The Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI) has launched a development "tournament" to explore how vehicles will communicate, co-operate and transact in the smart cities of the near-future.

The 4-month MOBI Grand Challenge kicks off on October 12, with a public demonstration of winning technologies to be hosted by BMW Group in Munich, Germany on next February.

The prizes come in the form of blockchain tokens, which will drive next-generation mobility and data sharing: Ocean Protocol, a blockchain enabled data exchange protocol, has committed $1 million worth of token prize; and Beyond Protocol, a machine-to-machine economy distributed ledger technology (DLT) company has committed the equivalent of $250,000.

Stepping back, MOBI continues to grow its distinguished membership which includes startups, carmakers and OEMs since it was formed back in May this year. Indeed, MOBI's CEO and co-founder Chris Ballinger revealed exclusively to CoinDesk that the R3 consortium has just signed up as a member.

Regarding the competition, Ballinger said it's less like a hackathon and more like a cross between the DARPA Grand Challenge – where robotic vehicles competed to autonomously navigate through the Mojave Desert – and an XPRIZE.

In fact, it's just the first phase of a 3-year project to assemble and test out the building blocks of next-generation mobility networks, he said, including components like non-GPS location communication between vehicles and infrastructure, micro-payments, and ad-hoc mobile networks.

And like the first DARPA challenge in 2004, Ballinger acknowledged this is only the first step. He also expects corporate and government sponsorship and support will follow, as it did with DARPA.

"We know that nobody is going to hit the home run in this first step. The technology is still immature. But we think this stuff will be possible within a few years," he told CoinDesk.

Micropayments and electric cars
When micropayments and wallets were first coming on the scene, people hypothesized that cars would be able to make a payment to get right of way, perhaps to reach an airport more quickly, for example.

Ballinger believes micropayments will certainly equip vehicles to do this type of thing, but much more as well; operating as an incentive to share data can reduce traffic flows across the board and also make driving safer, he said.

"The vision here is cars connecting with infrastructure and other vehicles in local ad hoc networks, sharing data, making a small payment," said Ballinger.

This can allow cars, while attempting to negotiate a right of way, to effectively "see around corners"; sharing information that could result in a small adjustment in speed as a car approaches an intersection could avoid an accident, he said.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Manzi, CEO of Beyond Protocol, said his team has been doing work that involves self-driving electric vehicles which could charge one another using wallets built into the battery units, as these become more efficient and advanced.

"Today, when a car runs out of gas it goes to the gas station. In autonomous tomorrow, a car could go to a charging station and then wirelessly charge another car," said Manzi.

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Ethereum-based adult entertainment platform SpankChain has suffered a smart contract security breach that led to loss of around $38,000, the firm reported on its Medium page Oct. 9.

The hack, which purportedly took place Oct. 6, was detected by SpankChain a day after, and was announced today in a post entitled “We Got Spanked: What We Know So Far.”

Anonymous attackers managed to steal 165.38 Ethereum (ETH) or around $38,000 from the platform’s payment channel smart contract. Additionally, the security breach caused the immobilization of $4,000 worth of the SpankChain’s internal token called BOOTY.

While most of lost or immobilized funds belong to SpankChain itself, the platform claimed that client reimbursements are of “immediate priority.” The company will shortly repay $9,300 worth of Ethereum and Booty coins directly to users’ SpankPay accounts via Ethereum airdrop.

The SpankChain team has subsequently halted its camservice Spank.Live in order to prevent users from depositing via the payment channel smart contract. The website reboot is expected to take around two to three days in order to reset the payment channel smart contract, carry out airdrop reimbursements, reset native token distribution, and eliminate the security weakness.

The attack was related to a “reentrancy” bug similar to that which exploited The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (The DAO). The hacker reportedly created a malicious contract mimicking an ERC20 token, with a “transfer” function calling back into the payment channel smart contract multiple times in a loop, extracting Ethereum each time.

