Category: General

The Digital Port: Transforming an ancient economic hub without disrupting workers’ lives

Posted on by Tushar

Port of the future: how technology is transforming shipping

Today’s ports are struggling to manage the massive volume of containers arriving on giant vessels.  Industry leaders are looking for new ideas to cope, but it’s hard to find answers that satisfy everyone.

The roots of the problem are multifold. Most obvious is the logjam that’s created when a modern ship laden with tens of thousands of containers arrives in port. Finding a spot to stack the large cargo is a problem. But the bigger issue is a matter of velocity. One-by-one, thousands of trucks enter and exit congested urban locations to drop off empty containers or pick up new loads. While freight rail is beginning to move an increased share of containers, the majority still arrive and leave the land-side of the port one or two at a time.

In an effort to reduce wait times and move containers faster, some container terminal operators are turning to waterfront robots to increase capacity and velocity while reducing cost. This type of automation has great potential, but we need to apply the same design thinking to the systems around the automation to realize the full potential of digital transformation.

A better way

So how do ports fully realize the goals of automation while optimizing the work environment and productivity of today’s port workers? First, we should consider all the parties involved:

  1. Truckers who assume the costs for delays in picking up loads and dropping off empty containers.
  2. Dock workers’ labor unions who want their members to participate in the benefits of automation and upskill the value of their members.
  3. Terminal managers who want to maintain a lean staff for profitability but also need to increase capacity and velocity of operations.
  4. Manufacturers and receivers who want lower demurrage and detention fees that result when there are delays in picking up freight and returning containers ready to ship.
  5. Consumers who want faster deliveries.

Fortunately, there is a way to satisfy all parties and it begins with a modern Port Community System (PCS). A PCS can digitally tie together the Coast Guard, maritime shipping agents, port authority, freight forwarders, Customs, dangerous goods clearance, port and terminal gates, and many of the other entities in the port community.

As each party electronically completes its part of operations—declarations, permits requests, inspections, goods authorizations and more—the PCS immediately moves   the filing, declaration, request, or approval to the queue of the next party, notifying them of updates specific to their work queue. Items they need to complete or adjust are noted, and wherever possible turned into drop-down lists.  Ideally the workers can be notified and fill out forms from any device —at their desk, on a tablet at the docks, or on their phone in the truck.

Greasing the skids

Greasing the Skids | He's Taken Leave

The terminals, which are separate business entities, are tied together in the PCS under the supervision of the port authority. Any insufficiencies in the permits, requests, or declarations are immediately identified, and the sender is automatically notified for quick updates and resubmission. Eliminating the communication hurdles — paper documents, point-to-point (rather than end-to-end) filings, loading and unloading orders – can save significant time and cost for all parties. Furthermore, a PCS provides time-definite delivery commitments to shippers and sellers while reducing ship and container time in port.

For exports, freight forwarders who consolidate loads into containers will know when empty containers will arrive, reducing the number they need to keep on hand. For imports, freight forwarders and consolidators will know when to expect the containers they need to break down and repack for shipping to final destination. Maritime agents can get their ships out of port faster as they will be able to communicate the location of containers ready and approved for loading to terminal operators. Once a PCS is implemented, other steps can be taken to increase the efficiency of trucks moving in and out of the port.

At Anteelo, we’ve given this a lot of thought as we increasingly focus on the ports business and our own PCS solution, Port Logistics Accelerator. We’ve come to recognize that connecting people and automating the processes those people use every day will have the largest impact on costs and hence, profitability.

Anteelo’s Intermodal Appointment System (IAS), when integrated with the PCS, can notify truckers when their loads are ready, setting a specific appointment for pick-up and delivery agreed to by their trucking company (or themselves, if freelance). Further, our Intelligent Truck Parking (ITP) system can interface with the IAS, monitoring parking lots and assigning parking spots and timeslots. These systems make pick-ups predictable, smoothing the flow of traffic around and inside the port and terminals. They also save time and fuel while reducing pollution and congestion.

Enabling operational flexibility

3 Ways Nuclear is More Flexible Than You Might Think | Department of Energy

A PCS can also help integrate the shunting operations required for full integration of freight rail into intermodal seaport logistics.  This gives port operators flexibility to use the best value transportation method for each shipment while maximizing the traffic flow into and out of seaports.

There’s no doubt that robots have their place and that, over time, ports will manage a greater share of shipments using automation. It’s also true, however, that digital solutions like port community, appointment, and intelligent parking systems can help everyone achieve the aims they seek.

In 2020, the Top 10 Cross-Platform App Frameworks to Consider

Posted on by Tushar
Everything You Need to Know about Cross-Platform App Frameworks in 2020
Cross-platform app development has its own merits which plays a major role in its current popularity. With the expansion of its reach, several cross-platforms app development tools and frameworks started to float in the market; slowly, and then all at once along with every other mobile app development company trying their hands at this interesting and one-of-a-kind technology.The result – We now have a sea of such tools and frameworks which you, as a developer, may find overwhelming. To help you out in your quest of finding the most ideal and exemplary cross-platform framework, here is a list of top 10 cross-platform app frameworks 2020 that are a sure thing.There are certain benchmarks that need to be cleared to declare something as “best” of that domain or category. In the same manner, while determining the best cross-platform frameworks, there were several prominent aspects that were considered, in order to truly see how every choice under inspection performed.However, before jumping on to the list, let’s get the basics out of the way.

What is a Cross-Platform Framework?

Considerations for Cross-Platform Mobile Development with Xamarin

To be concise, cross-platform is a type of software that has the ability to run on multiple computing platforms i.e., Android, iOS, Windows, Blackberry, etc. The apps built on this framework do not require separate coding for each platform, rather coding once will create the foundation for the app to run as efficiently on all platforms. It is one of the most popular methods in the app development domain today, which almost all the top mobile app development companies swear upon.

Note: To gather an in-depth view, read this guide on cross-platform app development.

1. Ionic

Cross-Platform Mobile App Development: Ionic Framework

Ionic is one of the most remarkable and popular cross-platform app frameworks, based on AngularJS. It allows developers to use a combination of many languages i.e., HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS and Cordova wrapper to access native platform controllers.

Ionic enables developers to create an impeccably creative user interface along with adding user-friendly features into the app. Apps developed with this framework are highly interactive and native-like, making Ionic a perfect candidate for PWA development as well.

Features

1. It is an open-source front-end framework meaning it allows alterations in the code structure, suitable to each developer and saves a lot of time. This gives hard competition to its contender Ionic, in the battle of Ionic vs React Native.

2. Ionic is based on a SAAS UI framework designed specifically for mobile operating systems. It provides numerous UI components for  developing robust applications.

3. Another one of its most-appreciated features is that it is based on AngularJS, making it easy to offer extensions to HTML’s syntax, core functionalities to imbibe useful yet attractive features and components into the app.

4. This framework uses Cordova plugins which allow access to devices’ in-built features including Camera, GPS, and Audio Recorder, posing as one of the major benefits of cross-platform tools.

5. The fact that Ionic gives a native-like feel to the apps is what makes it a favorite of developers. It helps develop cross-platform apps and allows them to perform perfectly on various platforms.

2. React Native

How to use WebViews and Deep Linking in React Native apps

When talking about cross platform app frameworks, it is hard not to include React Native. It is a framework built on JavaScript and is used to write real code and give the native-like feel to mobile applications that work both on Android and iOS. Due to its remarkable features, it is not only a preferred choice of developers but businesses also trust React Native as the right platform for their apps.

React Native integrates the benefits of JavaScript and React.JS along with providing the advantage to developers to write modules in Objective-C, Swift, or Java languages. Moreover, by using the native modules and libraries in the React Native cross-platform apps, developers can also perform heavy operations such as image editing, video processing or some other operations which are not part of the framework APIs.

Features

1. It is a good thing that React Native is an open-source cross-platform app framework, the same as Ionic. Because of this, it has a large community to support it and improve it by fixing bugs, improvising and introducing features.

2. One of the advantages of cross-platform development is that it requires one-time coding (WORA) for developing apps for platforms as diverse as Android and iOS. This solves one of the biggest challenges of  other frameworks – requiring developers to code separately twice for the same app on different platforms.

3. One-time coding instantly reduces the development time of the app along with keeping the React Native app development cost to its lowest.

4. Impressively, React Native is highly compatible with third-party plugins, such as Google Maps.

5. React Native focuses on UI to a great extent rendering a highly responsive interface. What it means is that the React Native environment eliminates the time taken in loading and delivers a smooth interface to the applications.

