This week two wallets made their debuts: BTCC and BitPay.

China-based BTCC announced the “Mobi” mobile wallet designed for out-of-the-box quick access and ease of payments. And merchant processor BitPay announced an upgrade to its Copay wallet that will include Intel’s on-hardware security enhancements.

The blockchain has also been hitting it big, with Chain Inc. open sourcing its blockchain platform and MIT Media Lab released a proposal for using blockchain technology to stop certification fraud. In a similar effort, IBM, Walmart and Tsinghua University have teamed up to provide blockchain security to the pork supply chain in China.

MIT looks to stop diploma fraud using blockchain technology

Blockcerts, an open infrastructure for academic credentials on the blockchain, announced its launch on Oct. 24. Coming out of the MIT Media Lab, a well-known source for blockchain and Bitcoin related research, the project proposes the use of blockchain technology to help track and provide proof-of-existence for claims of academic credentials such as diplomas.

“Blockcerts provides a decentralized credentialing system,” the MIT Media Lab posted in a blog post on the announcement. “The Bitcoin blockchain acts as the provider of trust, and credentials are tamper-resistant and verifiable. Blockcerts can be used in the context of academic, professional, and workforce credentialing.”

Issuers, which include universities and other academic establishments, can use the Blockcerts protocol to issue digital academic certificates that contain metadata on individual skills, achievements or characteristics. This is then registered to the Bitcoin blockchain, which is used to provide cryptographic tamper-proofing and proof-of-publish.

The certificates themselves can then be verified by anyone, without having to contact the issuer, that the certificate has not been tampered with, that it was issued by a particular institution and issued to a specific user.

Certificate holders would also have access to their certificates via a wallet (similar to a cryptocurrency wallet) and use that wallet to share the certificates with others. Examples of people that a holder might want to share a certificate with would be a potential employer, a government or another academic institution or program.

Currently, Blockcerts has a iOS mobile app and an Android version is in the works.

All of the code has been released open source with the MIT open source license, allowing developers to use, share and develop applications for it. Readers interested in further details about the topic of credentials and blockchains can read up on the subject in longer blog posts “What we learned from designing an academic certificates system on the blockchain” and “Certificates, Reputation, and the Blockchain.”

BTCC previews mobile bitcoin wallet ‘Mobi’

BTCC Limited (formerly BTC China), a China-based Bitcoin exchange and mining operation, revealed a brand new bitcoin wallet called “Mobi” at Money20/20 in Las Vegas earlier this week. According to CoinDesk, BTCC CEO Bobby Lee said the product will be both “bitcoin first” and accessible to a global audience.

Instead of holding money in a wallet—such as having users trade in USD, euros or renminbi—Mobi users will instead trade only bitcoins with the value price-locked to the user’s currency of choice.

As a result, Lee explained, when he sends 10 British pounds to his wallet, he would actually be sending 18,000 bits (or 0.018 BTC).

The wallet would also only lock to a mobile phone number and not require any other type of authentication.

“There’s no email, no password, no usernames, no two-factor authentication. If you own the phone number, you own the coins for that wallet,” Lee said during his presentation at Money20/20.

Image courtesy of BitPay, Inc.

BitPay’s new wallet will use Intel’s on-chip security hardware

Bitcoin merchant processor and web/mobile wallet service BitPay, Inc. this week announced a new secure Bitcoin wallet that will use Intel Corp.’s security extension software to safeguard currently.

According to SiliconANGLE’s Duncan Riley, this will come to an upgraded version of BitPay’s already existing wallet service Copay.

The new release will integrate with Intel’s Software Guard Extensions, which are built into Intel’s seventh-generation Core processors. This extension provides hardware-level enhanced protection for the wallet’s key generation, transaction signing and the private keys themselves.

“The Intel processing chip is isolated from the rest of the machine in a secure execution environment, so neither compromised software nor a compromised PC can expose a Bitcoin user’s funds or private keys to risk from attackers,” BitPay Marketing and Communications Manager James Walpole told VentureBeat. “The Intel integration is sort of like a safe zone where the things that could be dangerous on a compromised machine become safe to execute.”

Read more about this announced change to BitPay’s CoPay wallet on SiliconANGLE.

Chain open-sources blockchain software

Chain Inc., a startup focused on developing blockchain software solutions, made its blockchain platform open source on Monday and released it on its GitHub repository.

According to coverage here at SiliconANGLE, Chain’s intent is to increase outreach to developers and increase adoption of its blockchain platform. The startup made this move shortly after competitor R3CEV LLC announced plans to contribute code to IBM’s Hyperledger Project, another blockchain platform in the works.

To date, the most popular blockchain platforms—including the Bitcoin blockchain, Ethereum blockchain and a few others—have all be open source projects. Although some projects, such as Chain, started out closed source while courting industry interests, open source projects cooperate and integrate better with already existing popular open source implementations.

Image credit: Jai79 via pixabay.com

IBM and Walmart team up on Chinese pork safety

IBM, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Tsinghua University in Beijing to use blockchain technology to provide better auditing for food safety.

According to Mike Wheatley here at SiliconANGLE, China has developed a poor reputation when it comes to food safety. To change this, blockchain technology can be used as a way to provide an auditable transaction log for the entire supply chain.

To do this the trio intends to use blockchain technology to authenticate and record every transaction along the supply chain for pork products. Pork is just the beginning, but as China’s staple food product (and one that can easily spoil) the partners hope this will have the biggest impact and provide the best proof of concept.

“China’s rapid economic growth has led to massive opportunities for innovation, but it has also presented quality of life challenges, including ensuring that food sold in the country is safe to eat,” Professor Chai Yueting of the Tsinghua’s National Engineering Laboratory of Electronic Commerce Transaction Technology said in a statement.

This is not the first time a blockchain has been proposed to affect safety changes to the Chinese market. Patrick Dai, chief technology officer at VeChain, spoke at The Blockchain Conference 2016 in San Francisco about using blockchains to verify supply chains by citing up China’s 2008 milk powder poisoning crisis.

Photo: Dawson/Bloomberg News