A smart contract is a protocol that enables the specific behavior of a contract by applying the terms of the agreement into the code, eliminating the need for a third party intermediary.

While smart contracts are reportedly “extremely difficult to hack,” they are still a young technology, and can be prone to bugs, which may in turn be exploited by scammers.
The adult entertainment industry is increasingly taking advantage of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, mostly driven by the technology’s inherent anonymity, as well as a number of other benefits.

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Two blockchain veterans are gearing up to launch what could be the first cryptocurrency exchange in the Persian Gulf to be licensed by a central bank.

Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, Rain Financial has opened its public waiting list after a year in the Central Bank of Bahrain's fintech sandbox. Co-founded by Saudi blockchain consultant Abdullah Almoaiqel and Egyptian investor-turned-meetup organizer Yehia Badawy, along with their business partners Joseph Dallago and AJ Nelson, Rain aims to offer both a brokerage for retail crypto investors and an institutional platform along the lines of Coinbase Pro in Silicon Valley.

Although at least five other exchanges are also involved with the Bahrain sandbox – a regulatory program where applicants experiment in a closely supervised environment before graduating to full-fledged licensed businesses – Rain was the first to join in September 2017, and expects to launch in early 2019.

"What is unique about Rain is they are the most advanced and the closest to graduating," Khalid Saad, CEO of Bahrain Fintech Bay, a non-profit co-working space for local startups, told CoinDesk.

He added:

"There's no cryptocurrency exchange in the region that is officially regulated. Hopefully, Rain will be the first one."

Such an entity could conceivably encourage new capital flows into the crypto ecosystem from a part of the world rich in natural resources like oil and gas. As it stands, few Persian Gulf residents officially participate in the crypto markets, partly for fear of the sector's shadowy reputation (although Dubai has notably been a pioneer of "smart city" applications of blockchain technology).

Crypto-curious investors "are waiting for the right regulations to be in place and the right partners," Rain co-founder Badawy said. "We are here to fill this demand, with institutional-grade infrastructure."

Intrigued by the potential of this largely untapped market, crypto veterans such as Cumberland Mining founder Mike Komaransky, Bitcoin Core developer Jimmy Song and BRD crypto wallet cofounder Aaron Lasher, have all invested in the Bahrain-based startup. (Rain would not disclose how much it has raised.)

Further, Rain has tapped Joseph Dallago, an alumnus of the crypto wallet startup Abra, to be its CEO.

Uphill battle
To be sure, the Dubai-based incumbent BitOasis has been facilitating bitcoin purchases since 2015, and is also a participant in the Bahrain sandbox.

But while BitOasis (which did not respond to several requests for comment) has focused on building an active user base among retail investors, the Rain founders have been meeting with institutional players throughout the region, from bankers to regulators, seeking their support.

They faced an uphill battle. Kuwaiti regulators have essentially banned institutional traders from working with cryptocurrencies. Meanwhile, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority asserted in August 2018 that "no parties or individuals are licensed" to trade bitcoin in the kingdom.

"The primary concerns with the regulators in Saudi Arabia is with unregistered entities," Rain co-founder Almoaiqel told CoinDesk. "Some of the regulators are not aware that bitcoin payments are not really anonymous and there are ways to track these."

After months of educating regulators about the know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering standards applied by Western exchanges, which it plans to follow, Rain says it has secured banking partners to allow fiat-on ramps in all the local Gulf currencies.

"It's been a long journey educating our different regulators and partners," Badawy said.

But Rain has also been fortunate in that "Bahrain is a really advanced and progressive regulator in the region," Almoaiqel said. And the sandbox environment allowed the company to show the Central Bank of Bahrain how it would operate while limiting the damage should something go wrong.

"Whatever goes into a sandbox is designed to be small enough to fail, so that if it doesn't work out there is remediation available," noted John Collins, a partner at the advisory firm FS Vector in Washington, D.C. and former head of policy and government affairs at Coinbase.

