Global Food Giant Dole Adopting Blockchain Technology on Massive Scale
Global Food Giant Dole Adopting Blockchain Technology on Massive Scale Daily Hodl Staff April 26, 2020 Dole Food Company, Inc. is teaming up with IBM, Walmart and other partners to implement a blockchain-based solution across its entire supply chain.
Dole first began testing IBM’s enterprise-grade production blockchain platform in 2017, using it to boost the confidence of retailers and consumers by tracking and verifying the authenticity of its products
In case of a recall due to food contamination, Dole highlights the fact that blockchain technology can help accurately identify each point along the supply chain for its products, adding a secure layer of transparency, streamlining the recall process and resolving food safety investigations in seconds instead of weeks.
The California-based company says the rollout will be complete by 2025, expanding its 2019 blockchain integration for salads and fresh vegetables, where supply chain data is already being shared with several retail customers.
Consumers will also eventually be able to discover the origin of the food they eat by scanning packaging for product detail information.
Dole is the single largest vegetable and fruit producer in the world and operates in 90 countries with around 36,000 employees.
The top coins failed to fix their short-term growth. As a result, most of the cryptocurrencies have returned to the red zone. The only exception is Bitcoin SV (BSV), whose rate has increased by 1.58% over the last day.
BTC/USD
Yesterday's Bitcoin (BTC) price forecast came true as the correction occurred. However, the daily candle closed above $6,000 which means that the short-term bullish trend is about to continue.
The more likely projection is that Bitcoin (BTC) could reach $6,400, which is the nearest resistance zone.
At press time, Bitcoin is trading at $6,143.
ETH/USD
As it usually happens, when the rate of Bitcoin (BTC) falls, the price of the chief altcoin travels downwards even faster. The current situation is an exception to the rule. Over the last 24 hours, the rate of Ethereum (ETH) has declined by 7.54%.
At press time, Ethereum is trading at $131.57
XRP/USD
XRP is showing better price dynamics than Ethereum (ETH), but worse than Bitcoin (BTC). Since yesterday, the rate of the third most popular crypto has gone down by 6.36%.
The growth of XRP has not been cancelled. According to the daily chart, bearish sentiments are getting weaker. This is confirmed by the declining selling trading volume. Moreover, the blue line of the Moving Average Convergence/Divergence (MACD) indicator is about to cross the red line, which is a bullish signal. All in all, traders might see XRP trading at $0.17 next week.
At press time, XRP is trading at $0.1570.
Bitcoin's difficulty is set to plunge
As reported by U.Today, Bitcoin's mining difficulty hit an all-time high of 16.55 trillion on March 10. Its adjustments occur every 2016 blocks to reflect market conditions.
After the historic 38 price drop on March 12, many miners were forced to shut down their rigs that are no longer profitable, but the expected difficulty decline will allow them to get back to business.
It is worth noting that Bitcoin's hash rate also plunged to 82 TH/s due to miner capitulation, Blockchain data shows.
Osho Jha is an investor, data scientist, and tech company executive who enjoys finding and analyzing unique data sets for investing in both public and private markets.
The week of March 9 was a ride regardless of what market you trade and invest in. Markets spiking up, markets spiking down, longs taking drawdowns, shorts getting stopped out on intraday bounces. While investor sentiment across markets was negative, there was also a sense of confusion as “there was nowhere to hide” in terms of assets. Interestingly, I’ve yet to speak with anyone who made a “real killing” in that week’s trading. The ones who fared best are the ones who moved out of assets and into USD/hard currency and now have many options as to where to vest that capital.
On March 12, bitcoin having already traced down from $9200 to $7700 and then to $7200 in the prior few days, plunged from $7200 to $3800 before spiking up and settling in the $4800 to $5200. The move tested the resolve of bitcoin bulls who had expected the upcoming halving to continue to drive the price higher. Similarly, sentiment towards the crypto king and leading decentralized currency plunged with many pointing to bitcoin’s failure to be a hedge in troubled times - something that was long assumed to be a given due to the “digital-gold” nature of bitcoin. I, however, believe that these investors are mistaken in their analysis and that the safe haven nature of bitcoin is continuing.
See also: Noelle Acheson - Why Bitcoin’s Safe-Haven Narrative Has Flown Out the Window
Earlier that week, I wrote a short post on my thoughts around the BTC drawdown from $9200 to $7700. In it, I pointed out that gold prices were also taking a drawdown along with stocks and rates. My suspicion was there was some sort of liquidity crunch happening causing a cascading fire sale of assets. This more or less played out exactly as one would expect, with all markets tanking later in the week and the Fed stepping in with a liquidity injection for short
To thrive amidst your competitors in this digital age, you need to work on having an effective communication network, and blockchain technology is revolutionizing how businesses function due to its range of benefits. Industries including finance, healthcare, manufacturing, education and telecommunications have made its adoption a criticial priority. According to a Deloitte survey, 53 percent of fintech companies believe blockchain has become vital for their organization. PwC’s 2018 global blockchain survey also confirmed that 84 percent of companies, including the likes of Amazon and Facebook, are already dabbling in it. And expectations are high that blockchain will become even more widespread over the next several years.