3. Flutter

Flutter - Beautiful native apps in record time

Google introduced an impressive cross-platform app framework named Flutter back in 2017. It is a software development kit designed to assist in the expeditious Android and iOS app development. It is also a fundamental and primary method for developing Google Fuschia apps.

Flutter offers apps that easily and effectively run on multiple platforms with uniformity and dynamicity.

Here are some of the remarkable features that make Flutter an ideal cross-platform framework among developers.

Features

1. Flutter promotes portable GPU, which renders UI power, allowing it to work on the latest interfaces.

2. Flutter does not require updating the UI contents manually, as it possesses a reactive framework. Flutter app Developers are only required to update the variables and the UI changes will be visible after that.

3. Flutter cross-platform app framework poses as a perfect choice for developing Minimum Viable Product (MVP) as it initiates an expeditious development process and is also cost-efficient.

4. Xamarin

Xamarin - Wikipedia

Xamarin cross-platform app development framework is significantly different from the frameworks we have discussed so far. It is a streamlined framework used for developing apps for Android, Windows, and iOS with the help of C# and .Net, instead of JS libraries and HTML. It allows the developers to use 90% of the code for building an app for three distinct platforms.

Xamarin delivers applications with aesthetics like a native app with the help of its amazing APIs, something which makes the decision making a lot harder between Xamarin vs React Native. Here are Xamarin’s features explaining why it is one of the best choices of cross-platform frameworks for Mobile Development.

Features

1. Apps developed on the Xamarin framework are built using C# – a modern language having leverage over Objective-C and Java.

2. The developers get native-level app functionality with Xamarin. It reduces hardware compatibility problems to a great extent with the help of plugins and specific APIs, that work with common devices functionality.It also promotes linking with native libraries, allowing customization and native-level functionality. The feature alone, makes it one of the top Android app development framework.

3. Xamarin supports a direct inclusion of Objective-C, Java and C++ libraries. This allows developers to reuse many third-party codebases encrypted in Java, Objective-C or C++, making it one of the considerably preferred cross-platform frameworks.

4. Xamarin reduces the time and cost of mobile app development for it supports the WORA ( Write Once, Run Anywhere) and has a humongous collection of class libraries.

5. Xamarin offers robust compile-time checking. Because of this facility, developers witness fewer run-time errors and get well-functioning apps.

6. Xamarin has an astounding native user interface and controls assisting and allowing developers in designing a native-like app.

5. NativeScript

Building with NativeScript | Hacker Noon

NativeScript passes as an amazing free cross-platform framework based on JavaScript. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that NativeScript is a preferable choice of developers looking for WORA functionality.

NativeScript also offers all native APIs, rendering an ability to the developers to reuse existing plugins straight from NPM into the projects.

Features

1. NativeScript renders beautiful, accessible, and platform-native UI, and that too without the WebViews. Developers are only required to define once and let the NativeScript adapt to run everywhere. They can even customize the UI to specific devices and screens.

2. As opposed to React Native, NativeScript provides developers with a complete web resource that comes loaded with plugins for all kinds of solutions. This inevitably eliminates the need for third-party solutions.

3. NativeScript gives the freedom to easily access native Android and iOS APIs, meaning developers don’t need any additional knowledge of native development languages.

4. It uses Angular and TypeScript for programming purposes.

6. Node.js

Node.js - Wikipedia

Node.js is an incredible framework for developing cross-platform apps. Essentially, Node.Js is a JavaScript runtime framework built on the Chrome V8 JavaScript engine. It is an open-source environment that supports the development of server-side and scalable networking apps. Node.js cross-platform apps are inherently highly efficient and responsive.

The framework is capable of handling several concurrent connections together. It also comes loaded with a rich library of numerous JavaScript modules that help in simplifying the development of web applications.

Features

1. All of the Node.js APIs are asynchronous, signifying that they are non-blocking in nature, meaning servers based on Node.JS do not essentially wait for data from APIs. It immediately moves on to another API after calling it. A notification mechanism for Node.js allows the server to get a response from the previous API call.

2. Node.js library is impressively speedy in its code execution process, for it is built on the Chrome’s V8 engine.

3. Node.js cross-platform apps do not buffer, instead, the applications output the data in chunks.

4. To deliver smooth and perfectly functioning applications, Node.js uses a single-threaded model with event looping functionality. This event mechanism enables the server to reply in a non-blocking way, making them scalable.

7. Appcelerator Titanium

Appcelerator's Titanium - an overview - mfg

Appcelerator is one of the many cross-platform app development tools designed to assist in smoother and easier mobile app development. It is a great way to create cross-platform apps with just a single code base. Its primary focus is on streamlining the app development process with the help of native components present in JavaScript code.

Features

1. Appcelerator offers various tools for rapid application development. This indicates that a prototype can be created with much less time and effort to evaluate user interaction with UI.

2. It has ArrowDB-  a schema-less data store that allows developers to deploy data models with no additional efforts for setup.

3. It enables the integration of existing continuous delivery systems such as SCM solutions and more.

4. Appcelerator possesses pre-built connectors available for MS Azure, MS SQL, Salesforce, Box- the list is tediously long.

8. PhoneGap

Adobe Launches Hosted PhoneGap Build Service For Creating Cross-Platform Mobile Apps | TechCrunch

Phone Gap (Cordova) is one of the impeccable cross-platform frameworks for mobile development that makes use of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML5. It also offers a cloud solution to developers providing them the choice to share the app in the development process for feedback from other developers.

It develops impressive apps by leveraging existing web technologies. Another great advantage of PhoneGap is that it entirely supports in-built device features such as GPS, Camera, Phonebook, Storage, and so on.

Features

1. PhoneGap is considered an impeccable cross-platform framework as it enables developers to create cross-platform apps using existing web technologies such as HTML 5, CSS3 and JavaScript.

2. Being a cross-platform framework, PhoneGap supports the use of a single code base to create apps for different platforms namely iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, etc.

3. It follows an architecture that is plugin-able in nature, meaning it is possible that the access to native device APIs can be extended in a modular way.

9. Sencha Touch

Antea Adopts Sencha EXT JS Framework | Antea

Introduced nearly a decade ago, Sencha Touch helps in developing web-based cross-platform apps and is typically used to create efficient applications that use the hardware acceleration techniques. By using Sencha Touch, developers are able to create well-tested, securely integrated UI components and libraries.

In fact, it is possible to develop large business apps and maintain them effectively and easily. Some of the remarkable features of it are:

Features

1. It is famous for providing built-in native-looking themes for all of the major platforms like Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, etc.

2. It comes with an effective agnostic backend data package for working with data sources.

3. One of the most celebrated features of Sencha Touch is that it supports Cordova integration for the native API access along with the packaging.

4. It offers code compatibility between new and old ones.

5. It comes loaded with customizable and 50+ built-in UI widgets. It also has a collection of rich UI like lists, carousels, forms, menus, and toolbars, etc., created specifically for mobile platforms.

10. Corona SDK

Why is Corona SDK is the best framework for cross-platform game development?

Corona SDK enables programmers to develop 2D mobile applications for all the major platforms, including Kindle and Windows.

It proffers to give 10X faster mobile and game app development. The framework le delivers remarkable results at the back of its backend framework’s reliability on Lua which is a lightweight and multi-paradigm programming language. The language focuses on the main elements of the development which are the speed, portability, extensibility, scalability, and last but not least, the ease of use.

What is more, it is a free-of-cost framework working both on Mac OS X and Windows while supporting real-time testing.

Features:

1. It has over 1000 APIs that give developers the ability to sprite animations, audio, and music, Box2D physics, object tweening, texture management, native elements, data- the list can go on for pages.

2. It responds to the code changes almost instantly while giving a real-time preview of the app’s performance as it would on a real device.

3. It supports almost 200 plugins including in-app advertising, analytics, media, and hardware features.

After considering all of the best options that a competent cross-platform app development company is looking for in this domain, there is nothing left but to wait and see how these frameworks compete with each other to stay in the competitive market, and how well they bode against the new frameworks entering the market as we speak.

Blockchain Consensus Method: What You Need to Know

Posted on by Anteelo Master

What the Future of Blockchain Means for Entrepreneurs

Blockchain consensus is a decentralized distributed network that offers higher transparency, security, and immutability.

We all know that.

But, have you ever wondered how it is able to achieve all this?

Who governs this network and verifies every transaction, provided there is no centralized authority?

