Weekly NFT roundup April 14-20: real-world applications grow through postage and insurance

The last week saw practical real-world applications of NFTs grow with the certification of CaseMail's NFT postage technology, as well as the development of an insurance system for NFTs, solidifying their growing importance in the blockchain industry.

CaseMail’s NFT postage labels first to be certified by USPS

The United States Postal Service (USPS) has certified CaseMail’s NFT-based postal tracking and content verification technology.

CaseMail tokens can be...

21 April 2021 | Blockchain

EY ramps up blockchain offering with procurement and visualisation tools

EY (Ernst & Young) has continued its blockchain momentum with two new releases of an enterprise network procurement offering and visualisation tool.

The EY OpsChain Network Procurement tool, built on the EY OpsChain platform, will aim to allow companies to run private, secure, end-to-end procurement activities on Ethereum.

"As more and more companies work as part of global business networks, it has become difficult to manage network-level agreements from inside a...

28 September 2020 | Banking

Everledger, GIA and JD.com team up for diamond provenance ‘inter-chain collaboration’

Everledger and JD.com have announced the successful implementation of an 'inter-chain collaboration' with the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) to help increase trust and transparency in diamond provenance.

The Everledger blockchain platform syncs GIA diamond grading information to the JD Blockchain anti-counterfeiting and tracing platform, which provides customers with independently verified diamond certificates and origin information through JD.com's app, mobile and desktop...

25 August 2020 | Applications

Santander redeems $20 million bond using Ethereum – reports

Spanish multinational commercial bank Banco Santander has redeemed a $20 million (£15.2m) bond through the Ethereum blockchain.

According to the company, the move intends to make issuing bonds quicker, efficient and simpler. Santander also said that the bond will remain of the Ethereum blockchain until the end of its one-year maturity.

John Whelan, head of digital investment banking at Santander, tweeted on December 10 that the company had ‘just performed an early...

13 December 2019 | Banking

Figure Technologies closes $103 million series C round to boost blockchain for lending mission

Figure Technologies, a financial technology company announced that it has closed a $103 million (£78.3m) series C funding round led by Morgan Creek Digital and joined by MUFG Innovation Partners and other new and existing investors.

The company’s goal is to help stakeholders lend money through the use of blockchain technologies. Key products include Figure Home Equity Line, which aims to provide approval for a line of credit in as little as five minutes, as well as...

11 December 2019 | Funding

Inter-American Development Bank to use blockchain for land administration in South America

Washington-based Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has collaborated with blockchain platform ChromaWay on an initiative focused around land administration and registry.

The project, titled “Distributed Ledger Technology (Blockchain): The Future of Land Titling and Registry”, is a two-year initiative that will be carried out in Bolivia, Peru, and Paraguay and will launch in November 2019.

The blockchain project will be closely aligned with the IDB Lab – an...

29 October 2019 | Insurance

Samsung SDS pilots a blockchain-based medical claims processing system

samsung blockchain insurance medical

Samsung’s IT solution developer Samsung SDS is expected to roll out a blockchain-based medical claims processing system in October.Yoon Shim, a vice president of Samsung SDS, said at the Blockchain Seoul 2019 event that the firm has been piloting the system since August 2019. Samsung SDS is 22.6% owned by Samsung Electronics and 17.1% owned by Samsung C&T.

Yoon added that medical institutions and insurers have participated in the pilot to validate the effectiveness and the...

17 October 2019 | Healthcare

CULedger teams up with IBM to offer blockchain services for credit unions

CULedger, a provider of blockchain-based technologies to help credit unions, has collaborated with IBM to use permissioned blockchain technologies to create an immutable audit trail that can be utilised to build new business models.

By creating a permissioned blockchain-based network, CULedger will make the identification authentication, regulatory compliance around KYC, lending and payments processes better and simple so that consumers can conduct any interactions requiring...

13 March 2019 | Insurance

Ken Marke, CMO, B3i: From provocation to demonstration with blockchain for insurance

For some industries, the mere mention of the word blockchain over the past couple of years has seen them all but take leave of their senses. Words like ‘disruption’ and ‘transformation’ are bandied around like candy with nary a thought for practical applications, long-term strategy, and what, heaven forfend, might go wrong.

Thankfully, the insurance industry doesn’t appear to have been gripped by this collective madness – if the Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative...

18 February 2019 | Insurance

How will blockchain impact the insurance sector?

what effect will blockchain have on the insurance sector

Insurance is one of the oldest industries, and can be seen as representing part of the growth of the modern business which has come to define societies all over the world. While insurance in a form we would recognise today began with the first insurance contract in 1347, methods for transferring and distributing risk in a monetary economy have been observed in China in the third millennia BC. One thing that has defined the insurance sector over thousands of years is its ability to adapt its...

21 February 2018 | Insurance