Data Security
Data security is everything for businesses, as it ensures that their records are not susceptible to an attack. Nonetheless, businesses have been hacked time and again for relying on traditional methods of storage. In 2013, there was a data breach on Yahoo’s database and three billion records were affected. Likewise, data pertaining to Capital One credit cardholders (100 million Americans and six million Canadians) was hacked in 2019.
Blockchain, on the other hand, is a secure platform for storing information. It uses cryptographic techniques, Merkle trees, hash functions and public and private keys to make it difficult for a hacker to alter its content. The immutable nature of this technology ensures that stored content cannot be changed. Also, its high-level security makes it less susceptible to cyberattacks. Interestingly, there are many blockchain projects (e.g. Eximchain and Signal) working on enhancing how businesses would safely communicate data.
Data Privacy
While blockchain's content is open and accessible to anyone, there are permissioned and permissionless blockchains. The latter ensures that sensitive information is kept away from the public's eye.
Bitcoin has been consistently processing blocks more slowly as of late. For the past few days, the block time on the network has been more than 13 minutes.
Blocks times are slowing down on Bitcoin’s network. Although block times have a tendency to stay stable, this is the first such spike since late 2018.
A man who enforced anti-money laundering under two U.S. presidents has been named the CEO of the Libra Association
May 6, the Libra Association announced the appointment of Obama’s former under secretary for terrorism as its first CEO.
Stuart Levey served as an under secretary for terrorism under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, focusing on the enforcement of all U.S. anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing laws by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). In his most recent position, he served as the chief legal officer at HSBC.
Levey’s appointment continues a trend of Libra trying to make peace with regulators
Bipartisan support
The press release quotes Katie Haun, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and Libra Association board member who led the CEO search committee:
“Stuart brings to the Libra Association the rare combination of an accomplished leader in both the government, where he enjoyed bipartisan respect and influence, and the private sector where he managed teams spread across the globe. This unique experience allows him [...] strike the right balance between innovation and regulation.”
Empowering billion people while keeping bad players out
In his statement, Levey emphasized the importance of empowering a billion people while preventing illicit activity:
“I am honored to join the Libra Association as it charts a bold path forward to harness the power of technology to transform the global payments landscape. Technology provides us with the opportunity to make it easier for individuals and businesses to send and receive money, and to empower more than a billion people who have been left on the sidelines of the financial system.”
Under scrutiny from the U.S. government, Libra has had to make some compromises to its original vision. Perhaps, Levey, who enjoyed bipartisan support while in office and who has vast experience in the field of financial regulation is the man who will move the project forward in the face of increasing competition.
Ethereum's block count has just reached 10 mln, which represents a significant milestone for the second-largest cryptocurrency.
According to Luit Hollander, it took more than 15 zettahashes of computing power to mine this gargantuan number of blocks over the course of five years. The genesis block of the biggest altcoin was mined on July 20, 2015.
Ethereum, along with its eccentric co-founder Vitalik Buterin, came to prominence during the ICO bubble. It came close to flipping Bitcoin in June 2017.
After a strong start in early 2020, the price of ETH had its biggest daily crash to date on March 12 but has since surged back above the $200 level
This achievement comes on the verge of Ethereum 2.0. The proof-of-stake iteration of the cryptocurrency, which is also called Serenity, is expected to get off the ground in July with the launch of the Beacon Chain.
China will begin trialling payments in its new digital currency in four major cities from next week, according to domestic media.
In recent months, China’s central bank has stepped up its development of the e-RMB, which is set to be the first digital currency operated by a major economy.
It has reportedly begun trials in several cities, including Shenzhen, Suzhou, Chengdu, as well as a new area south of Beijing, Xiong’an, and areas that will host some of the events for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
State-media outlet China Daily said it had been formally adopted into the cities’ monetary systems, with some government employees and public servants to receive their salaries in the digital currency from May.
Sina News said the currency would be used to subsidise transport in Suzhou, but in Xiong’an the trial primarily focused on food and retail.
A screenshot purported to be of the app required to store and use the digital currency has been circulating since mid-April.
Some reports also claim businesses including McDonald’s and Starbucks have agreed to be part of the trial, however in a statement Starbucks told the Guardian it was not a participant. McDonald’s been contacted for comment.
