UCL CBT Blockchain Research Showcase Presentations
The UCL CBT ran its first blockchain research showcase where awardees from the first Call for Proposals presented their findings. The event took place on Thursday 20th February at UCL in London, UK. Learn more about the research proposals and watch the presentations here.
Hedera Hashgraph Virtual Hackathon
UCL CBT is supporting the Hedera Hashgraph Hackathon! Find out more here and register to take part here.
- Registration Opens: April 7th
- Hackathon Dates and Duration: Hacking begins May 1st and ends June 12th, 6 weeks total
- Hackathon Focus: We are focusing on projects that will take advantage of our latest service, the Hedera Consensus Service to verifiably prove an action, perform real-time audits, or take advantage of fairly ordered transactions.
- Prizes: Over $35,000 worth of HBARS, cash prizes, hardware prizes as well as acceptance into an accelerator program run by a partner.
News from CBT Associates
Margie Cheesman has co-authored a piece published with Big Data & Society which incorporates reflections on humanitarian blockchain implementations and concepts of self-sovereign identity.
Philippe Rixhon is pleased to share a recent publication entitled ‘A new framework for copyright policy?‘ in the Kluwer Copyright Blog.
Paul Momtaz is pleased to share two recent publications. The first is titled ‘Entrepreneurial Finance and Moral Hazard: Evidence from Token Offerings‘. This paper studies Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) to provide the first-ever evidence of a moral hazard in signalling in this entrepreneurial finance context. The second is titled “Initial coin offerings, asymmetric information, and loyal CEO“. This paper’s findings are consistent with the hypothesis that asymmetric information between entrepreneurs and investors entail agency costs that are decreasing in CEO loyalty.
Tina Ehrke-Rabel and Lily Zechner, both based at the Department of Tax and Fiscal Law at the University of Graz (Austria) and research fellows at UCL CBT, co-authored a paper on the value added tax (VAT) treatment of cryptocurrency intermediation services, which was recently published in KluwerLaw’s ‘Intertax’. In the paper, the authors assess how intermediaries on blockchains, i.e. exchange platforms and wallet providers, are to be treated for VAT purposes. Since bitcoin’s primary use has continually shifted from means of payment to speculation, the authors challenge the view that the European Court of Justice’s 2015 decision Hedqvist still applies today. Find the paper here.
Giovanna Massarotto has recently published an article “Antitrust in the Blockchain Era” in the Journal on Emerging Technologies, which explores the transition from digital to blockchain markets using the Web as a model of reference. It further investigates the crucial role of antitrust in such a transition and decentralization process going through some relevant past antitrust cases in the field of IT. The paper is available here.
Navroop Sahdev shares the vision of the new global macroeconomy following the coronavirus pandemic in her latest Forbes article “Rebooting the Global Economy: Physical Scarcity to Digital Abundance” by separating physical resources from digital-first systems, along with Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, MIT and Lawrence Wintermeyer, Forbes. Comments can be submitted to info@thedigitaleconomist.com. The Digital Economist was launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Jan 23, 2020 with 16 partner organizations including MIT Connection Science, UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies and Global Digital Finance.
Michail Basios and Leslie Kanthan published on Arxiv, their first version of the: “Cryptocurrency Trading: A Comprehensive Survey“. This work was presented at the UCL CBT awards presentation and the link to that is available at the top of this email.
Hossein Nabilou has a new working paper out on Bitcoin governance titled “Bitcoin Governance as a Decentralized Financial Market Infrastructure“.
Block-Sprint 2019: A Recap
Videos of the Block-Sprint winners’ pitches and highlights of the competition can be found here including a write-up on LinkedIn here. Watch out for the next one in 2020.
UCL CBT Releases Report on DLT in the Supply Chain
The UCL CBT, with the support of the Retail Blockchain Consortium (RBC), have created a market report looking at the adoption of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) in physical supply chains. This report is the first comprehensive outlook on the state of DLT in the global physical supply chain sector. As part of this report over 100 different projects have been analysed including start-ups, corporates, consortia and government that are implementing various aspects of DLT in the applications areas of tracing (provenance), logistics, financial transactions, retail operations and circular economy. Get a copy of the report here.
Community News, Events and Jobs
En[code] ThunderCore Blockchain Pre-Accelerator ‘Club’ – Encode Club are running an online pre-accelerator over the coming months. It will take the best early stage blockchain projects worldwide and help them take the leap to becoming a fully fledged startup, with the help of ThunderCore’s technology. Lasting 10 weeks, accepted projects will work with the En[code] team weekly to build out your project, supported by Grant funding, Workshops, Mentoring and Help preparing for investment. Applications close on 12th April and the Club starts in mid-late April. If you have any questions, email anthony@encode.club. Read more here. Apply here.
En[code] ThunderCore Blockchain Pre-Accelerator ‘Club’ – Encode Club are running an online pre-accelerator over the coming months. It will take the best early stage blockchain projects worldwide and help them take the leap to becoming a fully fledged startup, with the help of ThunderCore’s technology. Lasting 10 weeks, accepted projects will work with the En[code] team weekly to build out your project, supported by Grant funding, Workshops, Mentoring and Help preparing for investment. Applications close on 12th April and the Club starts in mid-late April. If you have any questions, email anthony@encode.club. Read more here. Apply here.
Future Learn have several courses that are directly releveant to the pandemic:
COVID-19: Tackling the Novel Coronavirus, with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Managing COVID-19 in General Practice, with St George’s, University of London
How to Teach Online: Providing Continuity for Students, our very first FutureLearn branded course
UCL CBT are creating an online blockchain course with Future Learn – look out for that in the summer!
Future Learn have several courses that are directly releveant to the pandemic:
COVID-19: Tackling the Novel Coronavirus, with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Managing COVID-19 in General Practice, with St George’s, University of London
How to Teach Online: Providing Continuity for Students, our very first FutureLearn branded course
UCL CBT are creating an online blockchain course with Future Learn – look out for that in the summer!
BeatCorona is creating a DLT based platform in order to combat COVID-19 in Africa. The aim of the platform is to share information, data and resrouces to fight the pandemic. Learn more here and contact the project directly at info@beatcorona.io