Well it’s Blockchain consensus algorithms – The core part of Blockchain development world that we will be talking about in this comprehensive guide.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

  1. Definition of Blockchain Consensus Algorithm
  2. Objectives of a Consensus Mechanism
  3. Properties of a Good Blockchain Consensus Mechanism
  4. Consequences of Relying Upon a Bad Consensus Protocol
  5. Blockchain Consensus Algorithms that are Popular in the Market
    1. Proof of Work (PoW)
    2. Proof of Stake (PoS) and Its Variations
    3. Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) and Its Derivatives
    4. Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG)
    5. Proof of Capacity (PoC)
    6. Proof of Burn (PoB)
    7. Proof of Identity (PoI)
    8. Proof of Activity (PoA)
    9. Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET)
    10. Proof of Importance (PoI)

What is Blockchain Consensus Algorithm?

Real Estate and Blockchain - Golden Realty

The simplest answer to what is Blockchain consensus algorithm is that it is a procedure via which all the peers of a Blockchain network reaches to a common acceptance or consensus about the real-time state of the distributed ledger.

A consensus mechanism enables the blockchain network to attain reliability and build a level of trust between different nodes, while ensuring security in the environment. This is the reason why it is one of the vital parts of every Blockchain app development guide and every dApp project in the distributed ledger environment.

These algorithms operate on the ground of different objectives, a few of which we will be covering in the next section of this article.

Objectives of Blockchain Consensus Mechanism

1. Unified Agreement

Vendor Due Diligence Checklist (With Downloadable PDF) | KirkpatrickPrice

One of the prime objectives of consensus mechanisms is attaining unified agreement.

Unlike centralized systems where having a trust on the authority is necessary, users can operate even without building trustin on each other in a decentralized manner. The protocols embedded in the Distributed blockchain network ensures that the data involved in the process is true and accurate, and the status of the public ledger is up-to-date.

2. Align Economic Incentive

Why Enterprise Blockchains Fail: No Economic Incentives - CoinDesk

When it comes to building a trustless system that regulates on its own, aligning the interests of participants in the network is a must.

A blockchain consensus protocol, in this situation, offers rewards for good behavior and punish the bad actors. This way, it ensures regulating economic incentive too.

3. Fair & Equitable

Adequate, Equal, Equitable, or Fair? - Generations Magazine Money

Consensus mechanisms enable anyone to participate in the network and using the same basics. This way, it justifies the open-source and decentralization property of the blockchain system.

4. Prevent Double Spending

Double-Spend Attacks on Bitcoin and More | Gemini

Consensus mechanisms works on the basis of certain algorithms that ensures that only those transactions are included in the public transparent ledger which are verified and valid. This solves the traditional problem of double-spending, i.e, the problem of spending a digital currency twice.

5. Fault Tolerant

Redundancy and fault tolerance (article) | Khan Academy

Another characteristic of Consensus method is that it ensures that the blockchain is fault-tolerant, consistent, and reliable. That means, the governed system would work indefinite times even in the case of failures and threats.

Currently, there are a plethora of Blockchain consensus algorithms in the ecosystem and many more are heading to enter the marketplace. This makes it imperative for every Blockchain development company and enthusiastic Entrepreneur to be familiar with the factors that defines a good consensus protocol, and the possible effect of going with a poor one.

So, let’s begin with determining what makes a Blockchain consensus a good one.

Properties of a Good Blockchain Consensus Mechanism

Review of the Six Types of Blockchain Consensus Mechanism

1. Safety

In a good consensus mechanism, all the nodes are capable of generating results that are valid according to the rules of protocol.

2. Inclusive

A good consensus mechanism ensures that every particular node of the network participates in the process of voting.

3. Participatory

A consensus mechanism where all the nodes actively participate and contribute to updating database on Blockchain is called a Good consensus model.

4. Egalitarian

Another trait of a good mechanism is that it gives equal value and weightage to every vote received from the node.

With this attended to, let’s find out what happens when you do not consider these factors and introduce a poor consensus model to your development process.

Consequences of Choosing a Bad Consensus Protocol

1. Blockchain Forks

The differences between a hard fork, a soft fork, and a chain split, and what they mean for the future of bitcoin | by John Light | Medium

Choosing a poor blockchain consensus method increases the vulnerability of the chain. One such vulnerability that is faced by the blockchain enthusiasts and developers is Blockchain Forks.

Blockchain forks, in a layman language, is a situation or circumstances under which a single chain diverges into two or more. A detailed explanation about Blockchain fork and its types is available in the video embedded below.

When a Blockchain fork occurs, the application begins operating in an unpredictable manner, creating two or more diverged nodes ahead.

2. Poor Performance

Poor Performance May Be Management's Fault – TLNT

When a bad consensus mechanism is considered, either the node gets malfunctioned or suffer from network partition. This delays the process of exchanging messages between nodes and increases the latency of the application, which ultimately lowers down the performance level.

3. Consensus Failure

Byzantine Fault Tolderance – Consensus Protocols in Distributed Networks

Another effect of incorporating a bad consensus mechanism to your business model is consensus failure. In this situation, a fraction of nodes fails to participate in any process and thus, in the absence of their votes, the consensus fails to deliver accurate and desired outcomes.

With the basics of Blockchain consensus methods now covered, let’s dive deeper into the topic and look at the popular types of consensus mechanism.

Blockchain Consensus Algorithms that are Popular in the Market

1. Proof of Work (PoW)

 

Developed by Satoshi Nakamoto, Proof of Work is the oldest consensus mechanism used in the Blockchain domain. It is also known as mining where the participating nodes are called miners.

In this mechanism, the miners have to solve complex mathematical puzzles using comprehensive computation power. They use different forms of mining methods, such as GPU mining, CPU mining, ASIC mining, and FPGA mining. And the one that solves the problem at the earliest gets a block as a reward.

However, the process is not that easy. A puzzle can be solved only via trial and error method. Additionally, the level of complexity of the puzzle increases with the speed at which blocks are mined. So, it becomes mandatory for one to create a new block within a certain time frame to cope up with the difficulty level.

The Proof of Work mechanism is used by multiple cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, ZCash, Primecoin, Monero, and Vertcoin to name a few.

In terms of its implementations, the Proof of Work (PoW) has not only influenced the financial industry, but also healthcare, governance, management and more. It has, in fact, offered the opportunity of multichannel payments and multi-signature transaction over an address for enhancing security.

2. Proof of Stake (PoS)

Implementing Proof of Stake Part — 1 | by Kashish Khullar | Coinmonks | Medium

Proof of Stake is the most basic and environmentally-friendly alternative of PoW consensus protocol.

In this blockchain method, the block producers are not miners, but they act like validators. They get the opportunity to create a block over everyone which saves energy and reduces the time. However, for them to become a validator, they are supposed to invest some amount of money or stake.

Also, unlike that in the case of PoW, miners are provided with a privilege to take their transaction fees in this algorithm for there is no reward system in this consensus model.

This, as a whole, encouraged brands like Ethereum to upgrade their model from PoW to PoS in their Ethereum 2.0 update. Also, it helped various Blockchain ecosystem like Dash, Peercoin, Decred, Reddcoin, and PivX to function properly.

Now, while PoS solved various issues earlier associated with PoW, there were many challenges still undusted in the market. To mitigate those challenges and deliver an enhanced blockchain environment, several variations of PoS came into existence.

The two popular variations of Proof of Stake (PoS) are DPoS and LPoS.

  • Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS)

In the case of Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), the participants stake their coin and vote for a certain number of delegates such that the more they invest, the more weightage they receive. For example: if user A spends 10 coins for a delegate and user B invests 5 coins, A’s vote gets more weightage than that of B.

The delegates also get rewarded in the form of transaction fees or certain amount of coins.

Because of this stake-weighted voting mechanism, DPoS is one of the fastest blockchain consensus models and highly preferred as a digital democracy. Some of the real-life  use cases of this blockchain consensus mechanism are Steem, EOS, and BitShares.

  • Leased Proof of Stake (LPoS)

LPoS is an enhanced version of PoS consensus mechanism that operates on the Waves platform.

Unlike the regular Proof-of-Stake method where each node with some amount of cryptocurrency is entitled to add the next blockchain, users can lease their balance to full nodes in this consensus algorithm. And the one that leases the bigger amount to the full node have a higher probability of generating the next block. Also, the leaser is then rewarded with a percentage of transaction fee that has been collected by the complete node.

This PoS variant is an efficient and safe option for the development of public cryptocurrencies.

3. Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT)

Byzantine Fault Tolerance Explained | Binance Academy

Byzantine Fault Tolerance, as the name suggests, is used to deal with Byzantine fault (also called Byzantine Generals Problem) – a situation where the system’s actors have to agree on an effective strategy so as to circumvent catastrophic failure of the system, but some of them are dubious.

