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    • Jun 14

👉Issue #70 of QX Snapshots is out!




Welcome to QX Snapshots - a weekly recap of the key news on emerging technologies. In this newsletter, you will get a "digest" of the latest info on Enterprise Blockchain, AI, Quantum Technology, and Metaverse. Hope it brings you value :)


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Every Friday we share key snapshot news on AI, Quantum Technologies, Metaverse, and Enterprise Blockchain/DLT.


Join our +400 trusted readers at U.S Bank, Eurasian Development Bank, EY, Morgan Stanley, BNY Mellon, Microsoft, Verizon, Facebook, ServiceNow, ConsenSys, Polygon Labs, Duke University, Sky, Informa, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Santander, and others.





[Blockchain] Fidelity International Tokenizes Money Market Fund on Onyx; Ripple and Archax Boost Tokenized Assets on XRP Ledger; Word Federation of Exchange and Policy Lab Papers. Fidelity International has tokenized a money market fund using JPMorgan's Onyx Digital Assets blockchain (private permissioned Ethereum). The move aims to improve efficiency in delivering margin requirements and reduce transaction costs and operational risk. Fidelity International sees this as a first step in scaling its technology adoption, with plans to expand across various asset classes.  Meanwhile, Ripple and Archax have expanded their collaboration to bring hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) onto the XRP Ledger (XRPL) in the coming year. The partnership combines Ripple's enterprise blockchain solutions with Archax's capabilities as a U.K. Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)-regulated digital asset exchange, broker, and custodian. Also, Bitcoin Suisse, a financial services provider managing $5.57 billion in assets, has issued an investment-grade, overcollateralized tokenized bond on the Polygon blockchain in partnership with Obligate, an on-chain capital markets platform. The bond, settled using USDC, allows qualified investors to invest directly in private debt issuance through Obligate. Bitcoin Suisse will use the funds to support the growth of its domestic lending business. The  World Federation of Exchanges, the global industry association for exchanges and clearing houses has published a paper presenting tokenization as a natural evolution in the financial industry, following the move from paper share certificates to dematerialization.  And, the Policy Lab has published its first white paper, written by Natasha Vasan, on legal issues related to settling financial transactions using public blockchains. The research, funded by a Policy Lab Research Hub grant, argues that public blockchains can be used to settle financial transactions even without deterministic settlement finality, countering skeptics who argue that permissioned blockchains are the only solution. 


[AI] Shreds.AI’s Software Development with Generative AI; Mistral AI Raises $640M for AI Model Expansion; New LiveBench Tool Measures AI Model Accuracy. Shreds.AI claims it can create enterprise software automatically from natural language descriptions using generative AI, slashing development times by 80%. The Paris/San Francisco-based company says it achieves this by harnessing up to a dozen large language models through a "meta AI" approach. Shreds accepts specifications, generates architecture diagrams/microservices, and produces full codebases that human developers simply review and validate. As proof, Shreds plans to release a WordPress re-write in Java, completed in 3 hours versus the estimated 91 person-years. It also will publish a Magento clone. Shreds is already in beta at Stellantis and a French utility. Meanwhile, Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI raised $640 million in a Series B round led by General Catalyst, valuing the company at $6 billion. Mistral aims to develop foundational AI models to rival OpenAI's GPT-4, Anthropic's Claude 3, and Meta's LLaMA 3. It has released open source models like Mistral 7B, 8x7B, and 8x22B under Apache 2.0 license, while offering proprietary models like Mistral Large via paid APIs. With backing from investors like Microsoft, Nvidia, and Salesforce, Mistral seeks to attract enterprise customers while pushing AI capabilities. Also, a group of researchers, including Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, has developed LiveBench, a new open-source benchmark for measuring the accuracy of large language models on question-answering tasks. LiveBench aims to avoid the "contamination" issue where models are trained on benchmark data, as well as the inaccuracies from using LLMs to evaluate other models' responses. It provides a regularly updated set of 960 questions across reasoning, data analysis, math, coding, language and instructions - with ground-truth answers to score models directly. LiveBench minimizes contamination by sourcing new content monthly from recent datasets, papers, articles and movies. This allows unbiased evaluation without relying on potentially flawed external LLM judgements.


[Quantum Technology] Quantinuum Simplifies Quantum State Preparation; Venturus and QuEra Forge Quantum Innovation Center in Brazil; Welinq and EDF Launch AQADOC for Energy Optimization with Quantum Computing. A Quantinuum-led team has established new protocols that significantly reduce the complexity and resources required for quantum state preparation - a crucial step in quantum algorithms. The innovation employs Fourier and Chebyshev series expansions, avoiding computationally expensive subroutines. This approach uses polynomially fewer resources with better asymptotic scaling than many non-heuristic methods. The team successfully prepared representative multivariate quantum states with applications in quantum chemistry, physics and finance on Quantinuum's 24-qubit trapped-ion processor. The versatile, modular protocols ease setting up complex calculations, potentially accelerating quantum computing adoption across scientific and commercial fields by improving accessibility. Meanwhile, Venturus, a major Brazilian science and technology institute, and QuEra Computing have collaborated to establish the Center of Excellence for Quantum at Venturus in São Paulo. This partnership aims to drive quantum computing innovation in Latin America through workforce training, applied research, and developing quantum algorithms and applications for industries like agriculture, finance, healthcare, logistics, and cybersecurity. Educational programs and events are planned to build a skilled quantum workforce in the region. Also, Welinq, in collaboration with EDF, has launched the AQADOC project funded by Ile-de-France Region. It aims to advance distributed quantum computing for energy production by leveraging interconnected quantum processor units (QPUs) from providers like Pasqal and Quandela. The consortium, including Lip6, Le Lab Quantique, Teratec, and GENCI, will develop algorithms for battery simulation, optimal energy routing, and complex simulations in dams and power plants.


[General technology] Reachy2 Humanoid Robot Unveiled by Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics; State Hackers Exploit Fortinet Flaw; Christie's Confirms Data Breach. Hugging Face's Le Robot team and Pollen Robotics showcased Reachy2, an open source humanoid robot trained using machine learning to perform tasks like placing cups on dish racks and handing objects to humans. The robot learned from 50 teleoperated VR sessions, with the dataset and model open sourced. Reachy2 features 7-DoF bio-inspired arms with 3kg payload capacity per arm, advancing open robotics accessibility. The github repo is available: here. Meanwhile, state-sponsored threat actors exploited a critical Fortinet FortiGate (FortiGate firewalls are known for their high performance, deep security capabilities) vulnerability (CVE-2022-42475) to gain access to 20,000 systems worldwide, including those of Western governments, international organizations, and defense companies. The actors had knowledge of the zero-day flaw at least two months before public disclosure, infecting 14,000 devices during this period. They deployed a backdoor called COATHANGER for persistent access and launched further malware from compromised appliances targeting edge devices. Also, the auction house Christie's has disclosed that 45,798 clients were impacted by a recent cyberattack where data was stolen by the RansomHub ransomware group. This is significantly lower than the 500,000 figure initially claimed by the attackers. According to filings, the stolen data included client names and ID document numbers. Christie's is offering affected individuals 12 months of credit monitoring services, stating it believes the data has not yet been misused. The breach occurred between May 8-9, when unauthorized actors accessed Christie's systems and exfiltrated files before the company detected the incident on May 9. Christie's did not pay the ransom demand, leading RansomHub to post a sample of the stolen data on its leak site. The incident disrupted Christie's website ahead of an $840 million art auction.









🔊Announcement: Today marks the conclusion of the review period for the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) Interoperability Specification Draft. As co-chairs of the DLT Interoperability Working Group, we at QualitaX will work with our fellow EEA members and other ecosystem stakeholders to address all the valuable feedback and insights submitted during this review process. We sincerely thank everyone who has taken the time to contribute their expertise and help us refine and improve this specification.



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