Things are getting interesting at the customer-level for Bitcoin in Japan where an electricity company is looking into allowing customers to pay their bills in bitcoins. This isn’t the first time since 2009 when bitcoins have been courted as a potential payment system for local utilities, but with 17 power plants, this might be one of the largest. Also, bitcoins for gift card merchandise peer-to-peer payment company Purse.io just announced a partnership with VPN provider Private Internet Access (PIA).

U.S. politics is starting to notice blockchain innovations as more startups begin to focus on the technology and enterprise-level outfits begin to research it. So much so that the U.S. Congress has announced the formation of a “Blockchain Caucus” to look into the current use of blockchain technology in U.S. and world business and get back to lawmakers.

Enterprise-ready blockchain technology continues to be a hot topic, as IBM and Microsoft made the news this week. Microsoft announced the general availability of its Project Bletchley, an Ethereum-based blockchain platform for developers to rapidly deploy enterprise-ready consortium blockchains (more details below). IBM partnered with China UnionPay E-payment Research Institute to deploy a “loyalty points” trading platform to connect multiple banks permitting bank customers to exchange loyalty points to add value for bank customers in the network. And, on the subject of blockchains and open-source software, IBM’s Donna Dillenberger spoke about participation in the Hyperledger project at IBM Edge 2016 with SiliconANGLE‘s theCUBE (video at the bottom).

Current BTC market value is holding around $607.08 USD (BitcoinAverage.com) and has shown very little volatility over the past week. It has risen from $599 last week to its current value, which is higher than the $575 range it had at the beginning of September after the price had been slowly recovering from a low at $550 in August, which had been coupled with the hack of major Bitcoin exchange Bitfinex.

Japanese may soon use Bitcoin to pay for utilities

The Japanese Bitcoin services firm Coincheck announced on Monday that local users will soon be able to pay utility bills with bitcoins, according to Bitcoin.com News. Coincheck’s parent company ResuPress Inc. formed a partnership with Mitsuwa Industry Co. Ltd. in order to facility bitcoin payments via a subsidiary of Mitsuwa called E-net Systems Co. Ltd.

The payment service is known as Coincheck Denki, and customers may begin paying in bitcoin starting in November.

To enable customers, Coincheck Denki E-net Systems maintains a partnership with Power Retail Corporation, an operator of power plants in 17 locations in central Japan. The company also operates power plants in 22 other countries.

Presently Coincheck services electricity bills exclusively, but the company has plans to expand to also cover payments for gas, water and even mobile data.

Jared Polis, U.S. Representitive for Colorado, is an American politician, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. Image credit via Wikimedia

U.S. Congress announces formation of ‘Blockchain Caucus’

Lawmakers in the United States Congress announced Monday that a “Blockchain Caucus” will be formed to focus on blockchain technologies such as Bitcoin, reports The Hill.

“The blockchain has boundless potential,” Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) said in a statement detailing the new Congressional Blockchain Caucus. “From cryptocurrencies to supply chains to banking to property titling, blockchain-based solutions have the ability to decentralize cybersecurity and revolutionize many industries.”

Although not the first conception of a blockchain cryptocurrency, Bitcoin’s invention and emergency in 2009 set in motion a proof of concept that shows how a blockchain can be used to provide value and secure transactions. Since then other cryptocurrencies have appeared, from Dogecoin to Ethereum, each showing different ways the technology could be utilized for currency exchange or a platform for smart contracts.

Then in 2015 and now in 2016, the fintech industry began to lay eyes on blockchain technology as a settlement layer for securities such as stocks. Major world banks partnered with blockchain-technology think tank R3CEV LLC looking to discover how to use blockchains to ease accounting and provide a settlement layer for bank-backed securities. In 2016, the World Economic Forum named blockchain technology as “the future of financial infrastructure.”

Clearly, the U.S. Congress sees the expansion of this technology as something that may change on financial systems and business operate. Even U.S. President candidate Hillary Clinton mentioned blockchain technology in her “Initiative on Technology and Innovation” policy document.

Purse.io partners with PIA VPN

Private Internet Access (PIA) is a virtual private network (VPN) provider has accepted Bitcoin payments for some time to protect users’ Internet usage habits from prying eyes. Today PIA announced a partnership with Purse.io, a peer-to-peer service that allows people to exchange bitcoins with people who have Amazon gift cards and have those items shipped. Because Purse.io works with people overseas, prices for products are often cheaper, thus buyers using bitcoin often see discounts, with an average around 20 percent.