Learn more about the Byzantine Generals Problem through this video:-

The two variations of BFT consensus model that are prime in the Blockchain arena are PBFT and DBFT.

  • Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT)

PBFT is a lightweight algorithm that solves the Byzantine General’s problems by letting users confirm the messages that have been delivered to them by performing a computation to evaluate the decision about the message’s validity.

The party then announces its decision to other nodes who ultimately process a decision over it. This way, the final decision relies upon the decisions retrieved from the other nodes.

Stellar, Ripple, and Hyperledger Fabric are some of use cases of this blockchain consensus mechanism.

  • Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (DBFT)

Introduced by NEO, the Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance mechanism is similar to DPoS consensus model. Here also, the NEO token holders get the opportunity to vote for the delegates.

However, this is independent of the amount of currency they invest. Anyone who fulfills the basic requirements, i.e, a verified identity, right equipment, and 1,000 GAS, can become a delegate. One among those delegates is then chosen as speaker randomly.

The speaker creates a new block from the transaction that is waiting to be validated. Also, he sends a proposal to the voted delegates who have the responsibility to supervise all the transactions and record them on the network. These delegates have the freedom to share and analyze the proposals to check the accuracy of data and honesty of the speaker. If, then, 2/3rd of the delegates validates it, the block is added to the blockchain.

This type of Blockchain consensus protocol is also called ‘Ethereum of China’ and can be a helpful resource in building a ‘smart economy’ by digitising assets and offering smart contracts on the blockchain.

4. Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG)

Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) Overview & Use Cases | Hazelcast

Another basic yet prime blockchain consensus model that every mobile app development services company working with Blockchain must be familiar with is DAG.

In this type of Blockchain consensus protocol, every node itself prepares to become the ‘miners’. Now, when miners are eradicated and transactions are validated by users itself, the associated fee reduces to zero. It becomes easier to validate transactions between any two closest nodes, which makes the whole process lightweight, faster, and secure.

The two best examples of DAG algorithm are IOTA and Hedera Hashgraph.

Though these are the prime consensus models in the development environment, many different blockchain consensus mechanisms have slowly and gradually starting gaining momentum, such as:-

5. Proof of Capacity (PoC)

What is Proof of Capacity? An Eco-Friendly Mining Solution - CoinCentral

In the Proof of Capacity (PoC) mechanism, solutions for every complex mathematical puzzle is accumulated in digital storages like Hard disks. Users can use these hard disks to produce blocks, in a way that those who are fastest in evaluating the solutions get better chances for creating blocks.

The process it follows is called Plotting. The two cryptocurrencies that relies on PoC blockchain consensus protocol are Burstcoin and SpaceMint.

6. Proof of Burn (PoB)

What is Proof of Burn?

Considered an alternate solution to PoW and PoS in terms of energy consumption, Proof of Burn (PoB) consensus model works on the principle of letting miners ‘burn’ or ‘ruin’ the virtual cryptocurrency tokens, which further provides them with a privilege to write blocks in proportion to the coins. The more coins they burn, the more are the chances of picking the new block for every coin they get.

But, in order to burn coins, they are required to send it to the address where it couldn’t be spent for verifying the block.

This is widely employed in the case of distributed consensus. And the finest example of this consensus mechanism is the Slim coin.

7. Proof of Identity (PoI)

OspreyFX KYC Verification - Acceptable Proof of Identity : OspreyFX

The concept of PoI (Proof of Identity) is just like that of the authorized identity. It is a piece of cryptographic confirmation for a users’ private key that is being attached to each particular transaction. Each identified user can create and manage a block of data that can be presented to others in the network.

This blockchain consensus model ensures authenticity and integrity of the created data. And thus, is a good choice for introducing in smart cities.

8. Proof of Activity (PoA)

What Is Proof-of-Activity (PoA)?

PoA is basically a hybrid approach designed through the convergence of PoW and PoS blockchain consensus models.

In the case of PoA mechanism, miners race to solve a cryptographic puzzle at the earliest using special hardware and electric energy, just like in PoW. However, the blocks they come across holds only the information about the identity of block winner and reward transaction. This is where the mechanism switches to PoS.

The validators (shareholders appointed to validate transactions) test and ensure the correctness of the block.  If the block was checked many times, the validators activate to a complete block. This confirms that open transactions are processes and are finally integrated into the found block containers.

Besides, the block reward is divided so that validators gain shares of it.

The two real-world implementation of this mechanism are Espers and Decred coins.

9. Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET)

Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET) (Cryptocurrency) Definition

PoET was introduced by Intel with an intent to take over cryptographic puzzles involved in PoW mechanism by considering the fact that the CPU architecture and the quantity of mining hardware knows when and at what frequency does a miner win the block.

It is based on the idea of fairly distributing and expanding the odds for a bigger fraction of participants. And so, every participating node is asked to wait for a particular time to participate in the next mining process. The member with the shortest hold-up time is asked to offer a block.

At the same time, every node also come up with their own waiting time, after which they go into sleep mode.

So, as soon as a node gets active and a block is available, that node is considered as the ‘lucky winner’. This node can then spread the information throughout the network, while maintaining the property of decentralization and receiving the reward.

10. Proof of Importance (PoI)

Proof-of-importance (PoI) - Wiki | Golden

Introduced by NEM, PoI is a variation of PoS protocol that considers the role of shareholders and validators for its operation. However, this is not only influenced by the size and chance of their shares; various other factors like reputation, overall balance, and no. of transactions made through any particular address also plays a role in it.

The networks based on POI consensus model are expensive to attack on and rewards users for contributing to the network’s security.

The information shared so far would have helped you in differentiating the varied Blockchain consensus protocols.

However, to simplify it for you, here’s a blockchain consensus algorithms comparison table.

 

Organizational Online Security: Brand Protection

Posted on by Anteelo Master

5 Most Common Online Security Threats According to Segurazo | by Segurazo | Segurazo | Medium

A Brief on ‘What is Brand Protection?’

Just like Rome was not built in a day, successful business takes days of hard work and challenges to reach a paramount height. Many enterprises that fall under Fortune companies today, took years to build their business and create an eminent brand image in the market. However, the reputation of any organization relies upon its brand and its presence on various platforms. One of the biggest platforms that majorly impacts an organization’s reputation is the ‘online platform’. A brand is a valuable asset of an organization, especially over the digital landscape. Therefore, organizations must ensure brand protection online in the same fashion as they protect their other valuable assets. Failure to do so may not only reduce the value of your brand in the market but also can completely damage the reputation of your business.

A brand is more than just a front face of an organization. It is an intangible perception in the mindsets of consumers that concerns the quality and attributes of a product or service of the business. Moreover, developing any brand requires significant time and investment, but it would take only a matter of some time for cyber threat actors to destroy a brand’s image completely online. Hence, due to the widespread usage of the internet in the business world today, it has become essential highly to protect your brand. Brand protection is basically the act of preventing the brand against counterfeiting and copyright infringement activities.  It is the process of securing a company’s intellectual property (IP) and their associated brand from copyright pirates or imitators from violating trademark rights, legitimate website content, designs, patents, etc. In short, brand protection prevents the brand from being abused in the digital landscape.

Why Does Your Brand Reputation Matter Online?

Today people are bombarded with various online advertisements of ubiquitous brand names. Even though renowned brands are easily recognizable, there are several other websites or applications present online that counterfeit brand names for malicious use. There are many reasons for the importance of brand protection. For instance, imagine your potential customer searching online for a service or product of your business. But rather than coming across the legitimate website of your company, your customer happens to fall for a fake website that has impersonated the content of your website and looks highly convincing. What would be your take on this? Without your knowing, your customer would fall for it and there would be a high possibility that after finding out the illegitimacy of the fake websites, a major bad impact on your brand reputation would arise. While it is just a scenario of one customer, imagine the number of other customers who might unknowingly fall victim to such websites that are impersonating your business online!

Follow the image below to understand the problem more clearly:

From the above image, it can be clearly seen that phishers can easily trick users with fake websites using convincing content and make it look like the original one. Although this practice of brand infringing comes in various forms such as copyright piracy, social media impersonation, trademark squatting, etc., the phishing of website and application tops among them all. The malicious motive of phishers to create an impersonated website or application is to get most of the traffic redirected from official to fake platform. By doing this, they get to trick customers into submitting their personal information and later these cybercrooks misuse the provided information. In fact, recently in the two weeks of the survey, it was discovered that 94% of COVID-19 related cyberattacks were phishing attacks and it included fake websites with domain names as “Corona” or “COVID”. Also, it was reported that 51,000 Coronavirus-themed domains were registered at the beginning of 2020, between January and March!

