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. 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.
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[Blockchain] UK Finance's RLN Experiment Phase Outcomes, Broadridge's DLR Platform Reaches $1 Trillion in Monthly Volume, WisdomTree Launches Tokenized Asset Platform, and Societe Generale-FORGE Deploys Stablecoin on Solana. The UK Finance Regulated Liability Network (RLN) Experimentation Phase, involving major banks and partners was successfully completed. This new type of financial market infrastructure aiming to enhance payments and settlement through tokenization and programmability, demonstrated potential benefits in reducing fraud, improving home-buying efficiency, and lowering failed payment costs. It showed promise in delivering economic value, supporting innovation, and providing new firms access to established institutions. The project aligns with the Bank of England's objectives for the payments sector. Meanwhile, Broadridge has announced that a Tier-1 Canadian Bank has implemented its Distributed Ledger Repo (DLR) platform for High-Quality Liquid Asset (HQLA) treasury securities management. Broadridge's DLR platform is expanding globally across sell-side and buy-side firms, creating a network effect and supporting various transaction types. The platform's monthly volume has reached $1 trillion, reshaping the global repo market. Also, WisdomTree has launched WisdomTree Connect, a new platform enabling access to tokenized real-world assets (RWA) for a broader range of users, including businesses and institutions. The platform complements WisdomTree Prime, offering digital asset solutions across the customer spectrum. It allows firms to access yield-generating products like the WisdomTree Government Money Market Digital Fund (WTGXX) on-chain, bridging traditional and decentralized finance. Users can receive digital records of funds in their wallets and transfer them peer-to-peer. Initially available via web portal and API, the platform supports purchases in US dollars or USDC, with tokens minted on Ethereum and plans for expansion to other blockchains. And, Societe Generale-FORGE plans to deploy its MiCA-compliant EUR CoinVertible (EURCV) stablecoin on the Solana network. This integration aims to provide users with faster, more efficient, and cost-effective access to digital payments and DeFi applications. The deployment will expand EURCV's use cases within the DeFi ecosystem, enabling liquidity provision and new application development.
[AI] LinkedIn to Automatically Opt Users into AI Data Sharing, Google Enhances AI Transparency in Search, and New 21M Persona Dataset Released on Hugging Face. LinkedIn is updating its user agreement to automatically opt users into sharing their data for AI training, effective November 20. This affects users in the U.S., Canada, and several other countries, but not the EU and Switzerland due to stricter privacy laws. Users can opt out by adjusting settings in their Data Privacy section. The company is using this data to train its own AI models for content creation and recommendations, and possibly sharing with other providers like Microsoft. The change has raised concerns about content creators' ability to capitalize on their work and proper attribution in AI-generated summaries. Meanwhile, Google plans to increase transparency for AI-generated content in Search results by flagging images with C2PA metadata as AI-generated or edited. This feature will be implemented in Google Search, Lens, and Circle to Search on Android in the coming months, with potential expansion to other Google properties like YouTube. C2PA, backed by major tech companies, develops standards to trace image history. However, C2PA faces adoption challenges and limitations, as metadata can be removed or corrupted. Despite these issues, the initiative aims to address the growing concern over deepfakes, with projections showing significant increases in related scams and financial losses. Also, FinePersonas a large dataset of 21 million detailed personas, totaling 142GB, has been released on Hugging Face. It provides diverse, synthetic data for AI researchers and engineers. Each persona includes unique attributes like background, goals, and experiences, with a bias towards education and scientific domains. The dataset enables the creation of customized, realistic synthetic data for various use cases, including generating instructions, diverse text, domain-specific problems, and even images. Users can start with a 100K sample dataset and extend existing personas if needed. The full dataset was created using the PersonaHub pipeline and Meta-Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct model.
