ProximaX has activated its testnet with 5 nodes.

The ProximaX Sirus Blockchain is decentralized platform promises to be an all-in-one platform for cross-industry application and DApp development. It is headed by Lon Wong, the president of the NEM.io Foundation. It has NEM inspired blockchain layer at its core, a decentralized storage layer through IPFS, and a P2P multimedia streaming and messaging layer powered by PeerStream Protocol (PSP),

The current testnet uses the NEM Catapult private chain which is modified to the requirements of the Proximax Sirius platform.

According to the announcement, the testnet includes Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism (adapted from the NXT project) instead of Proof of Importance (PoI). Eventually, the Proof of Stake (PoS) will only be one part of the equation that forms the Proof of Conflation Aggregate (PoCa). Proof of Importance (PoI) consensus algorithm has shown to have little impact the on overall score and is closely related to Proof of Stake (PoS).

Obviously, the idea behind the testnet is to use it as a staging environment. Testnet helps ProximaX community to test changes and amendments thoroughly which in turn should allow to highlight and eliminate possible security issues before the launch of ProximaX main network.

Key Updates On The Blockchain

• The blockchain has been made to be consistent with NXT and further optimized by changing a few object (list to deque) usage as follows:
• New PoS Implementation based on NXT.
• Updated the AccountBalance and AccountState.
• Calculation of the Effective Balance by using the ImportanceView.
• EffectiveBalance calculation was changed based on NXT to return the effective balance for `1440` blocks instead of `1440` + `720` blocks.
• Base targets stored as difficulties in BlockDifficultyCache.

Also, NEM core development team may also monitor ProximaX allowing them to make the NEM mainnet a better solution.

Future Updates

Testnet will keep on receiving updates and the updates include,

• Merge new changes from NEM (`Bison`)
• New Multisignature Transaction Type for ProximaX Reputation System
• Storage Specific Transaction Types
• Streaming Specific Transaction Types
• Super Contract Transaction Types
• ProximaX Blockchain TestnetTools such Blockchain Explorer and a Simple Wallet.

Executive Opinion

Lon Wong, CEO of ProximaX, said, “The launch of the blockchain testnet component is a very important element of the ProximaX Sirius platform. It gives rise to a break-through in the holistic offering of the ProximaX Sirius platform mainnet. With this, we are confident that we will be able to launch the mainnet successfully, thereby achieving our roadmap targets.”

In addition to testnet or staging platform, ProximaX has planned a few more major releases in the coming months. This includes the integration of the reputation system, new transaction types (such as super contract/smart contract extensions) and of course, an upstream upgrade from NEM Technology, the announcement said.

More details on how to access testnet are available here.

U.S. SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) issued statement listing guidelines about Crypto Tokens sold as a part of ICO and Cryptocurrency aka digital asset exchange platforms.

SEC explicitly mentioned about market participants in trading and investments still need to adhere to federal securities law framework regardless of whether they use blockchain technologies or any other technological innovations.

SEC took actions against AirFox, Paragon, Crypto Asset Management, TokenLot, and EtherDelta's founder.

The enforcement action is broadly categorized and focused into three main areas,

1. Initial offers and sales of digital asset securities (including initial coin offerings ("ICOs")) 
2. Investment Vehicles investing in Digital Asset securities and those who advise others about investing in these securities
3. Trading of Digital Asset securities

Initial offers (ICO) and Crypto Tokens

Regardless of the terminology or technology used in the transaction, the DAO Report and the Munchee Order ( Munchee, Inc., Securities Act Rel. No. 10445 (Dec. 11, 2017) settled order) emphasize that digital assets offered and sold as investment contracts are Securities.

This fact is now emphasized from the recently SEC issued settled orders against AirFox and Paragon in connection with their unregistered offerings of tokens.

The SEC statement said, "These two matters demonstrate that there is a path to compliance with the federal securities laws going forward, even where issuers have conducted an illegal unregistered offering of digital asset securities."

SEC further states, "An entity that facilitates the issuance of digital asset securities in ICOs and secondary trading in digital asset securities may also be acting as a "broker" or "dealer" that is required to register with the Commission and become a member of a self-regulatory organization, typically FINRA."

The list of enforcement actions by U.S. SEC against ICOs can be found here.

Investment Vehicles investing in Digital Asset 

SEC noted that on Sept. 11, 2018, the Commission issued the Crypto Asset Management Order and that it found that the manager of a hedge fund formed for the purpose of investing in digital assets had improperly failed to register the fund as an investment company. It was emphasized that any fund or fund manager or investment vehicle holding digital assets (cryptocurrencies or tokens) should register under the Investment Company Act and the Advisers Act.