Digital payment platforms are already widespread in China, namely Alipay, owned by Alibaba’s Ant Financial, and WeChat Pay, owned by Tencent, but they do not replace existing currency.
Xu Yuan, associate professor at Peking University’s national development research institute, told broadcaster CCTV that because cash transactions were offline and transaction data from existing payment platforms was scattered, the central bank was unable to monitor cash flow in real time
Although there is little change from the perspective of user use, from the perspective of central bank supervision, future forms of finance, payment, business and social governance etc, this is the biggest thing ever.”
On 17 April, the digital currency research institute at the People’s Bank of China, which is developing the system, said the research and development of a digital renminbi was “advancing steadily” and top-level design, functional research and development, and debugging had largely been completed, according to a CCTV report.
Progress on the digital currency was reportedly spurred on by Facebook’s announcement in June it intended to launch one itself.
The sovereign digital currency, which will be pegged to the national currency, has been under development for some years but in August the bank said it was “almost ready”. However, the following month, the bank’s governor, Yi Gang, said there was no timetable for release.
“A sovereign digital currency provides a functional alternative to the dollar settlement system and blunts the impact of any sanctions or threats of exclusion both at a country and company level,” last week’s China Daily report said.
It may also facilitate integration into globally traded currency markets with a reduced risk of politically inspired disruption.”
A decline in cash usage is expected to continue amid the growing popularity of digital payment platforms and as people avoid physical contact during the coronavirus pandemic.
In a touch more than 24-hours time, the third bitcoin halving will take place on May 12, 2020, on or around 9:50 p.m. ET. Miners will see their revenues slashed in half from 12.5 coins to 6.25 BTC after the halving and speculators wonder what will happen after the event. Currently, according to Google Trends the term “bitcoin halving” is one of the most searched topics within the crypto ecosystem today.
On Saturday evening give or take a few hours and minutes, the BTC network will experience the third block reward halving in its history. The first two halvings correlated with gigantic price surges and speculators are assuming the next “quantitative hardening,” will produce the same effect. The first block halving occurred in November 2012 and the price per BTC jumped from $11 per coin, to around $1,150 toward the end of 2013. Similarly, the second halving, which took place in July 2016 also saw a massive spike in bitcoin’s value. The price immediately after the 2016 halving was around $650 per BTC and the price surged to $19,600 on December 17, 2017. There has always been a great number of people who theorize that the third halving will produce the same outcome, but there are many skeptics who disagree.
A halving is when the blockchain protocol changes the reward for miners every 210,000 blocks mined, which is roughly around 4 years per interval. Before the 2012 halving, miners got 50 BTC and after the event, the reward was reduced to 25 BTC per block. After the last halving event, miners saw the 25 BTC reward slashed to 12.5 coins per block. This process, sometimes referred to as “quantitative hardening,” is of stark contrast to quantitative easing (QE) practices central banks partake in. The system will continue to produce block rewards and halve every four years, until on or around the year 2140.
Essentially, Nakamoto’s system is a synthetic form of inflation protection, that is meant to keep BTC scarce over the course of its history. Estimates show that right now BTC’s per annum inflation rate is around 3.6% and after May 12 it will drop to 1.8%. BTC’s inflation rate will meander around 1.8% until the next halving and will likely be around 1.1% following the fourth block reward reduction. Estimates also show that through the year 2025 and the halving in 2026, BTC’s inflation rate will be as low as 0.4%. The next 1.8% inflation rate will be lower than the world’s central banks’ benchmark reference rate. Soon after that, the issuance will even outshine the precious metal gold. Basically, what that means is it will be slower to produce than all the gold mined on earth being added to circulation, and gold mining rewards don’t cut in half every four years either.
The halving is not only a big deal as far as scarcity is concerned, but it will also have economic implications on miners. Every halving miners get their revenues cut in half and in order for them to profit, the price must balance the amount of capital they are putting into operations. Miners want to profit and if transaction fees and the overall price of BTC is lower than what they are spending, they will be forced to shut down. Following the third halving, miners will not be the biggest sellers of BTC, and cryptocurrency exchanges will be taking that position away from them.
The two things cryptocurrency supporters will be watching closely during the BTC halving on and after May 12, will be the cryptocurrency’s hashrate and price. Some skeptics believe that if the price of BTC doesn’t outweigh the costs to mine, then there will be a lot of miner capitulation. This means the hashrate or overall security of the proof-of-work chain would reduce in miners left in mass exodus. If the price jumps above the cost to mine blocks and higher, then the hashrate should increase and the security will also be bolstered even more so. The firm Tradeblock assumes the price per BTC needs to be at least $12,500 per coin to avoid miner capitulation.