Following an outbreak of E. coli in the United States that was linked to romaine lettuce, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is considering better track-and-trace methods and this includes the use of blockchain technology.

Speaking to business news channel CNBC, FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb announced that the federal agency had hired the vice president of food safety at Walmart, Frank Yiannas, as its foods and veterinary medicine deputy commissioner. Yiannas is expected to introduce new track-and-trace tools to the agency.

“We have a guy starting… the former head of food safety at Walmart who is going to be coming to the FDA to help us put in place among other things better track and trace using tools like blockchain maybe to even do track-and-trace on the food supply chain,” Gottlieb said.

Pinpointing the Problem

According to Gottlieb, whenever there is a food-related outbreak, technologies such as blockchain will assist in tracing the cause to a specific distributor, farm or grower in the supply chain. This will prevent blanket warnings which affect everyone even when the cause is limited to a particular origin.

Prior to joining the FDA, Yiannas was instrumental in deploying blockchain technology at Walmart with a view of tracking leafy greens as CCN reported in September. This included the food traceability initiative which required producers of fresh, leafy greens to use blockchain technology in tracking and tracing such products. Walmart gave the suppliers one year to ensure that systems were in place for the program to take off.

While announcing the initiative at the time, Walmart noted that multiple states in the U.S. had suffered E. coli outbreaks linked to romaine lettuce and this had resulted in 96 hospitalizations and five deaths. With blockchain technology, the big box retailer added, product information such as origin would become available throughout the supply chain in real time.

“In the future, using the technology we’re requiring, a customer could potentially scan a bag of salad and know with certainty where it came from,” Yiannas said at the time.

Food Safety

Outside the United States, French retail giant Carrefour has taken similar steps to Walmart by integrating IBM’s tailored blockchain data system known as Food Trust with a view of improving food safety.

And about four months ago, the Food Standards Agency, the food safety watchdog of the United Kingdom, announced that a blockchain technology trial to track beef from the slaughterhouse to the end consumer had concluded successfully.

A few of the top 15 cryptocurrencies saw notable increases over the past twenty-four hours. Stellar saw a gain of 15% against the US dollar, with 22% of its volume being against USD or USD-pegged cryptocurrencies themselves – meaning these gains are realistic, not just figurative. Litecoin gained over 13% against the dollar while Monero jumped nearly 16%, and Zcash was hot on its heels.

Stellar Price up 15%

Stellar (XLM) price is up 15% against the dollar, with a 3% gain in Bitcoin valuation, over the last 24 hours. The cryptocurrency saw a 24-hour volume of almost $100 million in trading, with a gain in overall market capitalization roughly equal to that.

According to CoinMarketCap, trading against USDT accounted for roughly almost 22% across twelve markets. Notably, the most trading in a single pair happened at an exchange outside of Binance — namely, Exrates, — although overall trading did have a plurality at Binance with 18% between XLM/BTC and XLM/USDT.

Litecoin Price up 13%

Litecoin price seems to have begun to pick up around 22:00 CST last night, with an initial sell-off worth about 20,000 Satoshis per token happening for the next couple of hours. A simultaneous price-rise in Bitcoin actually meant the market capitalization of the cryptocurrency rose during this same period. Then, around 1:45 AM CST, demand seems to have to picked up and the price was on the rise yet again with 13% increase on the LTC/USD pair.

Litecoin only recovered about half its BTC value in the rebound trading, but in terms of USD it saw a significant increase. Overall volume was about $500 million over the entire 24 hour period, with more than $150 million of that having been done against USDT. Trading against PAX and USDC combined was less than $100,000.

Monero Price up $8

Privacy coin Monero, which has a small infinite inflation and a current supply of about 16.6 million, gained roughly $8 in US dollars over the 24-hour period, with $20 million traded across all exchanges and pairs.

The vast majority of Monero trading – 94% – took place on Korea’s Bithumb against the Korean Won. XMR/KRW was the was the second most active market on the exchange over 24 hours, during which period it traded nearly $2 billion overall.

Zcash Price up 16%

The Zcash (ZEC) chart is perhaps the most interesting of the bunch, with a 24-hour simultaneous rise in both market capitalization and USD price, but a drop in actual BTC-per-token valuation.

The price wound up around $11 higher than it was 24 hours previous to 8:00 AM CST, gaining around $64 million in overall market capitalization, with more than 30% of its trading happening in the Ether market at an exchange called Lbank, and another 8% of the total volume happening at the same exchange against BTC. Another 22% of the volume happened at the same exchange as the most Monero trading, Bithumb, also against KRW. Thus a total of 60% of the ZEC volume happened in three currencies on two markets.