Trading of Digital Assets or Cryptocurrencies or Tokens

SEC mentioned that entity that brings together buyers and sellers for digital asset securities or crypto tokens comes under the purview of the definition of exchange under U.S. federal securities laws.  It noted that EtherDelta is a platform allows peer to peer trading of cryptocurrencies or tokens. It brings together buyers and sellers with the use of the website. Hence EtherDelta was considered as an Exchange.

These guidelines are the right way to move forward as they bring more predictability in cryptocurrency/digital assets investments though not 100 percent but it helps clear the regulatory vagueness in the crypto market.

The original U.S. SEC statement can be found here.

Microsoft announced Blockchain Development Kit. It built on Microsoft’s serverless technologies.

Principal Program Manager, Microsoft Blockchain Engineering, Marc Mercuri in the blog post claimed seamlessly integration of blockchain with the best of Microsoft and third-party Sofware as a Services (SaaS).

The newly released Azure Blockchain Development kit extends the capabilities of existing blockchain developer templates and Azure Blockchain Workbench. Azure services for key management, off-chain identity and data, monitoring, and messaging APIs are part of a reference architecture and now can be used to rapidly build blockchain-based applications.

This first release of Microsoft's Blockchain Development Kit focuses on three key areas:

• Connecting interfaces, 
• Integrating data and systems, and 
• Deploying smart contracts and blockchain networks

The Azure Blockchain Development Kit includes samples for inbound and outbound SMS, IVR, IoT Hub, and IoT Central, Xamarin mobile client for iOS and Android, Dynamics integration via Common Data Service (CDS), bots and assistants (Cortana, Alexa, Google Assistant) and web UX.

Microsoft also released a set of Logic Apps. These logic apps will enable the hashing of files and file related metadata, smart contracts for files and a file registry to store the hashes on the chain (blockchain or distributed ledger).

Logic Apps have been created to deliver this functionality for files added to the most popular sources for documents and media, including Azure Storage, OneDrive, One Drive for Business, SharePoint, Box, Adobe Creative Cloud, and FTP.

The Blockchain Application Development Kit also includes Workbench integration samples in the following areas:

• Legacy applications and protocols – Sending and receiving files via FTP, processing comma separated files and email delivery of data.
• Data – SQL, Azure Search, Excel, and PowerBI.
• SaaS –  SharePoint, Dynamics, Outlook, and Gmail.
• Registries – An accelerator that generates a custom registry and registry item smart contracts to accommodate any scenario.

Another announcement is related to a whitepaper on “DevOps for Blockchain Smart Contract” along with the implementation guide, available through the Azure Blockchain Development Kit.

Executive Opinion

Founder of Truffle, Tim Coulter, said, “We're excited to work with Microsoft to create the canonical DevOps experience for blockchain engineers. Our paper, ‘DevOps for Blockchain Smart Contracts’, goes into rigorous detail and provides examples on how to develop blockchain applications with an eye toward CI/CD in consortium environments.”

Head of Product Management, R3, Mike Ward said, "At R3, we are committed to ensuring developers can deploy CorDapps quickly, securely and easily. The Azure Blockchain Development Kit will give our enterprise customers tools to integrate with the applications, software, and devices that people use every day like Outlook, Alexa, SMS, and web UX. The blockchain is moving out of the labs and into everyday business applications.”

How to Access the Azure Blockchain Development Kit?

The Azure Blockchain Development Kit is available at GitHub location:
https://github.com/Azure-Samples/blockchain/tree/master/blockchain-development-kit

Microsoft also said that there will be set of Logic App and Flow Connectors to extend samples shipped with Azure Blockchainkit, to ledgers like Ethereum, Corda, Bitcoin, and others.

Binance cryptocurrency exchange announced that it will list USDC StableCoin.

Brief about USDC Stablecoin

USDC Coin (USDC), a regulated, US dollar-backed stable coin governed by CENTRE, an industry consortium co-founded by Coinbase and Circle.

Circle is a money services business registered with FinCEN. It is holding 48 US state money transmitter licenses. Circle was also the first recipient of the BitLicense issued by the New York State's Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). It is actively working with NYDFS to bring USDC to New York customers in a regulated way. Circle claims that more than 50 partners are onboard the USDC network since its launch in October 2018

Each USDC coin is a 1 to 1 (1:1) representation of a US dollar on the Ethereum blockchain.
Hence USDC coin maps to a single US dollar. USDC coin moves neither up or down relative to its reference currency, USD. USDC is 100% collateralized by a corresponding US dollar held in accounts subject to regular public reporting of reserves.


Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and other Altcoins can extremely volatile. Some of them moving up and down by around a factor of 20 to 30 percent within a couple of hours. It is believed that stablecoins can help bring much-needed stability and predictability into crypto markets though this hypothesis remains to be tested to be true. Stablecoins are generally pegged against fiat currency like USD, EUR, CNY or JPY and sometimes against gold or oil.

This month, cryptocurrency and digital exchange platform have announced their support for major stablecoins. Liquid Crypto Exchange listed the USDC Stablecoin followed by CobinHood Cryptocurrency Exchange listing four major stablecoins including the Gemini Dollar (GUSD), MakerDao (DAI), Paxos Standard Token (PAX) and TrueUSD (TUSD).

Binance Cryptocurrency Exchange Platform and USDC Availability

To start with, USDC trading pairs on Binance will start with trading pairs viz. USDC/BNB and USDC/BTC at 2018/11/17 03:00 AM (UTC). The listing of USDC on Binance cryptocurrency exchange will further strengthen the crypto sector.

The blockchain technology has been largely associated with cryptocurrencies for quite a while now. It came into limelight due to Bitcoin using it for transactional purposes and has been, ever since, even affiliated with the infamous Silk Road.

However, cryptocurrencies just mark the beginning of a revolution. Digital currencies just gave us a glimpse of its various applications, helping us see its limitless possibilities in disrupting almost every industry on the planet. There is, honestly, still a long way to go, since nothing is ever perfect, not even blockchain. We earlier discussed the major shortcomings of the blockchain.

That being said, every major corporation in the world is developing its own private blockchain, including IBM. In a recent turn of events, IBM has decided to help Seagate (a prominent storage device company) fight against counterfeit hard disks by helping them track their products using their in-house-developed blockchain.

Even Telefonica, a major Telecom Operator in Spain, has crafted out a partnership with IBM to make use of the technology for management of international calls. It will help the firm monitor mobile phone traffic, helping it to overcome challenges like lack of transparency during the routing process.

The telecom industry has just begun to scratch the surface on how blockchain can help save billions of dollars in operational costs and help with the issues it has been facing since the past couple of years. As a result of using IBM's blockchain, Telefonica will be able to track the traceability of a call as well as keep a tab on various things such as the duration of a call, its destination and the point of origin.

The technology will also help create a Peer-to-peer network which will comprise of numerous service providers, network operators, and some vendors. The platform will only be available to on-chain participants.

Here is what IBM said after Telefonica confirmed the partnership:
“Telefónica will be collaborating with IBM to develop a proof-of-concept that is based on our blockchain. The system will be used to solve one of the major problems faced in the telecommunications industry – management of traffic during international calls”.

Blockchain has a lot of application in the telecom industry and can help solve the issues such as transparency and uncollected revenues. Because of the immutable nature of blockchains, they will also be able to identify fraud as well as solve disputes on the network.

It is noteworthy that Telefonica is not the first telecom player to make use of the technology to improve upon its services. Just a month ago, Viettel Group, which is one of the largest telecom providers in Vietnam,  announced that they will make use of blockchain. Even in South Korea, LG UPlus, which owns LG Corporation, revealed that they have created a system which will work irrespective of network provider, helping users to make payment overseas easily.

Digital marketing is one of the most important aspects to take into consideration if you want to make your business to be successful in the overcrowded internet space. The scenario is ever-evolving, with new ways of marketing popping up almost every day. AI is probably the key to improve the marketing landscape.

Though using Artificial Intelligence in marketing is something groundbreaking or even new, the way it can help the digital marketing industry get better is quite huge. It is already used in many internet applications such as Chatbots and content curation.

Since there is no limit whatsoever on the size of information artificial intelligence can study from, it is quite resourceful in the content marketing space. Understanding the public and targeting them according to their interests is what digital marketing has headed towards since the past couple of years, though this has surely raised some concerns about user privacy.

According to a study by Salesforce, around 76% of consumers expect companies to understand what they need. The first website you might have thought of when thinking about content personalization is probably Netflix. In an earlier post, we have discussed how Netflix is using AI to deliver content to its customers.

AI is something which can help companies like Netflix understand exactly what and how people want and expect from them. For example, consider Lucy, a tool which uses AI to help with various things such as research, segmentation, and planning. It can achieve, almost in a minute, what a team of marketing experts can do in months.

What Lucy does is help you answer questions based on how and what you want to know. It will just take a short amount of time and come up with an answer, irrespective of how complex the answer is. Since the number of questions a company has to solve will never recede, it is understandable how handy tools like IBM Watson's Lucy is.

