The five-day Unitize virtual blockchain conference organized by BlockShow and San Francisco Blockchain Week ended with the final session on Friday. The event saw appearances from Heath Tarbert, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum; and Tim Draper, a serial blockchain investor, as well as other speakers from a diverse pool of market segments both within and outside the crypto space. Blockchain adoption, decentralized finance, central bank digital currencies and the future of Bitcoin (BTC) dominated the conversation in many of the panels. The event also saw speakers chart possible paths forward for …

Central Bank Digital Currencies, or CBDCs, have been an increasingly popular topic in the cryptosphere and financial world as a whole, especially with the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. In the United States, the need for a universal electronic payment system for stimulus checks gave rise to a proposition for the creation of a digital dollar and its implementation. While members of the U.S. government move to create a CBDC on the back of the pandemic, it doesn’t end there. A recent report by the Bank for International Settlements has also revealed that the development of CBDCs may be accelerated …

The government of South Korea is trying its best to adopt blockchain technology in various industries. The country’s central bank is reviewing the use of a central bank digital currency, and various government ministries want to adopt decentralized identification features within their current systems. Hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and research centers are also looking at blockchain solutions. Everyone knows that blockchain can help the medical industry, but at the same time, applying a new blockchain service structure to traditional industries is not so quick and simple. Lots of testing needs to be done before it can be to be applied in …

Retail and enterprise blockchain adoption trends dominated the discussions on days three and four of the ongoing virtual conference Unitize, organized by BlockShow and San Francisco Blockchain Week and sponsored by crypto derivatives exchange ByBit. The key topic that dominated discussion was blockchain adoption, which continues to spread across the globe, with governments and corporate establishments developing solutions based on distributed ledger technology. Exploring the blockchain development landscape Speaking during one of Wednesday’s panels at the conference. Yi Ming Ng, a member of the Tribe Accelerator project in Singapore, and Marloes Pomp, a blockchain consultant with the Dutch government, shed …

Development of China’s central bank digital currency, or CBDC, continues to show signs of progress. On July 8, a major domestic e-commerce platform and a video sharing site both joined the CBDC project, according to local news. Companies Meituan and Bilibilibili have apparently both begun to cooperate with a number of banks involved in the digital Yuan project. Meituan is a major service platform with over 240 million consumers and five million local merchants, and Bilibilibili is known as China’s largest video sharing website. In addition, Chinese multinational tech group, ByteDance, is also said to be in close discussion with …

The first two days of Unitize, the virtual conference organized by BlockShow and San Francisco Blockchain Week, have come and gone with speakers from various sectors of the emerging crypto and blockchain space. Developments around central bank digital currencies, as well as the impact of COVID-19 on the industry, have taken center stage during the first two days of the event. Crypto and blockchain adoption amid the pandemic The COVID-19 outbreak continues to dominate discourse across the social, political, economic and several other facets of human life. Thus, it was unsurprising to see the novel coronavirus featured in multiple panels …

Chinese ride-hailing juggernaut DiDi Chuxing has joined the digital yuan project, a CBDC developed by the People’s Bank of China, or PBoC. According to an announcement DiDi shared with Cointelegraph earlier today, the company has entered into “a strategic partnership” with the Digital Currency Research Institute of the PBoC. Together, DiDi and the PBoC’s think tank will reportedly work to bring the DC/EP solution to the former’s large-scale transportation network, which DiDi also refers to as “the world’s largest one-stop on-demand transportation platform.” The statement reads: “Under PBOC’s overall DCEP strategy and operation timeline, DiDi's DCEP taskforce will design and …

Speaking on a Unitize digital conference panel, Peter Dittus, chief economist for SFB Technologies, said he does see a place for privately-issued stablecoins. "I don't see a great future," Dittus said of stablecoins on the June 7 panel, live streamed by Cointelegraph. Two stablecoin classifications exist Stablecoins exist in two categories — privately issued and CBDCs, according to Dittus. Issued by governments, CBDCs essentially turn paper cash digital, with each coin representing the value of the nation's currency to some degree. Privately issued stablecoins also often hold to the value of various national currencies, although private entities run these assets, …

International interoperability will become the cornerstone of the CBDC race as it goes forward, according to Douglas Arner, director at Asian Institute of International Financial Law at the University of Hong Kong. Speaking at the Unitize blockchain conference earlier today, Arner argued that the interconnections between different global economic systems will become “one of the biggest challenges — and one of the biggest opportunities” as more countries are becoming involved in CBDC projects across the globe. In Arner’s view, the Chinese financial system already has some predispositions for the cross-border adoption of the upcoming digital yuan project, like the renminbi …

China’s central bank digital currency is usually identified as a way to challenge the dominance of the U.S. dollar, not Bitcoin (BTC). But it may struggle to find adoption in niches where crypto versions of the dollar thrive, primarily Tether (USDT). At the Unitize panel on Monday, Charles Yang from Genesis Block explained why the DCEP, commonly referred to as digital yuan, is not particularly attractive as a crypto replacement. Speculation and payments Yang identified two key drivers of crypto adoption, specifically in Asia. The first is speculation, noting that traders from countries such as Korea and China have a …

Having learned what it needs from the cryptocurrency space and blockchain, China will aim to rival the U.S. dollar, not Bitcoin (BTC), with its highly-anticipated digital yuan. Matthew Graham, a veteran investment banker in China and the CEO of Beijing-based Sino Global Capital — analyzed what is known so far about the forthcoming digital currency and argued that the Chinese government sees new technologies as a “leapfrog opportunity” to chip away at the dollar’s hegemony. Speaking with Boxmining founder Michael Gu at the Unitize conference on July 6, Graham said that even though it’s extremely difficult for China to internationalize …

Central Bank Digital Currencies, or CBDC, may just be one of the most important trends over the next decade claims Visa’s head of crypto. Cuy Sheffield, who runs credit card giant Visa’s crypto projects, tweeted that “as governments evaluate CBDC, the path they decide to take will have major implications for privacy, monetary sovereignty, geopolitics, and financial inclusion, as well as global adoption of crypto dollars and Bitcoin.” He said: “I'd argue that central bank digital currency (CBDC) is one of the most important trends for the future of money and payments over the next decade. Regardless of anyone's personal …