Moreover, in February 2020,  the banking sector was used as a bait in the phishing attack campaign. The cyber attackers targeted mobile banking users by sending phishing links that redirect users to fake websites impersonating well-known banks in North America. Nearly 4,000 users fell victim to the phishing attack where the cyber threat actors were able to capture their sensitive information and login credentials. In a threat research report, it was discovered that in every 20 seconds a new phishing website goes live! This means that 3 new websites per minute are specifically designed to target users to steal their personal information. These statistics are the call for organizations to understand how vulnerable their brands are online. Today, organizations without online brand protection hold higher chances of having phished pages of their legitimate website online.

Brand impersonation

No matter what kind of industry your business comes under, be it manufacturing, healthcare, food, or BFSI, phishers won’t spare you if they find your brand vulnerable online. They would not only create a fake website but would also get the power of risking your business’ brand reputation in phishing scams, including other malicious activities. This is why brand protection is the most critical aspect of every industry today.

What is Online Security

What Types of Brand Protection Strategies Should Organizations Follow?

An organization must implement proper and adequate brand protection strategies to keep a watch on the online activities taking place against their brand. Amidst the complexity of evolving online threats, stringent monitoring, and security measures are highly recommended for every firm. Knowing how cyber threat actors can infringe your brand and forge your company’s website, it is necessary to enforce your rights to maintain the integrity of your brand. Here are the best brand protection strategies that every CISO and CIO must implement in the organization:

  • Stringent Brand Monitoring:

Regular and stringent brand monitoring ensures that your brand is not being negatively publicized on the internet by phishing web pages or applications. It is the best way to identify fraudulent practices taking place against your brand and maintaining the brand’s reputation in the digital landscape. With proactive brand monitoring, it becomes easier to detect website forgery and manage the domain.

  • Instant Take-down Tool:

Implementing brand protection software not only detects counterfeiting of websites and applications effectively but also ensures to instantly take-down phishing domains present online in the name of your brand. Only regular tracking won’t stop cybercriminals from impersonating your website but implementing an instant take-down tool will help in removing all phishing domains within a matter of seconds from the web browser.

Cyber Security Expert Roles| ECU Online

  • Dark Web Monitoring:

Hackers can go beyond the regular surface web to exploit an organization’s brand reputation while creating phishing websites or applications. You may never know how your brand is being misused in the other hidden world of the web called the dark web. The dark web is an infamous part of the web where the confidentiality and legitimacy of brands is exploited. By implementing and using dark monitoring techniques, organizations can detect the copyright infringement activities taking place on the dark web.

Implementing these above-mentioned following types of brand protection strategies, organizations can secure their brand online and mitigate the chances of website forgery.

How Does the Price of Cryptocurrency Change in the Market?

Posted on by Tushar

Cryptocurrency - Guide and Explanation - Corporate Finance Institute

If we had to make a list of some of the top volatile elements of the world, the one name that would top even Mercury is Cryptocurrencies.

Ever since their launch in 2009, cryptocurrencies have found themselves being counted as one of the most fluctuating and volatile topics of the world seeking to get to the bottom of what is cryptocurrency.

There is hardly any investment enthusiast who has not tried to crack the code of why cryptocurrencies fluctuate and how to take that understanding and convert it into insights that would make the investment successful.

While the industry has managed to make itself one that is extremely difficult to gauge in terms of cryptocurrency price movement, let us try to decipher how the price of cryptocurrency changes in the market by understanding how and why the cryptocurrencies move.

But let us first start by drawing parallels between Cryptocurrencies and Fiat Money.

Cryptocurrency vs Fiat Currency: How the Two Compare Against Each Other

Fiat vs. Crypto & Digital Currencies | Gemini

The biggest comparative factor that stands between the cryptocurrency vs fiat currency debate is their backing. The fiat currencies are backed by the central governments and its value are derived from the fact that central government states it has value and then the parties transacting in the value are putting their trust in them. In the case of fiat currency, central banks control the entire supply of money and thus inflation.

Cryptocurrencies, on the other side, was brought into existence to not let central government have the autonomy to regulate the funds of an individual. And because they have a fixed supply, the devaluation through inflation is next to nonexistent.

Apart from this, both cryptocurrency and fiat currency come with similar characteristics: they both can be used as the medium to exchange services and products and they can store value.

Why Does Cryptocurrency Prices Fluctuate So Much?

The difference between a cryptocurrency and fiat money — Bitpanda Academy

A single statement answer to the question of what drives cryptocurrency price movement would be – because it is still a nascent stage.

Being a market that is yet to find its set of logical use cases, cryptocurrencies are still at a very nascent stage. And the result of this newness is the high volatility in the industry, which is majorly driven by the heightened experiments that investors make to get a sense of how the prices fluctuate.

Factors That Affect The Changing Cryptocurrency Values

The factors affecting price of cryptocurrency could range from the scope of cryptocurrency application in the present day to the future uses of cryptocurrency coin and a series of other linked elements falling in the development of the cryptocurrency space. Here are some of those reasons that bring about a cryptocurrency price movement in the market

1. Utility of the Coins

Most Utility Coins May Have Limited Utility, But Their Place In Crypto History Is Secure

Any sound Blockchain development company would tell you that a cryptocurrency should have a strong use case in order to incentivize people to hold the coins.

Let us look at Ethereum as an example to explain it further. For executing the commands and developing applications on the Ethereum blockchain, one would need to have ETH to convert into gas and represent the ‘fuel’ of Ethereum.

Thus, the more the people who execute transactions and develop applications, the more would be the demand for ETH and greater would be the prices. In short, the bigger role of cryptocurrencies, the greater would be the cryptocurrency market cap.

2. Scarcity

The scarcity problem: Why cryptocurrencies are so divisive | by Aw Kai Shin | Coinmonks | Medium

Scarcity denotes the finite mechanism of cryptocurrencies.

In economics, a stable supply of any item increases its value in the long term for it is assumed that the demand would also increase. This, in turn, creates a scarcity for there are only a few coins in circulation. Some brands even use a burning mechanism, which means destroying a part of the coin supply. This in turn, increases the coin value for there is lesser coin supply.

3. Assumed Value

Assumed Stock Illustrations – 182 Assumed Stock Illustrations, Vectors & Clipart - Dreamstime

A cryptocurrency can only be as valuable as the market deem fit and the market values it on the basis of factors which are at the center of the project development. Here are some factors that determine the value of projects –

  • One that constantly achieve the milestones mentioned in its whitepaper
  • Partnership and collaboration with credible companies
  • Launch of MVP or beta version
  • The growth of the cryptocurrency market

4. Deflation of Fiat Currency

fiat money | History & Examples | Britannica

When the price of fiat currency declines, the price of cryptocurrency would automatically go up with respect to that currency. This happens because you would be able to get more currencies with your cryptocurrencies.

5. Mass Adoption

4 Challenges Bitcoin Must Overcome Before Mass Adoption Can Take Place | by Sylvain Saurel | The Startup | Medium

Driven by the sentiment that the more a product is demand, the greater would be its cost, the cryptocurrency price movement goes up with greater adoption that it sees in the market. This one formula has been the core reason behind the rise in prices of Bitcoin. So the more use cases a coin will see (like in case of Bitcoin) the greater would be its overall cost.

6. Whales

Cryptocurrency Investing Tips and Guide

As the term denotes, Whales are those Bitcoin wallets that have around $1 billion in them. They make it very difficult to put any price target on the cryptocurrency. Per Wimmer, the founder of Wimmer Financial LLP, explains: “The crypto market is dominated mainly by ten big whales or privates. They are massive in the market and take up a lot space and volume so if you take the top 10 or even 50 you will have a lot of the volume covered already. It is too easy to manipulate the market so far”.

One way these ‘whales’ fuel price manipulations is through the rinse and repeat trading technique. Under this approach, a whale carrying huge crypto holdings begins selling them at lower than the market rate, which in turn causes a panic situation where small-time traders start selling off their holdings. The whale, meanwhile, waits through the panic state till the cryptocurrency value reaches rock bottom. And just when the price is low, they swoop in and buy more cryptocurrencies.

Besides these factors, if there is one thing that is and would continue to affect the cryptocurrency price fluctuations greatly is the regulations’ set. Presently, the speed at which governments are passing out regulations are limited to a huge extent, thus keeping cryptocurrencies reaching their mass adoption potential. But the more regulations, the greater would be the adoption and thus the rise in cryptocurrency prices.

Beyond Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), An Overview of Blockchain Funding Models

Posted on by Tushar

Understand Blockchain Business Models: Complete Guide - Blockgeeks

2017 was the year when Blockchain first entered the investment world.