Though this is not the only way you can make use of tools powered by artificial intelligence. It can also help you target your audience according to their what they are upto, without manually devising the latest trends and finding patterns between the consumer and the product.

AI is so powerful that it can also simulate various strategies, and help you see the results if you decide to implement one. It is probably the most powerful tool to make informed decisions. All this is possible since it can gobble up enormous amounts of data easily, split it up, and present it without any problems. The amount of data it can analyze is only limited by the provided computational power.

There are systems which can also help generate content using AI. Consider Associated Press, a reliable source of news in the present era. Three years ago, it published a story titled "Apple tops Street IQ forecasts", which was generated using complex algorithms powered by Automated Insights.

Even Washington Post has about 850 articles in its bag which were not written by humans but generated by robots, in just one year. Surely, the advancement in AI has changed our lives and will affect everything we do in the future.

Microsoft and Cray announced availability of Cray supercomputer in Microsoft Azure at no charge to qualified customers. The Cray supercomputing evironment in Microsoft Azure cloud platform's data center will help customers to run AI, advanced analytics, and modeling and simulation workloads at unprecedented scale.

Cray has parterned With Microsoft and Intel to offer Sentinel, a Cray XC50 system in Azure. Cray experts will work and help customers leveraging Azure’s rich portfolio of cloud services and solutions to run their production workloads on Sentinel. Large-scale simulation and modeling workloads in the cloud now possible with Cray's Sentinel supercomputers. Azure cloud platform ensures on-demand access to uncompromising performance at scale.


Sential Cray XC50 system bundles,

• Peak system performance of 500 PF and 1 PF in a single cabinet,
• CPU and GPU processors — Cavium ThunderX2 processors, NVIDIA Tesla P100 PCIe GPUs and Intel Xeon Scalable processor
• 2,000 cores 
• Attached Cray ClusterStor parallel file-system storage,
• The Cray Linux Environment,
• The Cray-developed Aries network interconnect,
• The Cray Programming Environment that includes optimized compilers, libraries and tools

Executive Opinion

Senior vice president and CMO at Cray, Fred Kohout, said, “Cray, Intel and Microsoft are joining forces to build this first-of-its-kind supercomputing service in the public cloud. Sentinel, powered by Intel processors, delivers uncompromising performance at scale. Customers can now build sophisticated end-to-end workflows in Microsoft Azure that run modeling and simulation at scale on a Cray supercomputer. With Cray in Azure, customers have the choice of Intel processors, Intel or Cray compilers, and technologies optimized for their supercomputing workloads. They can also generate data on the parallel file system and integrate this data with other Azure services.”

Brett Tanzer, general manager, Microsoft Corp. said, “The availability of Cray supercomputing services to our common customers is a huge step forward for any organization pushing the boundaries of research, simulation, and artificial intelligence in the cloud, enabling them to achieve and accelerate unprecedented advances in engineering, health, science and other applications.”

Vice president and general manager, Intel’s Data Center Group, Trish Damkroger, said, “The convergence of HPC and AI is driving a paradigm shift in computing and analytics. Access to optimized HPC capabilities in the cloud will enable users to take advantage of the scalability and agility benefits of public cloud and provide a platform for developers to test new classes of HPC-AI algorithms. Our partnership with Cray and Microsoft accelerates innovation and discovery on the Cray supercomputers powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors, while benefiting from the Microsoft Azure cloud offering.”

According to the announcement, with a dedicated Cray supercomputer in Azure, customers can get the same scalability in the cloud as they get with an on-premises Cray supercomputer. Cray in Azure addresses demands for capability computing for customers experiencing time-to-solution or scalability limitations in the cloud. With a Cray supercomputer in Azure, customers will be able to confidently and affordably scale any workload virtually.

MindTree has partnered with the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore (IISc) for advanced research in Artificial Intelligence (AI). The Endowment of the Mindtree Associate Professor Chair on Artificial Intelligence aims to nurture crucial AI research.

To brief, Mindtree is a global technology consulting and services company. Founded in 1909 by Indian industrialist Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, the Government of India and the Maharaja of Mysore, the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore (IISc) is India's premier public establishment for research and higher education in science, engineering, design, and management.


This partnership will be focused on teaching and research for AI in both Data Sciences and Natural Language Processing. An endowment fund named "Mindtree Associate Professor Chair on Artificial Intelligence" is set up to attract dynamic faculty doing groundbreaking AI research with both technical scholars and domain experts.

According to the announcement, the inaugural Mindtree Associate Professor Chair has been awarded to Professor Vijay Natarajan, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Automation.

