A major online retailer's blockchain fund added VinX, a blockchain-based wine venture, to its portfolio last week. VinX plans to develop a token-based digital wine futures platform based on the Bordeaux futures model. Given the importance of grape and barrel provenance, the industry is ripe for a more efficient and transparent way to track ingredients. The platform will seek to use blockchain technology to link wine consumers directly with wineries and develop a validation system that will reduce the rate of fraud in the wine industry – experts estimate that 20 percent of all wine in the world is counterfeit. In a recent report, a technology research company predicts that blockchain enterprise solutions in the global agriculture and food supply chain market will be worth over $400 million in the next five years. According to the report, the sector is currently worth $60.8 million and is predicted to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 47.8 percent to $429.7 million by 2023. The report predicts that to drive implementation, blockchain solutions will need to address difficulties like food fraud, which costs the global food industry roughly $49 billion annually.

Earlier this week, a business media giant announced plans to move its content to a distributed ledger-based platform provided by Civil, a blockchain-based journalism company. Through the partnership, both companies aim to provide audiences with an unprecedented level of transparency in news content and expand their influence to a broader audience. As part of the partnership, Civil will permanently archive the media company's existing content to Civil's decentralized platform, where the content can't be removed or altered. Also this week, Meridio, a blockchain-based real estate company, launched its first real estate leasing product, reLease. The product allows anyone to rent workspace for the day through a reservation platform built on top of blockchain smart contract and payment systems. Typically, residential and commercial leasing transactions involve rental applications, paper legal contracts, security deposits, and wire transfers – reLease seeks to eliminate this onerous and time-consuming process by using blockchain technology to digitize the contract and payment processes.

On the international front, a Chinese energy company announced plans to develop a cryptocurrency mining farm that can produce up to 300 megawatts (MW) of photovoltaic power for mining – for comparison, the Bitcoin network consumes roughly 200 MW of energy per day for mining. A recent report shows that crypto-mining is gradually becoming less profitable as electricity prices are steadily increasing. While miners saw a $1.4 billion increase in profits during the first three quarters of 2018 compared to the profits in all of 2017, mining is only becoming profitable for the larger players that can afford to continue opening new pools. An ex-employee of the mining giant Bitmain has launched a new crypto-mining chip company, MicroBT, claiming better power efficiencies than Bitmain's. According to estimates by a consulting firm, the crypto-mining market is anticipated to grow to $17 billion by 2022.

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