Elrond Brings Its High Throughput And Fully Sharded Blockchain Infrastructure To The Trusted IoT Alliance

Elrond Network

Elrond Network, the scalable public blockchain that deploys sharding technology has announced that it has entered the Trusted IoT Alliance (TIoTA), joining a retinue of high-profile enterprises and developer organizations to create a collaborative consortium ecosystem at the forefront of IoT innovation.

The McKinsey Global Institute projects that nearly 30 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020, encompassing an overall IoT economic impact value between $4 trillion and $11 trillion by 2025. TIoTA’s 2025 goals include building a secure, interoperable, and scalable IoT ecosystem based on blockchain technology that is capable of facilitating M2M payments, autonomous supply chain management, and many more applications across multiple industries.

Elrond Network is ideally suited for the push into the next generation of the Internet, where scalable, public infrastructure will be necessary to support the frictionless transfer of value. Elrond is one of the blockchain projects spearheading the experimentation of scalable, interoperable infrastructure for the underlying technology.

The platform relies on a horizontal database partitioning technique called sharding, and, when blended with the network’s Secure Proof-of-Stake consensus (SPoS), provides a decentralized and highly performant blockchain. As a result, Elrond presents an optimal backbone for the ongoing work of TIoTA, and the network will be of use to the TIoTA’s enterprise members for hackathons and challenges meant to solve real-world problems.

The TIoTA Consortium is comprised of numerous projects at the bleeding-edge convergence of IoT application development and blockchain technology. Alongside major corporate partners, Elrond is positioned favorably to support the growth of TIoTA’s leading open-source software foundation.

Elrond Founder and CEO, Beniamin Mincu, commented: “Our immersion with the Trusted IoT Alliance is a significant step forward for realizing the practical and real-world applications of what Elrond Network can achieve. Alongside the likes of TIoTA’s enterprise, IoT and blockchain members, Elrond’s public, sharded blockchain can provide the infrastructure that is necessary for the digital economy to blossom.”

“Elrond provides a scalable value transfer protocol for the digital economy,” said Anoop Nannra, Chairman of the Trusted IoT Alliance and Head of Blockchain at Cisco. “We are thrilled to have Elrond join our organization and contribute to our collective goals to establish best practices for the market and too commercialize trusted initiatives.”

Elrond’s integration with TIoTA comes amid a flurry of recent developments for the project. The Elrond Testnet is already live and has demonstrated the performance of more than 10K transactions per second. Similarly, Elrond recently announced their partnership with decentralized oracle service, ChainLink, who made waves recently under the agreement with Google.

Russian Mobile Operators Join Forces To Help Find Missing People, With AI

Russian Artificial Intelligence

Mobile operators have joined the search for missing persons: they offer rescuers high-tech tools to analyze aerial photographs based on neural networks, sending SMS via Big Data and other tools. VimpelCom and the Liza Alert squad are testing the analysis of photographs taken from drones, while Megafon is testing subscriber surveys that could see a missing person. Other operators are ready to offer their services to search engines. Cellular companies that have access to subscriber locations must assume social responsibility, experts are safe. The legislation on personal data is loyal to the use of personal information to search for missing persons, he explained to Izvestia in Roskomnadzor.

The search and rescue squad “Lisa Alert” is testing a technology that allows you to search for missing persons by passing photos taken from drones through a neural network of self-learning. About this “Izvestia” said the head of the management on the use of drones “Lisa Alert” Alexander Lomonosov. VimpelCom developed the solution to find people who use a neural network. The network is now being trained to distinguish between images in which people or objects remain from images in which they are not, he explained. According to Alexander Lomonosov, both staged photographs and shots taken by Lisa Alert during actual searches are used for training.

Until now, volunteers helped rescuers filter aerial photographs posted on a special website, Anna Aibasheva, representative of VimpelCom, told Izvestia. To verify about 2.5 thousand pictures (as many Lisa Alert drones generate per day of searches), 30 people needed to work for 5 to 7 hours, that is, 150 to 210 man hours, he says. According to her, the neural network filters these images with an accuracy of 98% for 1 to 2.5 hours, depending on the number of photos. The algorithm is set to work at any time of the year and can recognize any person’s clothes, including camouflage. The flight altitude of the drones can be up to 100 m, according to a company representative. In general, the system makes it possible to save 2.5 times the time spent by volunteers.