Professor Natarajan has an experience of 12 years and works in the areas of scientific visualization, computational topology, and computational geometry. The main topics of research include topological methods for visualization; multiscale representation of large-scale scientific data; geometric and topological simplification; and applications of visualization in life sciences, climate science, and material science. Prof. Natarajan's research is set to impact next-generation data processing, analysis, and visualization technology in the large.

Executive and Academia Opinion

Commenting on the association, Rostow Ravanan, CEO and Managing Director of Mindtree remarked, "Artificial Intelligence, considered the cornerstone of future technologies, needs an ideal ground for further research and development in India. IISc is perfectly poised to be this space, allowing the best minds interested in this area to innovate and develop unique AI-based solutions for current problems. Our collaboration with IISc will help create opportunities to strengthen research in AI and provide our clients an avenue to interact with some of the best minds working in this segment."

Director, IISc,  Prof. Anurag Kumar said,  "This association with Mindtree has substantially bolstered IISc's capabilities in some of the most important domains that hold the key to the future of technology. We look forward to receiving significant industry-specific exposure through this association, in modern AI and computation technology and the problems it solves. The initiative will open up a new territory for our students to learn, innovate, implement and execute unique ideas with a far-reaching positive impact."

This endowment will help the IISc's  students to solve modern business problems using AI and machine learning, leading to developing high-impact solutions at scale.

Even though the buzz around the blockchain technology has been gaining traction for a while now, like everything else, blockchain comes with its share of problems. It surely is a revolutionary technology which will change our daily interactions and upset the way businesses tend to work, some large organizations, especially CIOs, are turning away from it.

We already know what the technology has to offer, but, let us take a look at where it stands currently and what problems seem to plague it. Researchers and experts in the field have warned that it does not fit every business need and that a thorough analysis is always necessary when making the jump.

Fairly New Technology

The concept of blockchain was introduced to the world by Satoshi Nakamoto (which is probably a pseudonym for a person or a group). The major applications of blockchain revolve around two things: cryptocurrency and money related transactions.

Read more, 10 Things You Should Know About Blockchain

Even though the pace at which it is advancing is quite fast, only ten years have passed since its inception. There are two major platforms, Ethereum and Hyperledger, which have proven themselves to be quite effective at what they do.  That being said, we are still unsure of what issues might arise in the near future.

For example, considering Ethereum's script responsible for the smart contacts feature, Solidity, in its current iteration, lacks the support for dealing with decimals. To overcome this shortfall, developers might even need to start from scratch.

Data Storage Issues

The most prominent feature that blockchain has to offer is its write once, append many nature.  This makes it attractive to a lot of developers but can create issues in various scenarios.

To understand this better, let us take an example. Suppose if the user includes any type of graphics such as an image or something else in a transaction, the capacity required to store all the transactions will skyrocket.

This issue is that blockchain replicates every transaction or record to every system on the network.

Security And Vulnerabilities

There are two types of blockchain in general, public and private.

Public blockchains let anyone join the network. The most prominent example of this is Bitcoin. Anyone can purchase the cryptocurrency and start contributing to the network right away.

Private blockchains are generally used by large organizations such as IBM and unlike public networks require some sort of authentication to join.

Know more about ICO,

• What is ICO?

• 15 point checklist to read ICO whitepaper

Even though every record on the blockchain is immutable, meaning they cannot be modified in any way, any exploit and vulnerability in the network can cause a massive financial or data loss.

In 2016, a Hong Kong-based crypto exchange named Bitfinex reported that around 120,000 bitcoins were stolen. This directly translated to a loss of approximately $68 million at the time.

When the system was analyzed, the culprit was believed to be the bitcoin wallet provider BitGo, which had some software vulnerabilities.

Scaling Problems

Blockchain makes use of various mathematical principles to create a distributed ledger amongst its users, making it computationally intensive to store and update records.

Since every new transaction is serialized, the rate at which it can be updated is much much slower when compared to databases, which offer the ability to update records in parallel.

Back in January this year, the Miami Bitcoin Conference refused to accept Bitcoin as a mode of payment because of network congestion and increase in fees incurred.

This was quite ironical considering that the conference was about Bitcoin itself and its ability to make a worldwide impact.

Read more,
Disruptive nature of Bitcoin and its impact on industry

However, it gave us a glimpse of the scaling and network problems regarding the technology.

The rate at which corporates and industries are adopting the technology is quite fast. Even though there are some fundamental problems with the technology at the moment, we should always keep in mind that every technology has its own set of pros and cons.

Various researchers are already working on the underlying mathematical challenges which come into play wherever blockchain is used.

As is the case with every new technology out there, Blockchain will eventually be able to solve this shortcoming with the increase in advancement and research.