Blockchain developer AMIS (帳聯網路科技) yesterday announced that its new consensus algorithm has been adopted by JPMorgan Chase & Co’s Ethereum-based blockchain to help meet the US giant’s need for high throughput processing using the distributed ledger technology.
AMIS and JPMorgan are founding members of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, which develops the Ethereum blockchain.
Unlike public blockchains — such as the one that underpins bitcoin — Ethereum can produce both public and private blockchains, which is more suitable for enterprises such as JPMorgan as it develops Quorum, a private blockchain to process interbank and cross-border transactions.
Dubbed the Istanbul Byzantine fault tolerant consensus protocol (Istanbul BFT), the new tool markedly reduces the complexity and energy consumption of verifying transactions made on the blockchain, compared with conventional blockchains that use “proof of work” methods.
In public blockchains, the proof of work is often competitive and driven by financial gains for the participants in the form of “blockchain mining,” which requires heavy computation work.
Under the new protocol, verification is conducted by a clique of pre-approved nodes with “proof of authority,” AMIS chief executive officer Alex Liu (劉世偉) said.
Although the new protocol does not bring immediate financial gains for AMIS, it is an important open-source contribution to the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, the most active community of blockchain technology developers, Liu said.
“The protocol is a vital part of efforts aimed at building the next evolution of the Internet of Value, similar to the creation of the TCP/IP protocol earlier in the history of computer networks,” Liu said.
It is hoped that blockchain will replace the infrastructure for financial transactions, which is strewn with redundant agencies across disparate incompatible systems, resulting in slower processing speeds and higher fees, Liu said.
JPMorgan is also considering the benefits of adding automated regulatory filings to yield compliance cost savings, company developers said via a Web stream at a news conference in Taipei.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
India’s ban of online money-based games could drive addicts to unregulated apps and offshore platforms that pose new financial and social risks, fantasy-sports gaming experts say. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned real-money online games late last month, citing financial losses and addiction, leading to a shutdown of many apps offering paid fantasy cricket, rummy and poker games. “Many will move to offshore platforms, because of the addictive nature — they will find alternate means to get that dopamine hit,” said Viren Hemrajani, a Mumbai-based fantasy cricket analyst. “It [also] leads to fraud and scams, because everything is now
MORTGAGE WORRIES: About 34% of respondents to a survey said they would approach multiple lenders to pay for a home, while 29.2% said they would ask family for help New housing projects in Taiwan’s six special municipalities, as well as Hsinchu city and county, are projected to total NT$710.65 billion (US$23.61 billion) in the upcoming fall sales season, a record 30 percent decrease from a year earlier, as tighter mortgage rules prompt developers to pull back, property listing platform 591.com (591新建案) said yesterday. The number of projects has also fallen to 312, a more than 20 percent decrease year-on-year, underscoring weakening sentiment and momentum amid lingering policy and financing headwinds. New Taipei City and Taoyuan bucked the downturn in project value, while Taipei, Hsinchu city and county, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung
RSS