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Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) CEO Lisa Su surprised in more ways than one with the release of the company’s Q1 earnings on April 25, 2018. Not only was it a feather in her cap to learn that AMD has surpassed Q1 estimates, Su also revealed that only a small percentage of income was derived from the broad cryptocurrency arena.  Su confirmed that data centers and the gaming community were seen as prime areas of commerce for the company going forward. “Gaming is a great market, there are lots and lots of gamers – from casual gamers to real enthusiast gamers – and we’re addressing that entire segment,” Su said.

She added that in the data center market, all players were looking for “more power in the cloud, so they’re really great market segments.” The company’s shares rose 11 percent immediately after the Q1 report was released, and a further one percent the following morning.  Samsung Takes Up the Slack as AMD Stays True:  While Su felt that the current emergence of blockchain was more of a distraction to AMD than anything else, Korean giant Samsung has reaped its due rewards for recently initiating a dedicated production of the ASIC chips used in cryptocurrency mining.  Discussing strategies for moving ahead, Su reiterated the company’s focus areas, saying that “Blockchain is a very important technology. The idea that you can do all these peer-to-peer transactions and a decentralized market, but it’s a bit of a distraction at this point. We want to focus on the core markets,” she said.  Samsung meanwhile has reported a 58 percent year-on-year growth in operating income for the first quarter of 2018. The jump in revenue is at least partly attributable to strong demand for its digital coin mining chips.

Bitcoin slumped, dragging down smaller rivals such as ether and litecoin, as concerns that regulators will tighten their grip on the market weigh on the the world’s largest cryptocurrency. Regulators in China and South Korea are increasing oversight on cryptocurrency trading and mining, while the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission late last year started cracking down on some digital token sales, known as ICOs. Coinmarketcap.com’s decision to exclude Korean pricing data for coins helped create the appearance of a large drop in prices, which some traders attributed as playing a part in the selloff.  "News on the regulatory front is dragging down cryptos," said Gabor Gurbacs, director of digital-asset strategy at VanEck Associates Corp. "South Korea and China tightening is weighing on bitcoin and in the ICO market, things started slowing down, with the SEC cracking down on illegal offerings."  Bitcoin slumped as much as 17 percent to $14,820, the most in more than two weeks. The rout in bitcoin is part of a broader selloff in the cryptocurrency realm, with all of the top 10 by market cap falling, and most tumbling by at least 10 percent, according to Coinmarketcap.com. Cardano fell 16 percent, while litecoin slumped as much as 16 percent to as low as $230. Bitcoin is little changed this year after surging about 1,400 percent in 2017.

Apple has recently submitted a new patent application that uses Blockchain within a prospective system for creating and verifying timestamps.  Based on the public application to US Patent and Trademark Office on Thursday where Blockchain technology was used to certify timestamps as a program combined with Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) tools.  Apple's application describes three possible methods for establishing timestamps, with one of these scenarios centering on a Blockchain platform. There is a use case in question where data stored involves tying a piece of information to a particular transaction on a Blockchain, establishing the state of that data at a particular point in time.

The program would generate a block containing a timestamp, with every subsequent block being added as miners verify each transaction conducted on the chain. This system is part of what Apple is calling a "multi-check architecture," meaning that another system would confirm the timestamp after the block is generated but before it is added to the chain. Like other established institutions, Apple believes in the power of Blockchain technology and its benefits.  Apple has seen the benefits of how the transactions are verified and approved by consensus among participants in the network, making fraud more difficult. The technology operates on a distributed rather than centralized platform, with each participant having access to exactly the same ledger records, allowing participants to enter or leave at will and providing resilience against attacks.

A total of 13 Blockchain startup companies were included in the latest CBS Insights Fintech 250 startup list as of early October 2017. The report compiles “emerging fintech startups that are changing the face of the fintech industry.” It also cites the booming growth of the financial technology (fintech) sector.

The major industries where the bulk of the companies on the list come from include the processing and payment infrastructure, capital markets and trading and wealth management. Also included in the top six are mobile banking, business lending and merchant services.  The Blockchain industry, meanwhile, is among the smaller industries in the fintech sector.

Bosch, BNY Mellon, Cisco, Gemalto, U.S. Bank along with Bitse, Chronicled, ConsenSys, Ledger, Skuchain, Slock.it, HCM International of Foxconn Group, IOTA, Oaken Innovations, Qtum, Chain of Things, Big Chain DB announced the official launch of the Trusted IoT Alliance, a group of companies united to catalyze the development of a blockchain-enabled, trusted Internet of Things (IoT). The mission of the Trusted IoT Alliance is to bring companies together to develop and set the standard for an open source blockchain protocol to support IoT technology in major industries worldwide.  