USDT trading of ZEC accounted for just over $20 million of the total $198 million volume, with the majority of that also happening at Lbank – that single pair making up nearly 5% of the overall volume. Collectively, Lbank accounted for $118 million of the 24-hour volume on ZEC.

First, let’s talk about how these devices will drive collocation service revenues, which IHS Markit forecasts to grow from $23 million in 2017 to $32 million in 2021; a 40% increase over the same four-year period. Data center growth is correlated with general data growth. The more data transmitted via connected devices; the more data centers are needed to store, transfer, and analyze this data. In the specific case of the Internet of Things, there’s a need for geographically distributed data centers that can provide low-latency connections to certain connected devices. There are applications, like autonomous vehicles or virtual reality, which are going to require local data centers to manage much of the data processing required to operate. Most enterprises will not have the means or the business case to build new data centers in every nook and cranny of the globe, so they will need to turn to colocation data centers to provide quickly scale-able, low capital-intensive options for geographically distributed data centers.

IHS Markit forecast Internet connectable devices to grow from 27.5 billion in 2017 to 45.4 billion in 2021; a 65% increase in just four years. What does this mean for the colocation market? Well, it’s certainly a positive driver for colocation revenue growth; however, it’s not the 1:1 ratio many industry enthusiasts once thought. Second, it’s giving colocation service providers a new opportunity to assist with the aggregation and connectivity of new end-points and data sources.

The future of colocation hosting and cloud hosting services has an ever expanding demand with more devices we will need more hosting.

The verification and authentication of a certificate takes time, is expensive, and annoying. Applicants and examiners suffer from this as well as the issuers of the certificates, such as citizen centers or universities. They must regularly fight against forged certificates and the associated reputation damage. Moreover, the recipients do not have full control over the diplomas and certificates obtained.

That is why the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management is the first university in Germany to offer blockchain-based certificates. With this new technology, it is possible to create fraud-resistant certificates and statements. One can also make them permanently available without restriction – and in compliance with data regulations. For this pilot project, the business school cooperates with Consensys, one of the leading software companies in the field of blockchain. Consensys developed a decentralized app (dApp) for so-called “Self- Sovereign Identities“: An identity created by the user that is stored on the blockchain and thus tamper-proof. Data and degrees can be administered by the user. Therefore, the loss and re-certification of credentials and certificates are a thing of the past.

Veronika Kütt, a research associate at the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center and lead of the project states: “Blockchain-based certificates are fascinating. In the future, we will be able to display and verify credentials digitally. We are doing pioneering work here. Our students find it a privilege to be involved in a new technology so early on. It must have been similar to programming the first public internet sites in the mid-‘90s.“

Professor Philipp Sandner, head of the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center, adds: “Thanks to blockchain technology, it is possible to securely save personal data such as a CV or an identity card digitally. With our project, we show how easy and comfortable that can be for the user.”

The first students to receive a blockchain-based certificate from Frankfurt School also dealt with this technology in their degree course. The eleven students have completed the business school’s “Certified Blockchain Expert” program which is part of the professional education offerings. The specialists and executives from the finance, IT or consulting industry developed basic knowledge and IT skills for different applications of the blockchain technology. Now, they can use what they have learned to harness the potential of the new technology for their companies

Austria will raise a total 1.15 billion euros in a federal bond auction on Oct. 2 using blockchain notarization, according to Oesterreichische Kontrollbank (OeKB), which oversees the auctions for issuing federal bonds as a neutral capital market participant for the Austrian Federal Financing Agency (OeBFA). The auction demonstrates Austria’s pioneering role in Europe for deploying blockchain technology for sovereign bond issues, according to the notice posted on the Finance Ministry website.

Washington state is now home to it’s first wildlife highway over-crossing, built to increase driver safety, reduce vehicle accidents, and allow wildlife to safely cross the interstate.

This is being built on I-90 east of Snoqualmie Pass and is almost complete.

MINERVA II1a and MINERVA II1b are pretty mean photographers. When it comes to space travel, human beings are just getting started. Robots on the other hand are way ahead.

We have the Curiosity Rover doing its thing on Mars, the Parker Solar Probe is en route to the sun.

Donald Trump campaigned for election on a promise to make trade fairer for the US, and his push to do so has him fighting with some of America’s oldest trading partners.

The US has been embroiled in a tit-for-tat trade battle on several fronts over the past few months.

It’s been working on AR glasses to complement its Oculus VR headset, but now it looks like it wants to design its own silicon.

That’s according to a report in The Information (paywalled) that found several job listings over the past few days. For example, the listing for a Digital Design Engineer provides more details about Facebook’s direction with the hardware: