How the CFTC views crypto and distributed ledger technology will have significant impact on how they develop over the coming years. To get an idea of the CFTC’s approach, we met with Daniel Gorfine, the agency’s chief innovation officer and director of their “LabCFTC” which, as they describe it, is “designed to be the hub for the agency's engagement with the FinTech innovation community.” Gorfine often travels from city to city for LabCFTC’s “office hours,” where innovators can come and meet with the agency to ask questions. We decided to ask some questions ourselves.
Here’s what Facebook, Whatsapp, Telegram, and Instagram’s cryptocurrencies will look like—and why they’re bad ideas
Facebook is working on their own currency: a stablecoin, pegged to a mainstream currency. It will likely get rolled out first to users of WhatsApp, which could use this currency to send money to friends and family instantly. But will the currency they ultimately use have any value outside of the platform?
As industry contemplates DLT, State Farm test drives blockchain technology for auto insurance
On Dec. 10, insurance giant State Farm announced that it is testing a blockchain-based solution to improve the speed and accuracy with which auto insurance claims are settled. In testing the solution, the largest provider of auto insurance in the United States is following up on several years of study and interest by the insurance industry in ways the distributed ledger technology underlying blockchain and cryptocurrencies can benefit various lines of coverage offered by the multi-trillion-dollar industry. Specifically, State Farm is looking into blockchain’s use in subrogation, the process by which the at-fault insurer compensates the injured party’s insurer for costs paid to settle a damages claim. “Today, subrogation is…
Healthcare giants turn to blockchain for a joint database of doctors
Plans by a group of leading healthcare industry firms to create a joint database of doctors and other healthcare providers using Quorum’s Ethereum-based enterprise blockchain technology got a boost this past week when two industry giants—insurer Aetna, which was just purchased by CVS Health, and Ascension, the largest non-profit health system in the country with more than 150 hospitals—joined the project. The Synaptic Health Alliance’s overarching goal is see if blockchain’s distributed ledger technology can be used to share the burden of managing healthcare provider data while improving its accuracy, without adding another intermediary to the process. The other members are health insurers Humana and UnitedHealthcare, healthcare cost management provider…