Founded in 2014, Purse.io received $1 million USD in a seed round in December 2015.

It’s not clear what exactly this partnership means for Purse.io or PIA members from the announcement. PIA already accepted bitcoin payments before this partnership; and it was already possible before the partnership to use VPNs when shopping with Purse.io.

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IBM demonstrates a blockchain-enabled platform for sharing bank card bonus points

IBM and China UnionPay E-payment Research Institute recently previewed a demo of a collaborative project showing the exchange of loyalty bonus points among multiple banks using a blockchain. The platform was designed to show the ease of accounting and deployment for multiple banks to allow customers to trade loyalty points.

Loyalty points are a type of company virtual currency earned by credit card holders for certain actions, such as buying gas or taking plane trips. These points can then be exchanged for rewards from the bank such as gift cards, merchandise or airplane miles. Banks use these points to entice customers to use their cards or to stay with their bank to continue to receive the rewards. However, points cannot be transferred between different banks (or often between customers) which limits their value.

Conventional technology makes it difficult for banks to track, account for and enable easy trading of these virtual points between different business systems. In order to tackle this problem IBM and China Union E-payment Research turned to blockchain-based technology using the IBM Hyperledger Fabric project (IBM’s own blockchain-technology project based on the open-source Hyperledger project).

“The joint research efforts between China UnionPay E-payment Institute and IBM Research has enabled the successful exchange of bonus points among banks using blockchain technology, which embeds trust into transactions,” said He Shuo, Director, the Electronic Payment Research Institute, China UnionPay.  “This pilot along with similar innovations underway using blockchain will positively change the future of the finance industry.”

This move represents by IBM represents part of the current expansion of open-source blockchain technology as an enterprise-ready ecosystem. IBM believes this collaborative project will be a significant first of its kind demonstration of what blockchain-technology, open-source software and Hyperledger can do for the fintech industry.

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Microsoft announces Ethereum-based Project Bletchley general availability

In an attempt to get ahead of the next-generation of blockchain-enabled enterprise apps, Microsoft first unveiled Project Bletchley in June of this year. Now, SiliconANGLE’s Mike Wheatley reports that Microsoft has announced the general availability of the project to developers.

The platform of Project Bletchley is a consortium blockchain, which according to the Ethereum Foundation means a blockchain “where the consensus process is controlled by a pre-selected set of nodes. For example, one might imagine a consortium of 15 financial institutions, each of which operates a node; 10 must sign every block in order for the block to be valid.”

According to Christine Avanessians, senior program manager at Microsoft Azure, Microsoft plans to expand Project Bletchley as part of its Azure-based blockchain-as-a-service.

IBM Edge: How open-source is bringing blockchain to the enterprise

At IBM Edge 2016, Donna Dillenberger, IBM fellow and Watson Research Center at IBM, spoke to SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE with Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman about how open-source is bringing the blockchain to the enterprise. During her IBM Edge 2016 keynote she talked to how analytics and transactions work together using The Linux Foundation’s blockchain known as Hyperledger, which is founded on open-source software.

“Bitcoin started in 2009 as a result of the Great Recession,” Dillenberger said. “There were a bunch of people [who] wanted to build this cryptocurrency that would be free of central governments and banks. To do that, they thought, ‘We can’t even rely on computer systems. We have to ensure that Bitcoin would be hosted and distributed in computer systems that no one owned.’”

“That led to the creation of a protocol that could run on distributed computers, and even if one computer fails, the Bitcoin network would last. If a set of computers were compromised, the data would also still have integrity, and that led to the creation of the blockchain protocol.”

Due to its nature as an open source project, Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain ledger technology, means that companies such as IBM can expand on it. IBM’s interest in blockchain, through Hyperledger, Dillenberger explained is because it can be used to assist in accounting and settlement for supply chains.

According to Dillenberger, using a blockchain to track and resolve conflicts can help resolve disputes faster (with the ease of automated accounting) and this lowered time saves money. Ideally, having an auditable list of transactions distributed between all actors in the supply chain it also creates better communication and enhances relationships with partners and suppliers as well.

Featured image credit: via reddit member huevos_de_acero