The prevalent situation of confusion about the genuinity of Blockchain projects is what enticed the technology enthusiasts to take the matter in their control and create their own funding model to initiate some traction in the adoption of decentralization.

This need to get a new class of investors on board is what conceptualized Initial Coin Offering (ICOs). A model that went on to become a major hit in 2017 with the funding rounds now hitting new heights.

By the end of 2017 and starting of 2018, ICOs had now reached a point where the industry was now passing comparative lines and questioning if ICOs are replacing Venture Capital funding rounds.

In 2018, however, we saw a slight setback in the ICO adoption in the market, in terms of the picture that was now coming on the forefront – a picture of scams in funding bitcoin development. The market though kept rising to the occasion, even when the accusation of scams were surrounding it, with only a slight downfall. Something that now made people question if ICOs are still worth investing.

Came 2019 and we saw new types of Blockchain funding models entering the industry – promising to help Blockchain entrepreneurs and investors get into the decentralization world with more confidence. These models soon became the most renowned non-traditional funding models operating in the market today. In this article, we are going to introduce you with the world of Blockchain funding types that are now slowly moving away and beyond from Initial Coin Offerings. For in no way, there is a shortage in demand for Blockchain fundings, if at all, the decentralization range getting funded is only increasing. Giving the question – will investment in cryptocurrency and blockchain startups continue to rise or stagnate? An answer in Yes.

But since the whole Blockchain powered funding process was conceptualized with ICOs, we will not make it sit out of the list of Type of Blockchain Funding Models. Just like we have not excluded it from our Blockchain guide for entrepreneurs.

So, here we go.

The Top Blockchain Funding Models

A. Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs)

What Is The Initial Coin Offering (ICO) And Is It Worth Investing?

The concept is first to initiate funding powered by Blockchain ecosystem. Working mainly at the back of Whitepapers, the model invites investors to put in their money in the decentralized project in return of cryptocoins, which is expected to see a rise in the time to come – thus increasing with it the investors’ money and eliminating the need to explain how does ICOs work.

B. Initial Exchange Offerings (IEOs)

IEO vs ICOs: Here's Why Initial Exchange Offerings Are Booming

Being one of the most closely similar to ICO Blockchain funding types, the core of IEOs lies in the basic concept of Initial Coin Offering – with the only difference being in the fact that unlike ICOs, where the whole funding round and an event happens on the company’s website, it happens on the crypto-currency exchange.

The crypto-exchanges are meant to develop a platform in which the developer pool is minting and selling their token to the individual contributors in return of either fiat or any other cryptocurrency.

The primal answer of how IEO differs from ICO is that the investors need not send their cryptocurrency to some smart contract. Instead, they will have to open an account on a platform on which the IEO will take place.

The next step would be to fund in their crypto-exchange wallet and then make use of those coins for purchasing the company’s digital money.

The benefit of this is that the whole IEO model becomes tradable almost instantly, while in the case of ICOs, the investors are made to wait for months to sell their coins. In addition to it, the exchange is also interested in marketing their tokens for they receive a percentage of tokens which are sold in the offering.

What it Means for Your Business?

While only minutely different from ICOs (at least seemingly) the benefits that IEOs have to offer are very huge in comparison.

  • You will not have to ask your blockchain development agency to set up your KYC process as the process is already done by the exchange
  • It gets you the ready-made user base of the crypto-exchange
  • Getting listed on exchange needs a whole other set of expertise – a step which is easily avoided
  • The fact that your project is listed on an exchange automatically gives it a trustable reputation.

C. DAICOs

An idea coined by Vitalik Buterin at the beginning of 2018, DAICO is ICO made more trusted and accountable.

The Blockchain funding model starts off as ICO with investors sending their funds to the development team and receiving tokens that are proportionate to the funding. The difference comes when in the way that the funds are all locked away from the development team and they cannot access it – unlike in the case of ICO – thus answering how DAICO is better than traditional ICO.

In the second phase or the phase where the difference in DAICO vs ICO emerges is in the fact that following the DAO model, the token holders vote in favor of or against the project proposal. Meaning, the development team will only be able to implement the proposals which got enough positive votes – an event that happens on the smart contract.

The contract, in case of DAICO, has a variable called ‘Tap’. The tap is set to zero at the initial stage, meaning the development team won’t be able to access funds a.k.a Tap mode. This mode gets activated as soon as your ‘Contribution’ mode ends – the part where funds were given by the investors.

Now, the development team has to submit in resolutions which contain the project development phase while the investors have to unanimously decide whether or not to vote for the rise in Tap value. If they raise the value, funds will be given to the developers, otherwise, it won’t be – a part known as Withdraw mode.

In the case where the investors and the development team are unhappy with how it is all happening, investors can vote for self-destructing the contract, in which case refunds will be made to the investors.

The benefit that DAICO offers over ICO is a complete scam proof ecosystem. Unlike ICO scams where businesses take in all the money and leave the project, DAICO enables the investors to have full control over when to take their money out. And even in case of a scam, their whole investment never gets wasted for they get the refund while the tokens held by the developers are completely destroyed.

What it Means for Your Business?

While on a superficial level DAICOs appear as more of an investor-benefitting funding model, there are some pretty strong for cases from the business front as well –

  • Since the fund distribution now becomes dependent on the development phases, the motivation level is very high – helping in keeping high-quality quotient intact.
  • The high accountability that the model promises is something that helps face the scammy image of ICOs at its core, thus not just strengthening your business’s image but of the whole of the Blockchain industry.

D. Equity Token Offering (ETOs)

ICO Development services - Top ICO Development Company

The funding model that is the sub-section of Security Token Blockchain Offering is a fresh take on the ICOs. Unlike in the case of Initial Coin Offerings where the investors only get coins in return of their investment, Equity Token Offerings get them a pro-rata ownership in the company including the dividend and voting rights. The equity-crowdfunding model enables off-chain companies to issue share on the on-chain platforms in the ETO vs ICO debate. Here are some benefits that Security Token Offerings (STOs) as a whole offers to the Blockchain ecosystem –

What it Means for Your Business?

When you choose to go with the ETO model, you invite off-chain companies like private equity and startups to onboard without relying on caseless utility tokens. Something that opens your blockchain project for the world to invest in. There are some other implications of choosing ETO for your business as well, like:

  • The transaction cost in the traditional process of investment is reduced
  • The Reverse Dutch Auction enables gauging of investor demand before the actual ETO, which results in optimizing the price point for issuers.

Here were the four types of Blockchain funding models that are presently operative and emerging in the world to help set up several decentralized projects off the ground.

Now, the question remains how do you decide which funding model is right for your business? Our team of Blockchain experts and Bitcoin Blockchain developers has the answers. Fill in the contact form below to get the answers.

The Roadmap to a More Scalable Ethereum Experience (Ethereum 2.0)

Posted on by Tushar

CYBAVO - Ethereum 2.0 launching today

  • Ethereum 1.0 is getting upgraded.
  • Ethereum 2.0 is going to be the new face of App industry because of its speed, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and other such benefits.
  • Ethereum 2.0 will be ready within 18-24 months, in the form of 7 different phases.
  • Ethereum 2.0 Phase 0 is expected to be live this year.

Ever since Ethereum was launched back in 2015, the developers were having sky-high hopes from it. While Buterin and Co., the company behind the evolution of this blockchain-based distributed computing platform, made significant changes in its consensus model and scaling solutions, the developer’s demand for an integrated experience of all these changes was not yet fulfilled.

But this Monday, the history of the Ethereum platform changed. The company announced an OS upgrade, known as Ethereum 2.0 (Serenity) – a glance of which we are going to cover within the next 3 seconds.

Ethereum 2.0: What It Is

Ethereum's Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin Donates Over $1 Billion To India Covid Relief Fund And Other Charities

Ethereum 2.0, according to Van Loon, is a distinct Blockchain from the existing Ethereum Chain, where the hard fork of the current blockchain is not mandatory for proper functioning. Instead, the value in Ethereum 2.0 is transmitted from ‘Proof of Work’ chain through a one-way deposit Smart contract.