• The goal of the Alliance is the creation of a trusted IoT ecosystem that links cryptographic and registrant identities, along with metadata, to give objects the equivalent of digital, transferable "birth certificates," that can be inventoried and managed across blockchain networks.
• An object or "thing" could be an internet-connected machine or product, ranging from a car to a drone, package, sneaker, lithium-ion battery, or energy meter. On top of this trusted IoT platform, the group sees potential to automate business logic through smart contracts and building a thriving Machine-2-Machine economy.
• The Alliance is blockchain agnostic and will support integration across any open source enterprise blockchain or distributed ledger technology platform that has potential to become a backend for widespread commercial and industrial adoption. The Alliance aims to foster interoperability and interworking across blockchain platforms, applications, and in doing so remove barriers to broad scale adoption of blockchain technology. 

While this won't exactly bring responsibly farmed salmon to the masses -- after all, Whole Foods stores will remain in high-rent neighborhoods -- the price reductions could draw in curious new shoppers and present brick-and-mortar retailers with a dilemma. Do they follow suit and see their margins squeezed, or hold fast and risk sacrificing sales in one of the few areas of the food industry that's actually growing?  "Changing prices across the board is not a simple process for most retailers," said Greg Portell, a partner at consulting firm A.T. Kearney. "It takes time and labor. What Amazon has done is bring a level of dynamic pricing that will have to be matched by anybody selling food. It will disrupt the way the sector works."  Kroger shares rose 2.8 percent on Friday after falling 8.1 percent Thursday, while Costco alternated between losses and gains following Thursday's 5 percent decline. Friday, shares of Royal Ahold Delhaize NV, the Dutch company that operates the Giant Food and Food Lion chains, dropped as much as 7.6 percent in Amsterdam.  Even European companies with no ties to the U.S., such as Great Britain's Tesco Plc and France's Carrefour SA, saw their shares decline. Amazon said it would also cut prices in its 9 U.K. stores.

We are already seeing multiple tests of all of these technologies to different degrees across the industry. While just scratching the surface of potential, these tests are important to keep pace with consumer expectations.

• AI and Machine Learning: Organizations are testing the use of chatbots to improve customer service, while machine learning is being used to decrease fraud and improve personalization.
• Robotic Process Automation: Alerts and notifications are being automated with RPA.
• Internet of Things: Mobile device geolocation is increasingly being used for enhanced credit/debit card security, with firms also testing the use of voice-first digital assistants to conduct transactions.
• Blockchain: Blockchain technology is being used by many firms for secure document transfer and to reduce settlement costs.
• Open Banking APIs: Several traditional banking organizations are partnering with non-traditional providers to offer expanded banking services.

This month's cryptocurrency boom isn't limited to bitcoin. Over the last 24 hours, two of bitcoin's biggest rivals—Litecoin and Ethereum's ether—have enjoyed huge price gains. Trading volume has been so intense that one of the leading cryptocurrency exchange services, Coinbase, has suffered downtime.  "Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled," read a notice on the Coinbase status page around 2pm Eastern time. That issue was resolved around 45 minutes later, while trading in litecoins was disabled for about 90 minutes earlier in the day. The status page lists both ether and litecoin trading as having a "Major Outage."  Bitcoin's price has also been doing well over the last 24 hours—but those gains were largely regaining ground lost over the weekend. Bitcoin recently passed $17,000, roughly the same value the currency reached last Thursday.  Over that same four-day period, ether's value has risen 35 percent, from $450 to $620. Ether is the currency of Ethereum, a blockchain-based network that offers a Turing-complete virtual machine that allows people to run computer programs called smart contracts.  Litecoin has soared an astonishing 150 percent in four days, from $130 to $325. Litecoin is one of the Internet's first "altcoins." It has features similar to bitcoin but is able to confirm transactions more quickly. The rising price of litecoin and ether is part of a broader cryptocurrency boom. CoinMarketCap, a handy database of cryptocurrency prices, shows almost every cryptocurrency in the green over the last 24 hours, with many posting double-digit gains.

Lie #1: Bitcoin is Like Something Else:  This fallacy is so prevalent, frankly, because Bitcoin really isn’t much like anything else. There are some similarities between Bitcoin and, say, the US dollar or gold or even tulips, but the differences far outweigh the similarities.

Lie #2: Bitcoin is Secure:  Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and ‘crypto’ means secure, right? Not so fast. Bitcoin has proven appallingly easy to steal, and even easier to lose.

Lie #3: Bitcoin is Money:  Take a $20 bill and put it under your mattress. Wait ten years and retrieve it. What is it worth? $20, of course. Sure, inflation will have likely reduced its value somewhat, but $20 will always be $20. Such is the nature of money.

Not so with Bitcoin. It’s more of a commodity that acts as a speculative vehicle, while exhibiting few of the properties of money.

Lie #4: Bitcoin has Intrinsic Value Outside of its Minability

I analyzed the question of Bitcoin’s intrinsic value in a previous article, concluding that its only intrinsic value (that is, value outside of its market value) is due to the fact that people have to mine it.  Figures vary widely due to shifting hardware and electricity costs as well as economies of scale, but the cost of mining one Bitcoin is somewhere in the neighborhood of $800 to $1,500. Furthermore, all the Bitcoins now or in the future exist because someone mined them. So when you buy a Bitcoin from a miner, you are essentially paying them to mine it – and it’s only worth the trouble for them if you’ll pay them more than it cost them.Note that mining Bitcoin is very different from mining gold, say. Gold’s intrinsic value goes well beyond its minability, as it is desirable for many other reasons outside of its market value. Comparing Bitcoin mining to gold mining is, you guessed it, an example of Lie #1.

