Early this week, a multinational technology firm and an Indian telecommunications firm joined the governance council of Hedera Hashgraph, a public, permissioned blockchain for enterprises. Hedera's public network reportedly facilitates micropayments and distributed file storage and supports smart contracts for private networks. Governance council members reportedly receive compensation for running nodes.
According to recent reports, a multinational professional services firm will provide the technology support for WiV Technology, a fine wine investment trading platform. WiV's platform seeks to enable investment trades of bottles and cases of wine and direct shipment from producers to a bonded warehouse with full traceability. The professional services firm has reportedly developed a non-fungible ERC-721 token structure for the platform that will be deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. Each wine case will be allocated a token that has a unique identifier and that stores the wine's properties, such as origin, quality and value, as metadata on Ethereum. A smart contract will then track the token ownership, provenance and transaction history.
In other recent enterprise news, Brave, a web browser that blocks advertisements by default, is estimated to have more than 226,700 verified publishers that use the platform. According to reports, this is a 1,200% increase in verified publishers over the past year. In related news, a new patent application for a blockchain-based web browser emerged late last week. The application comes from the same multinational technology firm that recently joined Hedera's governance council. The browser reportedly would collect prespecified information from web browsing sessions, such as websites visited, bookmarks, task performance, geolocation, plug-in installation and security patches, and then transfer the information to a network of peer-to-peer nodes for collection and storage.
Two blockchain patent applications from a multinational retail firm were recently published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The first patent application deals with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) blockchain-based coordination system, while the second patent application deals with a digital currency application. According to reports, the blockchain-based coordination system will be used to transmit key UAV information, such as identification numbers, flight heights, flight speeds, flight routes, battery information and loading capacity, to other UAVs. The firm reportedly sought a patent for a blockchain-based drone package delivery system in 2017.
To read more about the topics covered in this week's post, see the following:
- IBM, Tata Become First Big Techs to Back Hedera Hashgraph Blockchain
- EY helps WiV Technology accelerate fine wine investing with blockchain
- Number of publishers on Brave increased 1,200% since mid-2018
- IBM Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Web Browser
- Walmart Files Patent for Blockchain-Backed Drone Communication
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