case for digital product passports for digital waste recycling and a cross-border management of IP rights, the announcement said. Besides Software AG, the IF will rely on other partners and will attempt to growth its partner network. In the past, the organization has worked with major companies from around the world to help them develop multiple use cases. This includes software giant IBM, Dell Technologies, Jaguar Land Rover, and others. IOTA To Power EU Supported Blockchain Solutions? In its final stage, the EU program will require projects to field test the capabilities of their proposals. The IF claimed to be “excited” about its role on this European driven initiative and added: We very much support the strategic focus placed by the European Commission on blockchain and distributed ledger technology as a driver for innovation and growth. We are privileged to be part of this pre-commercial procurement procedure to develop a Europe-wide infrastructure based on blockchain and DLT for use in public services (…). IOTA will dedicate resources to develop solutions and use cases on Scalability, and the implementation of sharding on the EBSI infrastructure. The objective is to improve the protocol’s scale capabilities to onboard and support the users that will leverage the EBSI network. The IF will attempt to develop its sharding solution with a “root network” approach. In other words, a main network will be connected to a series of leaf or branch smaller networks. In addition, the organization will work on its consensus and governance mechanism, its interoperability, and potential to implement identity solutions. Related Reading | IOTA to Release Smart Contract Network ‘Assembly’ And Distribute ASMB Token At the time of writing, IOTA trades at $1,11 with a 1.9% loss in 24 hours.

The university will also hold most of its bitcoin, only allocating 1% each quarter to explore additional Bitcoin uses for SDSU.