Aside from giving startups "a safe space to work with regulators," Collins said, sandbox programs around the world are creating "regulatory bridges" across jurisdictions, such as the cooperation between the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority.

"That's another added benefit, especially for crypto exchanges," Collins told CoinDesk. "If you are able to be in a sandbox but interacting with any number of different regions at the same time, that is a uniquely good fit for a crypto product."

'Pent-up demand'
Across the Gulf, crypto adoption has been slow to take root compared to Middle Eastern countries like Turkey and Israel. Yet Rain CEO Dallago told CoinDesk people in the Gulf often value universal assets, such as precious metals, far more than retail investors in Western markets.

"We feel like the regional tastes really match up with the characteristics of bitcoin," Dallago said. "There's a lot of pent up demand in the region."

Further, Almoaiqel said, "remittance is a huge use case here. The region has a high population of foreign workers." Indeed, immigrants and expats reportedly make up more than half the population of the Gulf countries except Saudi Arabia.

Still, it's hard to say how much demand there really is given the precarious regulatory climate. The peer-to-peer exchange LocalBitcoins facilitated just $266,634 worth of Saudi bitcoin trades the second week of September, volumes comparable to neighboring countries like the United Arab Emirates. This is a pittance in contrast to places like Argentina, which saw $6.9 million worth of LocalBitcoins transactions the same week.

On the other hand, many believe that broader education in the Gulf could tip this scale. So Rain's co-founders are organizing dozens of local bitcoin meetups from Kuwait to Saudi Arabia, including an event at the Bahrain Fintech Bay headquarters that attracted around 50 participants in July.

"The point of these meetups is to educate people in the region about the benefits of digital currency," Almoaiqel said, concluding:

"It's our duty to counterbalance all the negative news about cryptocurrency scams."

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Mastercard has won a patent for a proposed system that would allow for the launch of different kinds of blockchains – including those that support multiple currencies.

Published Tuesday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the patent explains that a group or company may need to store different types of transaction information on a single platform – something that is currently difficult to do on a single blockchain.

To counter this issue, MasterCard describes how a specific block-generation method for a permissioned blockchain can ensure that different blocks store different types of information.

The document, which was first filed in July 2016, explains that "the transaction records stored in the blocks comprising a blockchain are often required to be of the same format and include the same types, and sometimes even sizes, of data."

However, "in the case of an entity that wants to use multiple types of blockchains, such as a different blockchain for several different currencies," that source might need to run multiple blockchain platforms, which in turn would require a large amount of computing power.

The patent goes on to explain:

"There is a need for a technological solution to provide a partitioned blockchain that is capable of storing multiple transaction formats and types in a single blockchain, reducing the computing resources and processing power required for deployment and operation of the blockchain, while also providing for enhanced usage of permissions for permissioned blockchains."

The patent adds that an appropriately partitioned blockchain can receive information about transaction types from different computing devices. Each partition, referred to potentially as a "subnet" by the patent, would store information about a specific type of currency or otherwise hold different types of information than the other subnets.

Among financial companies, Mastercard has become a prolific filer of proposed patents, all developed around various use cases of the technology.

For example, earlier this year, the firm scored a patent for a system that, as envisioned, would speed up cryptocurrency payments within a proposed system.

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In the third quarter of 2018, San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase’s U.S. dollar volumes hit a 1-year low, according to a recent analysis of Diar published October 8.

According to the diagram below, in the third quarter of 2018 the U.S. dollar volumes on Coinbase dropped to the lowest level during the past year. Compared to the same period last year, the trading volume of Bitcoin (BTC) is currently slightly higher, around $5.4 billion versus compared to $4.6 billion in 2017. The trading volume of Ethereum (ETH) and Litecoin (LTC) represents the greatest slump.


