At the Ethereum Developer Conference on November 9, Microsoft announced that it would offer blockchain building blocks as part of its Azure cloud hosting platform; the Ethereum Blockchain as a Service (EBaaS) offering allows developers to quickly launch an Ethereum environment which includes code building blocks for SmartContracts and a semi-private testing environment with a blockchain which then can be migrated to the public Ethereum environment; the offering is in partnership with development house ConsenSys. Source
ConsenSys has hired Tyler Smith as its new director of energy and consulting; the firm has its headquarters in New York and focuses on global blockchain development; Smith joins the firm from BHP Billiton where he was the head of blockchain for the world's largest natural resources company; he has also been involved with numerous activities involving blockchain development; his work at ConsenSys will focus on Ethereum blockchain solutions for the energy industry. Source
ConsenSys has announced their latest venture, a peer to peer trading company called CarbonX; CarbonX plans to tokenize carbon credits; the company is backed by a co-founding group that includes the Tapscotts, authors of Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business and the World; Joseph Lubin, Founder of ConsenSys stated, "As one of the fastest growing companies working on Ethereum, a platform that is poised to reformat how the world organizes itself, ConsenSys is committed to enabling technologies to be built that will facilitate attention to externalities like pollution and critical new foundations like sustainability. CarbonX has the potential to incentivize behavior that contributes to environmental sustainability, and is an excellent example of Ethereum-based technologies poised to make positive change." Source
The new initiative will promote engagement with those involved in blockchain; it will also monitor new developments to help inform policy making; the European Commission allocated a budget last year and sought out bids for a services contract to set up the observatory; the contract was won by ConsenSys. Source
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New York-based ConsenSys has been elected to advise the City of Dubai on the first ever blockchain city technology effort; the initiative is led by the Smart Dubai Office and IBM, the government's strategic partner; as part of the Dubai Blockchain Strategy 2020, the city of Dubai will now require all government records and transactions to be documented using blockchain technology. Source
Event follows Ethereal Summit hosted by ConsenSys earlier this year; will include panels, live music, discussions and workshops about blockchain; the event will focus on making blockchain technology easier to understand and is being marketed as a culture focused event rather than a technical one; Cointelegraph provides a list of featured speakers. Source
CarbonX is a peer to peer personal carbon trading company; it was formed in a joint venture between ConsenSys and a co-founding group which includes Don and Alex Tapscott who authored the book Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business and the World; according to Blockchain Daily News, “The company plans to purchase carbon credits, or invest in reduction projects, and re-cast the offsets as ERC20 tokens on an Ethereum-based blockchain, then distribute them through an open-loop style loyalty rewards program.” Source
Wall Street trading firm TrueEx is launching a derivatives platform for cryptocurrency and they have also entered into a partnership with ConsenSys; the partnership with ConsenSys will focus on building a benchmark for ether; the derivatives marketplace is pending review by the CFTC and is looking to list non-deliverable forward contracts for cryptocurrency. Source.
From a financial incumbent point of view, if you are going to mutualize infrastructure, you need to actually mutualize the infrastructure. This means solving the game theory problem of accidentally giving away the value of your back office systems to your biggest, best-funded bank competitor -- not a competitive equilibrium. To that end, technology companies are a natural place for maintaining crypto systems. However, note that public chains today already have the benefit of billions of dollars in cyber-security spending (i.e., mining) and the dedicated engineering of thousands of open source developers. By choosing to use a public chain, you get this out of the box. With a proprieraty solution, even if the end-results are open-sourced, community is impossible to replicate. Maybe this is why IBM bought Red Hat for $34 billion, and Microsoft bought GitHub for $7 billion.