Blockchain Report — 8/22/2018
By: Christopher Durr
Tags: Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Investing, News, Bitcoin

Summary: Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Is Getting Involved In A Blockchain Project; Energy Firm Announces Massive Cryptocurrency Losses During Blockchain Rebrand; U.S. Government Grants $800,000 To Blockchain Researchers

Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Is Getting Involved In A Blockchain Project

According to Coin Telegraph, Steve Wozniak has announced that he is planning to get involved with a blockchain project for the first time. He made this statement at the ChainXchange blockchain conference held in Las Vegas. Wozniak praised blockchain technology in an interview, stating:

“I’m involved with, very soon, my first time being involved in a blockchain company…Our approach is not like a new currency, or something phony where an event will make it go up in value. It’s a share of stock, in a company. This company is doing investment by investors with huge track records in good investments in things like apartment buildings in Dubai.”

Wozniak then compared Ethereum to the Apple’s app store, because they both allow thousands of companies and individuals to run their own applications. He said, “Ethereum provides the tools for a blockchain application of your own… I see more people using Ethereum that way.”

Energy Firm Announces Massive Cryptocurrency Losses During Blockchain Rebrand

According to Coindesk, energy firm Global Energy Resources International Group is planning to rebrand itself as a blockchain company despite the fact that the company has lost millions investing in cryptocurrencies. The firm is planning to change its name to “Global Token Limited”.

A company filing shows that the company has launched cryptocurrency trading platforms in Hong Kong, as well as making investments in cryptocurrency assets and blockchain technologies. A report disclosed by the company in August 10 shows that they invested a total of $2.4 million in cryptocurrency assets, which has had a near 50% loss of $1.02 million.

As a result of the losses from cryptocurrency and related blockchain investments, the company recorded an overall net loss of $6.3 million in the first half of the year, compared to just $573,277 in the same period last year.

U.S. Government Grants $800,000 To Blockchain Researchers

According to Coindesk, the U.S. government is helping to fund a distributed ledger platform being developed by researchers at UC San Diego. Subhashini Sivagnanam, a researcher at the San Diego Supercomputing Center, won $818,433 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop the Open Science Chain (OSC). The OSC is a ledger that will help researchers efficiently access and verify data collected through scientific experiments.

This is not the first time that the NSF has made a foray into blockchain technology. The NSF has funded a number of blockchain projects in previous years, including blockchain projects focused on cryptocurrency incentive mechanisms and blockchain technology use-cases.

Public records describes the OSC as the following:

“A web-based cyberinfrastructure platform built using distributed ledger technologies that allows researchers to provide metadata and verification information about their scientific datasets and update this information as the datasets change and evolve over time in an auditable manner.”

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