Japan shipping company creates crypto for its crews: Japan’s largest shipping line by sales, Nippon Yusen KK (NYK) is according to Bloomberg, developing a digital cash system for crews to manage, send and convert money into local fiat currencies. With shipping crews coming from a host of different nations, the NYK initiative allows seafaring workers to transfer and convert cash with ease. Until this innovative idea, blockchain has only really been used in the shipping industry to track containers.
Korean crypto trading suspended after Amazon network ‘failure’: Cryptocurrency exchange Upbit had to reassure Korean crypto traders that their funds were ‘secure’ after an outage on Thursday morning, triggered by an Amazon Web Services (AWS) network failure, caused trading to stop for about an hour. Upbit, one of the most popular crypto exchanges in South Korea, like many other digital businesses, is heavily reliant on the AWS on-demand cloud computing platform. By 10am Upbit announced that the disruption, due to a domain-name server issue, was fixed and the service had returned to normal.
Cryptocurrency’s very own Billy the Kid: Steal from the rich to give to… yourself? That was Nicholas Truglia’s plan when he hacked into the phones of Silicon Valley tech executives to take their cryptocurrency. From his Manhattan apartment the con man targeted several people in California and succeeded in stealing a cool $1 million using a SIM-swapping tactic. The New York Post reported that targets included Saswata Basu, CEO of the blockchain storage service 0Chain, Myles Danielsen, vice president of Hall Capital Partners, and co-founder of the start-up SMBX Gabrielle Katsnelson.
Carrefour moves into blockchain: With extensive operations in China, French supermarket group is testing blockchain for its operations. The company is using its Spanish supermarkets to track poultry via distributed ledger. Partnering with IBM, Carrefour will be keeping tabs on the movement of free-range chickens from the region of Galicia, and include information such as date of birth, nutrition, packing date, and more. The move is not a first in the industry, as Walmart has also been using blockchain for real-time farm-to-store tracking.
Indian anti-bank-fraud blockchain partnership launched: A supply-chain fraud-prevention blockchain-based pilot has launched in India. The project, a partnership between Swift India and New York’s MonetaGo will be trialed on a domestic network of leading Indian banks. It follows the 2018 deployment of MonetaGo’s Fraud Mitigation Network in India. MonetaGo’s platform, that sits on the Hyperledger blockchain network, works to allow banks to “securely and confidentially” share information that will help reduce electronic fraud.