Source: Diar

Performance of another major crypto exchange, Bitstamp, is somewhat better. The trading volume of BTC is around $4.4 billion, while in the same period last year it was at around $4.6 billion. ETH trading volume has risen twice and is currently $669.1 million compared to $322.8 million in September last year. The most significant drop of the year is represented by LTC, with a current volume of $113.4 million against $266.2 million last year.


Source: Diar


While trading volumes may be low on the exchange, Coinbase has been actively diversifying and expanding its services. Last month, the exchange rolled out a new update called “Coinbase Bundles,” which is designed to simplify cryptocurrency trading. The Bundle consists of five cryptocurrencies supported on Coinbase; BTC, ETH, LTC, BCH, and LTC.

Coinbase also announced a new process that will allow it to list more digital assets faster. However, the process refers only to digital assets that are compliant with local law, which means that certain assets listed on the platform may only be available to customers in particular jurisdictions.

Last week, Cointelegraph reported that Coinbase is reportedly finishing negotiations that would value the company at $8 billion. Coinbase is purportedly in talks with Tiger Global and its shareholders regarding a possible $500 billion investment. The sources reportedly said that Coinbase would add $250 billion to its treasury, while another $250 million could be slated for buying out existing investors.

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IBM is taking its food-tracking blockchain into production, making it one of the largest enterprise projects to achieve that milestone, and has signed European supermarket giant Carrefour to use it.

Announced Monday, the commercial launch of IBM Food Trust means that large players, as well as small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) in the food industry supply chain, can now join the network for a subscription fee ranging from $100 to $10,000 a month.

And many SMEs may have a stronger incentive to participate now that Carrefour, which operates 12,000 stores in 33 countries, is on board. The retailer will track and trace its own branded products in France, Spain and Brazil, before expanding to other countries by 2022.

"For us, it's a matter of sense for the consumer," Emmanuel Delerm, blockchain program director at Carrefourm told CoinDesk. "It's really this that will push us to say to our producers or partners or suppliers, will they come on the platform? It's really consumer-orientated; it's really for them that we are doing this."

Yet Carrefour is only the latest food company with supply chain clout to sign up for IBM Food Trust. Others include Nestle, Dole Food, Tyson Foods, Kroger, Unilever – and not least of all the U.S. big-box behemoth Walmart. Notably, Walmart has already flexed its muscle, telling leafy-greens suppliers last month that they must integrate with the network by September 2019 and citing an e.coli outbreak as an urgent reason to improve transparency.

Describing the fruits of more than a year's work, Ramesh Gopinath, IBM's vice president of blockchain solutions, told CoinDesk,

"IBM Food Trust is the first production blockchain at real scale and we are super-excited to finally be making the product available broadly."

Indeed, the one other enterprise blockchain of comparable heft to go live is we.trade, the trade finance consortium of 12 global banks, which entered production in late June.

The mainstay of the IBM Food Trust commercial offering, explained Gopinath, is the ability to trace items backward and forward through the supply chain. This means the apples in a brand of baby food, for example, can be pinpointed back to a particular batch and orchard; then, in the event of, say, contamination, the trace can go forward to recall the whole range of products that might be affected.

"That obviously requires the growers, the suppliers, and the retailers all to be part of the solution, sending in information in a trusted and permissioned fashion and we link it all together," said Gopinath.

So far, 3 million transactions have been processed on the ledger during 18 months of testing, and now that it's gone live, Gopinath is confident that "if anything it will be ten times faster."

Top of the food chain?
IBM Food Trust is without doubt leading the track-and-trace food space. The network was built using the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain protocol (which Big Blue contributed to the Hyperledger project). But there will likely be others in the race, including some which may also emerge from within the Hyperledger commmunity.

Also gathering momentum is Sawtooth, the codebase donated to Hyperledger by Intel. Indeed, if you take the time to inspect the Sawtooth Supply Chain GitHub repository, in July of this year there were 15 code commits from U.S. food giant Cargill, involving some kind of track and trace project; the word "fish" is mentioned. Asked if a proof of concept was forthcoming on Sawtooth, Cargill declined to comment.

