The Bank of Thailand (BoT) announced on Tuesday it was creating a central bank digital currency (CBDC) on Corda, a distributed ledger technology platform developed by the R3 consortium. The project, "Project Inthanon," is a collaborative effort by BoT and eight major private banking institutions, and seeks to create a prototype that enables domestic funds transfers within the country's interbanking system using CBDC tokens. The first phase of the project is set for completion by the beginning of 2019, after which the BoT will seek to expand the project to include third-party funds transfers and cross-border funds transfers.

Canada is proceeding on the trajectory it set in June 2017, when the Canadian government-funded research program Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP) hosted a blockchain kickoff session and revealed plans to implement the technology in administering funding for innovative projects to Canada's small and medium-sized businesses. Earlier this year, IRAP, through its National Research Council of Canada (NRC), launched Canada's first trial of a public blockchain technology to facilitate the transparent administration of government contracts. On Monday, NRC announced that it has built an Ethereum blockchain explorer hosted on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) through services provided by Bitaccess, a blockchain startup. The explorer allows users to search the Ethereum blockchain for published grants and contribution data.

In the United States, researchers at the University of California-San Diego won more than $800,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop the Open Science Chain, a distributed ledger that will serve as a living digital catalog to help researchers access and verify data from various scientific experiments. The web-based platform allows for an auditable means for researchers to provide metadata and verification information about their data sets, and update such data sets as they change and evolve.

At the local level, a prominent Ohio businessman is striving to make Cleveland the Silicon Valley of the blockchain era. Bernie Moreno, owner of numerous luxury car dealerships, is garnering support for "Blockland Cleveland," a $150 million blockchain technology initiative that has attracted the interest of other Ohio business and civic leaders. The plan intends to feature a physical campus that, over the next four years, would grow into a 300,000-square-foot Cleveland-based incubator with 2,000 startup desks for developers, 15 spaces for young businesses, an auditorium suitable for 300 people, fiber connections to support the building and a K-8 school.

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