In June, Megafon and Lisa Alert tested a social search service based on Big Data. The conclusion is this: the operator receives the approximate coordinates of the place where the last person was seen and sends messages to his close subscribers with his description. A mailing list can contain from 30 messages to 1 thousand, said a representative of a cell phone company previously. Only subscribers who have agreed to receive newsletters receive offers of help, he emphasized. 200 shipments have already been made, explains an operator employee. In general, personal data legislation is loyal to the use of personal information to search for missing persons.

The introduction of the technology that the Odyssey won is scheduled for 2020, it follows from the description of the competition. To search for the missing, LTE-450 cell communication technology is promising: it will allow troops to connect in remote and inaccessible places, where there is no network coverage of other operators, said Tele2 spokeswoman Daria Kolesnikova. This is especially true during the mushroom and berry harvest season, when a record number of people are missing in the forests, she says.

Ethereum Blockchain Network Crosses More Than 200,000 ERC20 Tokens Benchmark

Ethereum

Regardless of what you think of Ethereum (and altcoins in general), it is a fact that this network has had and had a great impact on the entire industry. While bitcoin is considered primarily as a means of payment, during the huge increases in 2017, the ether was the driving force and the means of payment in many cases.

The Ethereum network was really forced to assume that role: the tokens in the network shot up like mushrooms. Suddenly, everyone wanted to issue the so-called ERC-20 token. Since the launch of the network, more than 200,000 Tokens have been issued on the Ethereum network according to EtherScan.

ERC-20 is a technical standard for implementing tokens in the Ethereum chain. Almost all the coins or tokens issued on this platform belong to this category. The most important example is the ether. That is the fuel of the Ethereum network and it is also an ERC-20 token. With ether, it pays to make transactions, but also to execute smart contracts, for example.

These tokens are issued based on a smart contract. These contracts do not have to be ‘smart’ or super practical, therefore, it is a slightly unfortunate name. However, these smart contracts ensure that the network and tokens must comply with certain rules. Therefore, you can program your tokens in a certain way and give it certain properties.

In 2017, the initial coin supply trend began. Everything and everyone had to have their own record. Often that was only possible with ETH. Which resulted in prices well above $ 1,000 per ether. Current hodlers can only dream of that. Millions could be collected. And if you could make a good marketing talk, you could charge wonderfully. Because investors were ready to push their ETH earned so hard to another new company.

Billions in investments in projects, most of which have never added anything to the crypto space. On the other hand, there are some outliers. If you look at the top 100, most remain an ERC-20 token. The largest token, after ETH, is currently Binance Coin (BNB). But that currency will eventually move to its own chain. But also other currencies that are popular this year, such as Chainlink (LINK) and Basic Attention Token (BAT) have been issued on the Ethereum network.

Study Says Only 2% Of Bitcoin Transactions Relate To Anything Illegal

Elliptic, a research firm in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), investigated more than 200,000 transactions in the Bitcoin network for their connection with criminal activity.

In order to sort out 203,769 transactions for a total of $ 6 billion, the research team used a machine-learning algorithm. The results were highly controversial: 77% of transactions were not classified at all, 21% were recognized as full and only 2% were illegal. And yet, researchers confidently state that artificial intelligence can significantly increase the effectiveness of anti-money laundering procedures.

Less than month ago, a similar study was conducted by Chainalysis and, according to its data, the share of transactions in the Bitcoin network related to criminal activity in 2019 is estimated at about 1%. That is, in general, the data from Elliptic analysts are almost no different from the results of a study conducted by Chainalysis. Note that in 2012 this figure was 7%.

Law enforcement agencies often turn to Elliptic for help, especially when it is necessary to identify cases of illegal use of cryptocurrencies. Algorithms developed by the company help determine whether Bitcoin is used for legitimate purposes, for example, by people who do not have access to banking services, or if unknown attackers try to use cryptocurrency for illegal activities.

“Despite the high performance indicators of our algorithms, their use is still fraught with some problems, the largest of which is false positives. The main objective of this study was to reduce the number of such responses. However, the key conclusion is that such machine-learning algorithms are very effective at detecting illegal transactions, ”said Elliptic co-founder Tom Robinson.

Robinson also noted that in some cases, the system detected patterns for which it is difficult to find a description, but they corresponded to confirmed cases of illegal activities related to darknet markets, attacks by ransomware and other criminal activity.