Finality, Settlement, and Validation: The Place to Start
One of the most important concepts in capital market transactions is settlement and finality. Even though the payment infrastructure gets the majority of airtime, settlement finality is just as, if not even more, important in the securities markets. In the public markets, the structure of securities and the clearance and settlement process is quite standardized….
Many Rights Make the KoreProtocol Right
Over the last few weeks, we have seen the highly entertaining farce of Craig Wright claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto by registering a copyright to the original bitcoin whitepaper and code. He may very well be Satoshi. However, registering a copyright does not confer an official recognition of identity. Wei Lu, CEO of Coinsumer, proved…
Minimizing Failure Vector Surfaces for Digital Securities
Modern capitalists and ancient Chinese may disagree on many things, but the one thing they do seem to agree on relates to security of the realm. George Washington, back in 1799, said, “…offensive operations, often times, is the surest, if not the only (in some cases) means of defence.” A similar sentiment can be seen…
Who do you trust with your Crypto?
“The great thing about trustless cryptocurrency systems is just how many incompetents you have to trust along the way.” – David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain. Lately, I’ve stopped reading fiction because real life drama with public blockchains is way more entertaining. The fun never stops. For example, one tragi-comedy began…
The Right Technology – The Case of Mercury Cash
Nothing proves the wisdom of choosing the right technology for the right job than the case of Mercury Cash, a hosted-wallet solution for real-time liquidation and transfer of cryptocurrency and fiat assets. Recognizing the importance of being prepared for a new cryptoworld, Mercury Cash set out to explore various blockchain protocols to find the one…
Decentralized vs Distributed Systems Part I
Blockchain per se is not about decentralization; rather, it is a distributed system technology. The two terms, decentralized system and distributed system, are often confused, so much so that the term ‘blockchain’ seems almost synonymous with a public, decentralized system. The usual picture used to show the distinction between decentralized versus distributed systems is the…
Technologies of Blockchain Part 4: Conclusion
In parts 1, 2 and 3, we briefly touched on some of the historical foundations of blockchains from computer science and mathematics, including their sub-topics such as distributed systems and cryptography. Specific topics in either of these categories were consensus mechanisms, fault-tolerance, scaling, zero-knowledge proofs, etc. Obviously, this brief series doesn’t do justice. The history…
Technologies of Blockchain Part 3: Cryptography, Scaling, and Consensus
In Part 2, we saw how a simple concept of a linked list can morph into complex, distributed systems. Obviously, this is a simple, conceptual evolution leading up to blockchain, but it’s not the only way distributed systems can arise. Distributed systems need coordination, fault tolerance, consensus, and several layers of technology management (in the…
Technologies of Blockchain – Part 2: Distributed Systems
We saw in Part 1 that linked lists provide the conceptual foundation for blockchain, where a ‘block’ is a package of data and blocks are strung together by some type of linking mechanism such as pointers, references, addresses, etc. In this Part 2, we will see how this simple concept gives rise to powerful ideas…
Technologies of Blockchain – Part 1: The Foundations
Blockchain is not just a single technology but a package of a number of technologies and techniques. The rich lexicon in the blockchain includes terms such as Merkle trees, sharding, state machine replication, fault tolerance, cryptographic hashing, zero-knowledge proofs, zkSNARKS, and other exotic terms. In this four-part series, we will provide a very high-level overview…
The Three Fallacies of Smart Contracts
Smart contracts have become popular due to the extensibility of the Ethereum blockchain beyond its main foundation as a cryptocurrency platform, where it competes with Bitcoin. The phrase ‘smart contract’ caught on in the popular imagination. After all, contracts are important mechanisms for transacting business, and what better than to make our contracts smart with…
Forking – the New ‘F’ Word in Blockchain
Forking seems to be an integral part of the Blockchain architecture. This is due to Blockchain’s decentralized nature and the need to establish systemic trust among multiple participants (who are generally unknown to each other and therefore untrustworthy by definition). To most of the non-technical population and a fair amount of the technical population as…
Joining Hyperledger to Revolutionize Tokenization of Private Securities Globally
We are thrilled to announce our membership in the Hyperledger Project. This was a carefully thought-out decision, but given the nature of our business, a fairly easy one to make. Our roots are in providing managed compliance-related services to private companies globally. Building on this experience and success, we are well into executing on our…
A Big Lesson from the Delaware Blockchain Amendments
Andrea Tinianow, the founding director of the Delaware Blockchain Initiative (and ‘Blockchain Czarina’), recently published a very insightful article on the significant gap in the mainstream protocols for security tokens. The gap is in the way the Delaware Blockchain Amendments are interpreted by the mainstream security token platforms. The Delaware Blockchain Amendments were an outcome…
A Security Token for Full Lifecycle Compliance
ICOs suffer from disapproval from not only the SEC but also several media that have banned ICO advertising. This disapproval seems justified, since many of the ICOs had no business plans, no product, no service, no credible team, and no roadmap for generating value. Of the remaining well-intentioned ones, the problem of passing regulatory scrutiny for…
Introducing the KoreChain
The KoreChain is the first blockchain on a serious industrial-strength infrastructure that is focused exclusively on the complex world of global financial securities. The KoreChain is a permissioned Hyperledger Fabric blockchain. This gives it the native advantage of Fabric, a blockchain platform that has been engineered from the ground up for handling enterprise-class applications. KoreChain…