With this attended to, let’s have a look into the reason behind the idea of launching this upgrade, or better say, have a comparison of Ethereum 1.0 and Ethereum 2.0

Ethereum 2.0 vs Ethereum 1.0: What Everyone Ought to Know

Ethereum Vs Ethereum 2.0 [Key Differences] » CoinFunda

When it comes to comparing the two OS versions, the reasons that come up as the igniting force behind the introduction of Ethereum 2.0 are the following challenges associated with current Ethereum:-

  1. Scalability:- Ethereum was launched with an aim to be the world computer that manages all the financial transactions and host dApps and Smart contracts without being impractically slow. However, Ethereum 1.0 is not able to fulfill this requirement while operating with PoW (Proof-of-Work) algorithm – something that gives the scope of introducing other more scalability-friendly platforms in the many Blockchain guide meant for entrepreneurs.
  2. Security:- Though not a major issue, the security level and considerations associated with Ethereum 1.0 are not advanced. They have to be improved, which is what Ethereum 2.0 is focusing upon.
  3. A Solution for Difficulty Bomb:- The developers have been continually compelled to shift from PoW to PoS by slowing down the mining rewards. However, this is increasing the difficulty associated with the process, and in the absence of any solution, it has been resulting in a dead end. Ethereum 2.0, in this case, will come up as a solution for the dApp developers to make better applications.

Now as we are familiar with the secret behind launching Ethereum 2.0, let’s dig deeper into what includes in this upgrade and when it will be live.

Ethereum denotes a series of updates that will make Ethereum make better and faster by focusing on two prime goals:-

  1. Introducing PoS (Proof of Stake) consensus mechanism that will eventually eradicate the need to invest in PoW (Proof of Work) mining.
  2. Introducing Sharding which will boost speed and throughout of the ETH transactions.

Now, when talking about the series of updates, the Ethereum 2.0 is making the update live in different phases. An outcome of which is that the 7 phases of the evolution of Ethereum 2.0 is expected to hit the market – with the Phase 0 just gone live.

Wondering what these different phases are? What will be included in each phase and when are they supposed to be made available to developers? Let’s cover this in the next section of the blog.

Different Phases of Ethereum 2.0

Phase 0: PoS Beacon Chain

Ethereum 2.0: Beacon Chain PoS Upgrade Launches - CoolWallet

The Beacon Chain is a PoS-enabled chain that will run in parallel to Ethereum’s Proof of Work chain and enable a Blockchain app development company to reap the benefits of the network without investing their time and energy into the process of re-learning the parameters of the platform. It is estimated to enter the market this year itself.

Phase 1: Basic Sharding

Understanding Database Sharding | DigitalOcean

In this phase, shard chains will work in sync with the Beacon chain. They will aid developers with higher transactional speed and instant output delivery in transactions, which will eventually upgrade the scalability.

Shard chains will be responsible for managing transactions and exchange of account data and will be live in the world in 2020.

Phase 2: EVM State Transition Functioning

Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) - Wiki | Golden

Proposed to enter the market in 2020-2021, this phase of Ethereum 2.0 Serenity will be related to the advent of new EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) which will be upgraded via the eWASM (Ethereum Web Assembly). This new virtual machine is predicted to perform code execution more swiftly and effectively while supporting many more programming language.

Besides, this phase will also witness the introduction of better protocol standardization to enhance the network security.

Phase 3: Light Client State Protocol

What is a light client and why you should care? | Parity Technologies

The fourth phase of evolution of Ethereum 2.0 will begin in 2022 and will cover everything related to the improvement of network in terms of security, scalability, and decentralization.

Phase 4: Cross-shard Transactions

This phase will be basically related to mind mapping of the complete architecture and will be seen somewhere around 2022.

Phase 5: Tight Coupling with Main Chain Security

The sixth phase of Ethereum 2.0 Serenity will be associated with internally fork-free sharding and data availability proofs.

Phase 6: Super-Quadratic or Exponential Sharding

What Is Sharding? | BTCMANAGER

The last phase of Ethereum 2.0 (Serenity), which will go live by the end of the year 2022, will be related to managing recursive shards.

The process of evolution of Ethereum 2.0, with 7 seven phases is announced to be completed within 18-24 months. This implies we will be able to enjoy 100 times more scalable network by the year 2022 along with other facilities like transition of Ether tokens from old chain to new one.

Natural Language Intent Recognition (Part 3) of the NLP Anthology

Posted on by Tushar

Rasa NLU in Depth: Intent Classification

Natural Language Intent Recognition: Intelligent Audio Transcript Analytics Using Semantic Analysis to Understand User’s Intent

In the modern business landscape, timing is everything. Quickly identifying user’s intent can help you get a leg up your competition. How? It can enable you to respond actively to a potential customer’s interest and multiply your chances of influencing the key decision-makers through meaningful conversations.

But, if you receive thousands of customer interactions a day, detecting customer intent in your unstructured data is challenging. The good news is that you can automate intent classification with artificial intelligence, so you can identify intent in thousands of emails, social media posts, and more in real-time and prioritize responses to potential customers.

Raise your hand if you’re a business that’s finding it increasingly complex to detect user intent from voluminous unstructured data sets containing long-wielded sentences and juxtaposed multiple objectives. Chances are your hand is up.

The good news is that you now have a solution to this.

What is Intent?

Android Intents - Tutorial

Simply put, refer to anything a user wants to accomplish

Now talking from a technical perspective, we define intent as a single or group of 2-3 contiguous sentences that can solely convey an idea with its necessary context. Extracting the call intent can lead to many downstream applications, such as better content creation and planning.

3 Challenges in Natural Language Intent Recognition

We discussed some challenges in part-1 of this 4-blog series. Here we discuss three more challenges specific to intent recognition (or intent classification).

  • There can be multiple intents present across the call transcript like we discussed in the example above.
  • Differentiation between the client intent and details of the same. In the above example, differentiating between the intent, i.e., to know about the growth percentage or its details.
  • Missing or incorrect punctuations leading to wrong sentences extracted as questions. For example, “I’m not sure what the report says?” having a question as wrong punctuation.

Anteelo’s NL-IR Approach

Pre-processing

Data Preprocessing : Concepts. Introduction to the concepts of Data… | by Pranjal Pandey | Towards Data Science

Cleaning and casual talk removal steps, mentioned in Part 1 of this 4-blog series, are followed to remove the unwanted sentences present in the transcripts. This important step highly affects the output of the next steps.

For instance, “How are you Cathy? How was your vacation?” should not be extracted by the Question Analytics module, which we will explore later in this blog. The intents are present throughout the call; however, we observed that 92% of the time, the intent was in the first half of the call. Hence, we focused on it to increase the precision of the system.

Feature extraction

  • Natural Language Question Extraction: To extract questions that clients ask, we use Anteelo Question Analytics NLP Accelerator that follows a hybrid approach ( combination of both rule-based and supervised approach). The rule-based approach leverages 5W-1H words and four generalized POS tag and Dependency parser patterns to detect the starting point of the interrogative part, if available, in a sentence. The supervised classifier was trained on ~100k questions’ data.

The Main Approaches to Natural Language Processing Tasks - KDnuggets

  • Constraints-based Intent Sentence Extraction: Identify the objectives of the client that are not conveyed in the form of questions. Intent identification is done by skip-gram matching of two generalized Dependency parser patterns.
  • Contiguity Sentence Extraction: We also extract the important sentences after the first extraction step to provide more context. The following sentences were extracted if they are tightly coupled with the preceding sentences identified by the conjunctions and other identifiers

Intent Segments Formation

Primarily, the intent segments are formed combining the contiguous sentences extracted by the methods stated above. However, simply combining the contiguous sentences can lead to many sentences in a segment that would decrease the system’s effectiveness.

The system divides the obtained segment into subsets with the least deviation in the number of sentences in each subset segment and with a maximum of 6 sentences in a subset segment. The splitting is done considering the continuity and similarity of sentences. These split segments are considered as final intent segments that will be fed into the next module.

Natural Language Intent Ranking

Natural Language Processing | kore.ai

This module will rank the intent segments obtained from the above module. We use multiple signals to rank these segments.

  • Topics: Used topics obtained from Key Concept Extraction mentioned in Part 2 of this blog series to boost the segments’ scores containing these concepts.
  • Number of questions: Improve the score of the segments having a high number of questions.
  • Importance of paragraph: Giving higher weightage to the segments in the bigger paragraph, having vital information.
  • Summarization: Boost the score of the segments having TextRank + Bert summary sentences.

More signals can be added to domain-specific needs.

Dynamic number of Output Intents

Since there is no fixed number of intents that the clients ask in a call, providing a hard cut-off of Top “N” intents will not provide desirable output. Hence, the system is designed to automatically provide the dynamic number of intents corresponding to each transcript using a differential cut-off to identify the number of intents that needs to be provided as output.

COVID-19’s Impact on Online Business

Posted on by Tushar

New COVID-19 Resources Available - International Society of Nephrology

The radical transformation in how people across the world are living during the Coronavirus pandemic is having a significant impact on internet businesses. While some are seeing sales plummet, others are struggling to cope with growing demand. In this post, we’ll look at how the online marketplace is changing in the current circumstances.

