In my opinion, these are the major impactful and interesting news and articles this week, which are shaping the fusion of blockchain and asset management. Purpose will prevail: we can look forward to an Ethereum & ASIC tug of war. The HSEX strategic imperatives on data and market tech products are interesting. We see an interesting trend in origin tracing for food products, with multiple real cases coming from retailers. It’s very interesting to note that not only typical tech-cloud providers like MS Azure and Amazon Web Services and typical blockchain platform providers like Ethereum or EoS but also verticals like Ant Financial are entering the BaaS (blockchain backend as a service) space. It’s worth noting how a strong crypto-mining country like Iceland talks about blockchain, especially the reuse of the infrastructure.  Things can happen in the market, and smart contracts have to be defined in even stronger terms: now imagine this case of a Norwegian black swan!

Most Notable News

1. Ethereum at gunpoint with ASIC miners: Purpose will prevail
2. Brazilian Brokerage Behemoth Launches Bitcoin Exchange
3. Report: Hong Kong Stock Exchange Eyeing Blockchain Firm Acquisitions
4. Swiss Bankers Ease Access for Crypto Startups to Prevent Mass Exodus
5. Dutch Supermarket Giant Adopts Blockchain to Make Orange Juice Production Transparent
6. Alibaba’s Ant Financial to Launch Blockchain Backend-as-a-Service Platform
7. Icedland aiming to be a pure blockchain business country
8. South Korean Gov’t Pledges Support for BlockChain Startups to Facilitate Industry Growth
9. Norwegian Power Trader Facing Bankruptcy After Massive “Black Swan” Loss

Most Investment-Related Notables

Non-fungible tokens are getting very interesting from an investment angle. Cryptokitties and decentraland are two of the first, but there are many coming in arts, music, and other creative industries. Here’s something like coinmarkercap for NFT market caps. Secondly, ERC 1404 is very interesting for banks, with multiple regulations, compliance and controls – could be powerful.

1. NFT marketcaps
2. Restrictive token standard for Banking ERC 1404

Most Interesting Insightful Reads

There are a lot of lessons to be drawn from cofound.it winding down – the state of the ICO market, what utility vs shareholder rights means in a real context, how such a winding down could be put in the governance model and in smart contracts themselves. Read on.

Cofound.it – winding down

In our opinion, the major impactful and interesting news and articles this week that is shaping the fusion of blockchain and asset management.

Most Notable News

1. 65 projects related to Environment listed by WEF
2. Coinbase marching into Wall Street
3. ECB take on digital Euro
4. Korea partnering with Samsung on blockchain
5. France preparation for ICO framework

Most Investment related Notables

1.  Wave of crypto-institutionalization
2. Crypto market 80 Trillion USD in 15 years

Most Interesting Insightful Reads

Practical review into first stable coin DAI

Tweet of the week