Word on the Block: Hester Peirce
The U.S. government needs to provide more clarity and guideposts for crypto regulations — and better cross-agency coordination is needed, said U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) commissioner Hester Peirce in an exclusive interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau. “It is really quite challenging right now for projects, and people are thinking about different ways to do that in a way that’s compliant. But there are no easy answers because we haven’t provided that clarity on how to do it,” Peirce said.
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Word on the Block: Changpeng Zhao
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao — also known as “CZ” — praised bitcoin as a “better form of value” over fiat currencies, explaining that its advantages became apparent during the 2020 economic turmoil. Zhao’s comments followed a 20% plunge in bitcoin prices from its all-time high of over US$40,000 on Jan. 8 and then tumbled 20% for four days before recovering. Bitcoin is currently trading at around US$35,000 at the time of publication.
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Word on the Block: Charles Hoskinson
Fortune 500 companies looking to expand more into developing economies in Africa and the Middle East need a faster and cheaper payment system for local transactions. IOHK and Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson says his company is going to start “pursuing aggressively the Fortune 500” to sell them on Cardano and the ADA coin as the solution. “A Fortune 500 company needs new tools to be able to get into that market and work with those consumers,” Hoskinson said, in an interview with Forkast.News. “We can facilitate that because we’ve been in those jurisdictions, especially Ethiopia, for example, for over three years.”
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Word on the Block: Benjamin Sauter
A common misperception is that lost or stolen bitcoin is gone forever. But as blockchain forensics continues to evolve, identifying, tracing and recovering hidden crypto assets may have already become easier than traditional asset recovery. A court order signed by a U.S. federal bankruptcy judge last month in the Northern District of California granted relief to the liquidators of a three-year old US$32 million cybertheft. The assets stolen from U.K.-based crypto exchange Dooga — then registered as Cubits — were traced through forensics technology to wallets stored in two U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchanges.
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Word on the Block: Mrinal Manohar
Although Microsoft Azure has been gradually closing the gap, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has topped the world’s cloud infrastructure services in market share again in Q4 of 2020 — a peek into the future potential of how CasperLabs can help “morph” China’s Blockchain Service Network into the AWS of the blockchain industry in the Web 3.0 era. “People watch Netflix all the time,” said CasperLabs CEO Mrinal Manohar in a video interview with Forkast.News. “Almost the entire infrastructure is on AWS [and] you’re using AWS even if you don’t know about it.”
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Word on the Block: Jim Nasr
Jim Nasr is the founder and CEO of Acoer, an Atlanta-based blockchain-enabled applications developer with a focus on healthcare. Last year, Acoer employed Hedera Hashgraph‘s distributed ledger technology (DLT) to create a coronavirus-tracking application. “If you are using blockchain and using it correctly as we are, you can show that [healthcare] data provenance, and it can be interrogated by anybody on demand. What it doesn’t guarantee and really nobody can guarantee this is that the point of origin data collection is accurate,” Nasr told Forkast.News in a previous interview. Hedera Hashgraph has recently been adopted for the cold chain monitoring of Covid-19 vaccines for the U.K.’s National Health Service hospitals, according to a statement from Hedera Hashgraph.
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