Lie #5: Bitcoin is Not in a Bubble

A Bitcoin’s intrinsic value is around $1,000 while its market value bounces around between $15,000 and $20,000 (or some other crazy number depending on when you’re reading this). The difference is pure speculation – one fool’s bet that a greater fool will be willing to buy that Bitcoin for more than the first fool paid for it.

Lie #6: You’ve Made Money on the Bitcoin You’re Holding

The largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange struggled to keep up with record traffic as the price surged, with an upcoming launch of the first bitcoin futures contract further fueling investor interest.  Proponents say bitcoin is a good medium of exchange and a way to store value, much like a precious metal. They also argue it is preferable to traditional currencies because it is not subject to central bank manipulation. The supply of bitcoin will eventually be capped at 21 million, and some 16.7 million have already been released.  But critics say that the price run-up is a bubble that has been driven mostly by speculation, leaving bitcoin vulnerable to a sharp reversal. JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) Chief Executive Jamie Dimon famously called bitcoin a fraud in September. “Bitcoin remains a major gamble as it is very much an asset that remains in uncharted waters, we’ve simply not experienced this before,” said Nigel Green, founder and chief executive of deVere Group.  “Also, an asset that goes almost vertically up should typically raise alarm bells for investors,” he added.  The world’s biggest cryptocurrency has surged seventeen-fold in value so far this year. The latest move brought its so-called market cap, its price multiplied by the number of bitcoins in circulation, to nearly $305 billion, according to Coinmarketcap, a trade website. By comparison, the market value of Wal-Mart Stores Inc is around $288 billion.

The cryptocurrency market has exploded this year with over 1,000 digital currencies now on the market.    The price of bitcoin, the first and largest cryptocurrency, has captured the most attention, with Wall Street CEOs from JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon to Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfeinweighing in on the coin this month alone. 

It's up over 450% this year at near $4,400 per coin.   But bitcoin's meteoric rise doesn't mean that it'll be the top-dog crypto forever. 

Matthew Goetz, a former Goldman Sachs vice president and cofounder of BlockTower Capital, a Connecticut-based crypto hedge fund, recently told Business Insider that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are technologies like any other, and as a result, are susceptible to being usurped by a digital currency with superior tech.   "Bitcoin is the most entrenched, it has very stable protocol, it doesn't change a lot, and it has a very strong developer base, but at the end of the day it is still software," Goetz said. "There is some chance that something an order of magnitude better than bitcoin, technologically, could come along."

Mizuho Financial Group is partnering with tech conglomerate Hitachi to develop a blockchain platform for supply chain management.  Announced Thursday, the two companies have reportedly agreed to test a system built on technology from the open-source Hyperledger blockchain consortium to determine whether they can use an immutable ledger to record orders, invoices and otherwise collect data about company operations.  The ultimate goal, according to the firms, is to develop a record of every transaction that can be accessible by anyone in the company, thereby streamlining the process needed to order an item.  Right now, Hitachi's process involves ordering an item, confirming the order, creating an invoice and approving the invoice. Due to technical limitations and reliability issues, however, this process does not always work as desired.

Hitachi intends to incorporate its Lumada Internet of Things platform into the test to aid its data collection efforts and continue to build commercial products.  Notably, this is not Mizuho's first time testing a blockchain platform for the use case, as the firm recently completed a trade finance trial with several organizations. Other trials have included a rewards program and a research lab in the U.S.

“When we took a look at their system, we found a serious vulnerability and textbook insecure code,” Neha Narula, director at MIT Digital Coin Initiative and a researcher involved in uncovering the flaw, wrote in a blog post.Specifically, Narula and three other researchers claim they were able to break the homegrown hash function “Curl” that IOTA was using as part of its digital signature scheme, which ensures funds can only be spent by their rightful owners. They then demonstrated how an attacker could potentially forge a digital signature to steal a user’s funds.  It's important to note that IOTA has since fixed the flaw.  IOTA is currently the eighth largest cryptocurrency by market cap. The project pulled in 1,337 bitcoin (valued at $500,000 at the time) in an initial coin offering (ICO) in late 2015. And, through its Trusted IOT Alliance, the project partners with several notable companies, including Microsoft.

Historically, some banking activities such as trading have been relying heavily on analytics and cutting edge algorithmic tools. The coming of age of powerful data analytics solutions combined with the development of intelligent algorithms have created new opportunities for financial institutions.   Sebastien Meunier, Head of Digital for North America at Chappuis Halder & Co., discussed how these tools can be leveraged to develop a lasting competitive advantage in priority areas: customer analytics, financial crime prevention, regulatory compliance and risk management.