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Blockchain service firm Chainstack recently published a report about developer activity on six major enterprise blockchains, showing that Fabric has overtaken Corda in regard to dev activity on its repository. A chart included in the report shows that Fabric developer activity exceeded Corda's in Q4 2019.

The choice of Stellar is a bit surprising given that IBM has been working with the Linux Foundation on Hyperledger Fabric for years. But Hyperledger Fabric is permissioned, private distributed-ledger technology. IBM wanted something more open that any organization could join if it met certain criteria. In World Wire, IBM has created kind of a virtual private network within Stellar. Organizations can register assets and become part of the network, but IBM carefully vets each participant and validator. By contrast, Ripple says it does not know who runs the validator nodes on its distributed ledger. It's really about knowing the validators, but without creating this walled garden that you have to have special permission to join.

The Hyperledger Foundation has released the second version of its open-source distributed ledger (DLT) platform, Hyperledger Fabric.

The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB) is completing the final testing and assurance exercises following several system upgrades and will make the DCash platform available for public use during the week of March 7. The DCash system has been down since January 14. The interruption was due to an expiring certificate on the version of the Hyperledger Fabric that hosts the DCash ledger, and not to any external intervention. It has taken longer than expected to fix the problem because the ECCB took the opportunity to undertake several upgrades platform including enhancing the system's certificate management processes, and updating the version of Hyperledger Fabric. Other upgrades will allow the platform to process government disbursements to individuals and permit commercial websites to accept DCash. The ECCB says that the security and integrity of all DCash data, applications and architecture, including all central bank, financial institutions, merchant and wallet apps remain secure and intact.

The Belarus government-owned Center of Bank Technologies has reportedly initiated the construction of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) platform. The Center also posted a job vacancy for backend developers with expertise in Hyperledger Fabric and smart contract development experience. Plus, last week the National Bank of Belarus Deputy Chairman of the Board reportedly called the digital ruble project a "significant areas of development in the payment sector." https://neg.by/novosti/otkrytj/v-belarusi-nachalas-razrabotka-platformy-dlya-tsifrovogo-rublya/

The ECCB CBDC pilot involves a digital version of the EC dollar (DXCD) distributed by licensed ECCU financial institutions. The DXCD will be used for transactions between consumers and merchants, between people, all using smart devices. IBM Hyperledger Fabric was selected as the blockchain platform.

This article details how CBDC can be implemented, comparing three possible DLT-based options (Corda, Hyperledger Fabric, and Quorum) on privacy, scalability/performance, resiliency and finality.

Compared with Bitwise, which released a follow-up fake volume report in May 2019, Alameda thinks more crypto volume is real. For large exchanges like OKEx and Huobi, which were founded in China, Alameda estimates about 70% of their transactions are authentic. Bitwise is much more skeptical, as is the Blockchain Transparency Institute, which has estimated that more than 60% of Huobi's volume is fake and more than 90% of OKEx's volume is fabricated.

"We introduce systematic tests exploiting robust statistical and behavioral patterns in trading to detect transaction fabrication on 29 cryptocurrency exchanges. Regulated exchanges feature patterns consistently observed in financial markets and nature; abnormal first-significant-digit distributions, size rounding, and transaction tail distributions on unregulated exchanges reveal rampant manipulations unlikely driven by strategy or exchange heterogeneity. We quantify wash trading on each unregulated exchange, which averaged over 70% of the reported volume. We further document how these wash trades (trillions of dollars annually) improve exchange ranking, temporarily distort prices, and relate to exchange characteristics (e.g., age and userbase), market conditions, and regulation."

Ethereum studio ConsenSys will reportedly integrate Quorum into the China state-sanctioned Blockchain Service Network (BSN). The BSN is a service infrastructure that allows developers to build decentralized applications on top of blockchains that it supports, like Hyperledger Fabric, Ethereum, and Polkadot. It is backed by the State Information Center of China, a think tank under the country's cabinet-level economic planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission. Beijing-based Red Date Technology oversees the operations and development of the platform.

It could be that Tether doesn't have solid enough finances to do any of the things I've listed. Or maybe it does, but it doesn't actually care about rumours. After all, even after years of criticism, Tether continues to grow and dominate the stablecoin sector. The community of stablecoin users seem quite content to rely on everyone's using it. For now, at least.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is reportedly launching a central bank digital currency (CBDC) proof of concept (PoC) by October 1, 2021. The source is said to be the information technology director for the bank, Rakiya Mohammed, who disclosed that the CBN had been researching since 2017 to develop and adopt the digital currency. The project called 'GIANT' will run on the hyper-ledger fabric blockchain. The announcement was supposedly made at the 306th Banker's Committee meeting, but I have found no mention of it on the CBN website. Also there's some confusion about whether it's a pilot or PoC, because the article says that a "pilot" will be launched by October 1, but a PoC wouldn't happen until year end, which is obviously back assward. If anyone out there has more concrete information please pass it on!

Deutsche Boerse and Swisscom utilize different blockchain protocols to settle securities transactions by exchanging cash tokens for tokenized shares in a joint proof of concept involving R3's Corda and IBM's Hyperledger Fabric.

CIP, a facilitator of Brazilian banking and financial infrastructure, has officially launched its blockchain ID platform via a partnership with IBM using Hyperledger Fabric.

The Central Bank of Iran (CBI), via its Informatics and Services Corporation (ISC) and in conjunction with Areatak - a Tehran-based blockchain solutions provider - is developing a national blockchain project for its banking and financial sector.

Wirecard's fabricated Asian business was not its only deception. The rest of the once-lauded German payment provider's business was chaotic, beset by byzantine reporting lines, hobbled by lamentable IT and racking up losses, according to a report by Wirecard's administrator and accounts of former employees.

IBM is upgrading its enterprise Blockchain Platform to carry over changes in Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 (its base layer) that will improve performance and data privacy, and allow transaction parties to propose and amend smart contract parameters.

There are multiple possibilities for distributed ledger technology. This introductory article compares Corda, Hyperledger Fabric, Quorum, Ethereum and Bitcoin, relative to them fighting it out in a battle to determine what would be best suited to the use case of processing distributed transactions in the insurance domain. The considerations include data privacy, scalability and ease of programming.

The U.S. Federal Reserve published details about a 2019 payments trial involving distributed ledger technology, specifically the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain software. The so-called "FooWire" experiment was designed to test whether the technology is suited for payments application. FooWire was "small-scale" and specifically focused on permissioned capabilities. The network included three hypothetical organizations: a central bank, a government agency, and a commercial bank. Network administrators were responsible for approving and creating accounts and nodes to administer the ledger. The only asset that could be transferred between nodes was an artificial asset called Funds. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/observations-from-the-foowire-project-experimenting-with-dlt-for-payments-use-20200813.htm

China's Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) - a public-private nationwide infrastructure project to spur mass adoption of blockchain technology - is setting up international portals in Turkey and Uzbekistan, following its September announcements to set up BSN portals in Hong Kong and South Korea. The BSN integrates frameworks such as Ethereum, Algorand, EOS, Polkadot, NEO, Tezos, Oasis, Hyperledger Fabric, ConsenSys Quorum, and Corda. It is also supported by cloud services, including Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft Azure.