[Quantum Technology] JPMorgan and Amazon Explore Quantum Portfolio Optimization, Bank of Italy Hosts G7 Workshop on Quantum-Safe Finance and Purdue Researchers Teleport Energy Using Quantum Protocols. The Bank of Italy is hosting a G7 workshop on building a quantum-safe financial system. The event happening next week, aims to discuss the impact of quantum computing on finance, including benefits like improved risk management and credit scoring. However, it also addresses the potential risks to current encryption technologies, which could threaten financial and payment system stability. The workshop seeks to foster collaboration between academia, the financial sector, regulatory authorities, and tech companies to explore available solutions and their strategic implications. The goal is to raise awareness and promote an orderly transition towards quantum-safe technologies in the financial world. Meanwhile, researchers at Purdue University have demonstrated a quantum computing protocol that can extract energy from seemingly empty space, teleport it, and store it for later use. This builds on a 2008 proposal by Masahiro Hotta, which suggested using entangled quantum field fluctuations in empty space for energy teleportation. The Purdue team solved the problem of energy storage by using qubits in their lowest energy state. When entangled and separated, measurements on one qubit slightly increase its energy, reflected in the entangled qubit. This breakthrough, tested on a quantum computer, opens new possibilities for energy manipulation in quantum systems. Also, researchers from JPMorgan Chase, Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab, and Caltech are working on large-scale portfolio optimization using quantum computing. Using an approach called decomposition pipeline, they break down complex mixed-integer programming problems into smaller, manageable subproblems, allowing for more efficient solving using both classical and quantum techniques. While showing promise in improving computation times and scalability, the study acknowledges current quantum technology limitations. The hybrid quantum-classical approach demonstrates potential for addressing specific components of larger financial problems, with future work likely to explore broader applications beyond portfolio management.
[General technology] Disney to Drop Slack After Major Data Breach, FBI Dismantles Flax Typhoon Botnet, and Europol Shuts Down International Phishing Network. Disney plans to discontinue using Slack as its company-wide collaboration system following a data breach where hackers leaked over a terabyte of company information. CFO Hugh Johnston stated most Disney businesses will stop using Slack later this year, with many teams already transitioning to alternative enterprise-wide collaboration tools. The hack, attributed to a group called NullBulge, exposed data from thousands of Slack channels, including computer code and details about unreleased projects. The breach reportedly involved over 44 million messages. Disney is investigating the unauthorized data release, while NullBulge is known for compromising software supply chains through GitHub and Hugging Face exploits. Meanwhile, the FBI dismantled a major botnet called Flax Typhoon, which infected hundreds of thousands of IoT devices worldwide. Associated with Integrity Technology Group, Flax Typhoon targeted various organizations to exfiltrate data. The FBI used Rule 41 to remove malware and take control of the botnet's infrastructure. Despite the group's attempts to migrate and launch DDoS attacks, the FBI successfully mitigated these efforts. About half of the affected devices were in the U.S., causing significant harm to victims. Also, Europol dismantled a major international phishing network targeting mobile phone credentials. The phishing-as-a-service platform, iServer, affected over 483,000 victims globally, primarily Spanish-speaking nationals. Operation Kaerb involved law enforcement from six countries, resulting in 17 arrests, 28 searches, and 921 items seized. The Argentinian developer of iServer, operating since 2018, was arrested. iServer enabled "unlockers" to bypass Lost Mode on stolen phones by harvesting credentials through phishing. The scheme involved sending fake messages to theft victims, redirecting them to enter their credentials and 2FA codes. An estimated 1.2 million phones were unlocked using this method.
24 Participants Kickstart the Innovation Journey at The QFC Digital Assets Lab - Qatar Financial Center
Fnality and Ownera partner to interconnect digital money to the institutional tokenisation market - Fnality
Commerzbank and Deutsche Börse Subsidiary Crypto Finance Join Forces for Digital Assets in Corporate Banking - Commerzbank
Centrifuge Partners with Archax to List the Anemoy Janus Henderson Liquid Treasury Fund - Archax
Bitcoin: A Unique Diversifier - BlackRock
Blockchain RPC Service built on Google infrastructure - Google
Welcome to the global ‘AI sovereignty’ race - Politico
Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust Launches with 17 Projects, 100+ Founding Members - LF Decentralized Trust
Software as a public good - Github
📢 The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance DLT Interoperability Specification v.1 has now been released!
This milestone represents the culmination of over two years of dedicated work and cooperation with industry stakeholders.
The specification is a significant step forward for the industry, establishing a secure and efficient framework for interoperability between different blockchain networks. This collaborative effort paves the way for more seamless enterprise applications across complex and regulated sectors!
We are privileged to have collaborated with colleagues at Datachain, Quant, MIT, Algorand, Stellar and many other companies on this!
Particularly the teams at Adhara, Fnality International, HQLAᵡ and Wanchain driving adoption and real-world implementations of the specification!
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