But in any case, IBM's Gopinath was sanguine about other Fortune 100 companies working on possible solutions, adding that interoperability is an ultimate goal.

"All of that, in my view, is good news," he said. "It's affirmation that path we started on three plus years ago is the right one. And back when we started out, we have always had interoperability in mind."

He also pointed to data sharing standards like GS1 which means the necessary work will be done up front. Gopinath added,

"I'd love it if IBM Food Trust was the only platform out there for this, but we are not that naive. If there's another one that is as good and as mature as Food Trust out there then absolutely we will be happy to do the interop."

Chicken and egg
Carrefour's Delerm said the supermarket chain worked on its own blockchain for more than a year, mainly using internal engineer teams, before switching to IBM's.

"Being a retailer we knew that IBM was working with Walmart on IBM Food Trust in the U.S. primarily," he said.

As such, Carrefour saw scope to widen the range of products it was already working on, such as the way it currently verifies production of free-range chicken in the Auvergne region in central France.

"As of today, we have three products in France that since the start of the year we have been delivering to consumers all the information: tomatoes, chicken and eggs, and we added recently the chicken also in Italy," said Delerm.

In addition to the existing Carrefour Quality Lines live on the blockchain, the plan is to use IBM Food Trust to include international brands, said Delerm, such as some of those already working with Food Trust like Nestle and Unilever, as well as exploring organic produce-tracking.

Growing adoption
Also joining Food Trust on Monday are the cooperative Topco Associates representing 15,000 stores; retailer-owned cooperative Wakefern, representing 50 member companies and 344 stores; as well as suppliers including Beefchain, Dennick Fruit Source and Smithfield.

Food Trust can also be accessed by way of a module that simply allows firms to upload data about goods to the system, done via the cloud or another app, and which is free of charge. A more advanced version of this involves certificates, organic or Fair Trade credentials and so on.

Stepping back, Food Trust is one of IBM's main blockchain buckets; another is shipping and global trade, and in this area, the flagship platform is IBM's collaboration with Maersk, dubbed TradeLens.

So far, TradeLens is yet to onboard any other carriers that are anything like the size of Maersk. So, could it be that the food industry is an easier ride in terms of adoption, or perhaps it's an area where the benefits are more immediately tangible?

Gopinath pointed that Food Trust has been some 18 months in the making, and that progress is being made on TradeLens to scale up to the same degree among parties that normally compete with each other.

He concluded:

"IBM Food Trust is making this big announcement; similarly, TradeLens will also have a commercial availability announcement. And at that point, I can guarantee you it will be in the same shape we are in here."

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Venezuelans can only use the state-backed cryptocurrency, the Petro, to pay for passport fees starting next week, the country’s vice president Delcy Rodriguez said in a press conference Friday, Oct. 5.

Ahead of Petro’s official “launch” in November, Rodriguez confirmed that as of Monday, Oct. 8, fees for all passport applications will only be payable in Petro, and will cost an increased amount: 2 petros for a new passport and 1 petro for an extension.

The average monthly minimum wage in Venezuela, Bloomberg reports, is four times less than the cost of the raised passport fee. 

“In the case of Venezuelans who are abroad, until the first day of November the cost will be $200 for issuance and $100 for extensions,” Rodriguez stated, according to leading Latin American newspaper El Universal.

Venezuela has sought to combat the side-effects of rampant inflation and a failing economy by embracing the use of cryptocurrency to circumvent capital controls.

As Cointelegraph reported, Petro, President Nicolas Maduro’s purported solution to the country’s economic crisis, has consistently courted controversy, with accusations last week claiming its developers copied the whitepaper of altcoin Dash.

Along with the passport fees shake-up, Rodriguez also announced the formation of a dedicated migration police force, ostensibly designed “to preserve citizen security and migratory control.”

Bloomberg notes that around 5,000 citizens flee Venezuela each day.

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