More By placing all the information about services or complex manufacturing and assembly processes on a private, permissioned blockchain, the idea is that a company can create an “immutable" audit trail of data. When you think about it, currently this involves a labor-intensive combination of paper and networks. But initial trials with private blockchains in the last couple of years have shown there is potential to reduce the identification process of a data trail from several days to...

More While the cryptocurrency world continues to swirl around in a daze of troughs and highs, startups are continuing to make use of the fundamental underlying strengths of blockchain technology. A new entrant in this race is Tradeshift, a leading players in supply-chain payments and marketplaces, which is today launching its new service which enables supports blockchain-based finance, or writing all transactions to a public ledger in order to create transparency and securing a record. While...

More TechCrunch is coming to Zug, Switzerland, to discuss all things Blockchain . This is going to be one of the most important events we've ever held in Europe and one of the most important ever. You're not going to want to miss this. TechCrunch Sessions: Blockchain 2018 features an impressive lineup of fireside chats and panels with icons of the global blockchain and crypto tech scene. We’re thrilled to bring accomplished founders and chief executives to the stage. Among others, this...

More When blockchain first appeared, especially Ethereum’s innovation of ‘smart contracts’, a number of people posited that it could be used to trade energy between one source and another, such as power supplies or batteries. The idea would be to enable consumers to buy and sell renewable energy directly between one another, in a peer-to-peer (P2P) trading manner. Blockchain would be ideally suited to this, creating a transparent, auditable and automated record of energy generation and...

More Blockchain technology and the decentralizing effects of distributed ledgers have enormous amounts of potential and may mean the Internet will never be the same again. The fact that one could eventually run vast applications without any servers is equally transformational. But it’s still very much a wild west out there in terms of ascertaining who is working on ‘the real deal’. The blockchain world is currently weighed down with the expectations of dubious crypto-currency speculators and...