1. Growing demand for streaming services

Best Streaming Services 2021: The Full List Available

Millions of people are turning to movies and box-set series to keep them entertained while they are cooped up indoors. As a result, streaming services are seeing growth not just in the amount of time people are watching but in the numbers of new customers flocking to use their services. In Europe, Netflix has had to reduce its picture quality by 25% to ensure bandwidth capacity.

Increased demand means that in North America, Netflix is now forecast to more than double expected growth in new subscriptions, from 1.6% to 3.8% over the year – and that’s in a region where it is already well established. Internationally, growth is expected to rise by over 30%.

It’s not just Netflix that is benefitting. So too are other streaming services, like Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and Now TV. Recently launched services like Disney and the BBC-ITV venture, Britbox, which may have struggled to compete, might find opportunities that wouldn’t have arisen in normal circumstances.

2. Online gaming taking off

No Dice, All Bets Are Off | Outlook India Magazine

Although a narrower market, younger people forced to stay at home are driving up demand for gaming. This isn’t just increasing subscriptions for online gaming services but also helping retailers of downloadable PC games. PC gaming platform, Steam, for example, has seen its highest number of users in 16 years with traffic spikes of over 20 million at times.

3. Big impact on PPC ad spending

9 PPC Mistakes That Impact Success

The travel industry has been one of the most affected sectors by the virus and this has resulted in a slump in advertising from travel-related businesses, with some market experts suggesting it could lead to 15 – 20% reduction in travel advertising revenue for Google and Facebook. This figure is likely to be compounded by all the other businesses that rely on tourism also cutting their ad spend.

It is not just travel-related businesses who are reducing advertising. With many companies forced to close due to the effects of social distancing, they too will be cutting back or suspending advertising altogether. In 2018, McDonalds spent over a billion dollars in advertising just in the US. It has now closed all its UK stores and is shutting thousands of others globally as the pandemic spreads. It obviously won’t be damaging its cashflow by spending huge amounts on ads over this period. With industries such as entertainment, high street retail, restaurants, etc., also affected, Google and Facebook could see ad revenue fall by up to 45% over the next few quarters.

However, it is not all bad news. With fewer advertisers competing for ads, the cost per click in many sectors is likely to reduce, meaning those companies that can still derive value from advertising will see their budgets go further. In addition, consumers are clicking on more ads associated with employment, education, hobbies, leisure, arts and entertainment.

4. Holiday bookings won’t dry up

COVID travel: Where to book your trip once pandemic deals dry up

While travel is out of the question for most people at the moment, more than half of those who take frequent holidays are likely to book trips further into the future. Business travellers are even more likely to make long term bookings. While this is not the immediate relief those in the travel industry and all the depended industries need, the taking of deposits can help with current cashflow problems. Most of these bookings will take place over the internet.

As the pandemic begins to recede, it is predicted that most holidaymakers will, initially, seek domestic holidays where there is likely to be less disruption impact by failing tour operators and airlines and where the impact of the virus is more certain than abroad.

5. Global increase in online shopping

Online shopping is catching on among women in India

As fewer people go out, their shopping habits are moving online. Even retailers seeing a boom in sales, like supermarkets, are having more customers using their delivery service simply to avoid the risk of going to the store.

This rise is happening globally. An Ipso-Mori study found that 18% of UK consumers were shopping more online. In countries which have been more badly affected, the numbers of people increasing their internet shopping is even more substantial: 31% in Italy and 51% in China. However, the biggest increases are in countries like India 55% and Vietnam 57%. This rise has meant some companies are struggling to cope with demand. Amazon, for example, is so busy it is recruiting 100,000 additional staff, raising wages and making its employees work overtime to meet demand.

One area of particular growth is in the use of grocery apps, which are seeing unprecedented numbers of downloads in the US. Instacart downloads during March are already more than triple that of February while Walmart’s app has seen a 160% rise.

Conclusion

Coronavirus is having a significant impact on consumer behaviour and this is affecting internet businesses in different ways. For many, there are challenging times ahead as consumers drop plans to travel and stop online bookings for local businesses. However, there has been a sharp increase in online shopping with some retailers having to expand their workforces to cope.

4 Global Supply Chain Challenges and How Control Towers Can Help

Posted on by Tushar

4 Challenges Facing Innovation - Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney

The global market in 2021 is faster, more digital, and more competitive than ever. Customers carry the baton, and demand signals keep flowing into the enterprise from more and more different channels.

The modern supply chain dynamics require innovative capabilities and strategies to deal with uncertainties, improve resilience and implement holistic solutions to balance costs, services, deliveries, and customer expectations.

Four Challenges Facing the Modern Supply Chain Industry

What is Modern Supply Chain Management? - Unicsoft

Supply chain leaders need to manage a highly complex supply chain for the global business environment and deal with disruptions to keep the bottom line and top line intact. However, for decades, poor supply chain visibility has suffocated the industry.

Here are the four challenges gripping the modern supply chain.

1. Data and Application Silos

Are Data Silos Creating a Big Data Problem for Your Company?

Vertical organizations often fly blind.

Yes, that is true. Most companies are vertically integrated and use systems such as ERP, TMS, WMS, MRP to manage their functional departments. The functions primarily rely on plans developed within such systems to drive execution, monitoring & control. As a result, critical information such as customer demand, logistics, function-specific supply challenges & backlogs is siloed and invisible to other departments.

While function-specific analysis is time-consuming, cross-functional insights are even more challenging and require sifting through large volumes of data. Thus, business unit heads lose sight of the strategic ambitions of the overall supply chain

According to a survey by Supply Chain Dive, only 6% of companies believe that they have achieved complete supply chain visibility.

The lack of supply chain visibility is overwhelming and keeps on staggering.

2. Lack of Know-Hows, Tools, Technologies to Generate Insights

4 things you should know for a career in data analytics

With the advent of digital data, volume, accessibility, and insights generation through analytics are critical to creating a sustainable supply chain.

However, because analytics is not widely adopted, the data is poorly used.

The data engineering and analytics capabilities in most supply chains are insufficient. As a result, supply chain leaders often cannot effectively use relevant data at the required speed. They also lack diagnostic and advanced analytics tools/technologies and often fail to understand the nature of use cases or problems in the supply chain.

3. Lack of Predictive and Prescriptive Capabilities

Descriptive, Predictive, Prescriptive Analytics | UNSW Online

Digitalization is not enough.

As per the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply Risk Index’s report, the average annual economic loss caused by major natural disasters around the world is approximately US$211 billion.

Supply chain leaders also need to leverage new capabilities to predict market moods, deviation, and unanticipated geopolitical landscape.

However, most existing advanced analytics applications cater to solving point problems. There is an acute shortage of capabilities to use prescriptive or simulative simulations or what-if analysis to investigate broader issues in the supply chain and make recommendations. In addition, there are only a few good AI/ML-driven analytics solutions out there that prevent executives from using machine learning and limit the automation of the supply chain.

4. Lack of Off-the-shelf Solutions

Off-the-Shelf Software is Limiting Your Company's Productivity

Every use case or nature of the problem varies from customer to customer. So off-the-shelf products cannot meet customization and personalization requirements. Regarding the KPIs that businesses want to measure, use cases vary from company to company, making it impossible for off-the-shelf applications to handle. Such rigid solutions put the burden on supply chain leaders to get data in the desired format.

Indulgent customizations, choice complexities often lead to value destruction.

Need for an End-to-end Supply Chain Visibility Capabilities through Digital Control Tower

“Gartner reports, 79% of supply chain leaders believe that the internet/platform-based approach is the most critical new business model.”

The above four challenges require building a digital control tower with data engineering functions and pipelines on top of a solid data layer. Establishing a simplified data architecture with an automated framework can integrate master data and transactional data sources in a streamlined manner, ensuring the availability of necessary data across multiple silos to obtain accurate real-time visualization of the overall supply chain health.

AI/ML-driven analytics and rapid scenario planning can provide speed, consistency, and flexibility to achieve controllable and manageable supply chain functions, thereby helping executives gain a competitive advantage.

Two Critical Elements for an Ideal Supply Chain Control Tower

An ideal Supply Chain Control Tower (SCCT) is a cross-departmental, system-integrated “information hub” that provides end-to-end visibility.

There are two key elements to build/implement an ideal SCCT.

1. Real-time Visualization Catering to Different Personas.

BI | Think with Data – :: Cerebra ::

Executive Insights: An ideal supply chain control tower will provide a bird’s eye view of the overall supply chain health. It will enable the leaders to collect and distribute information, identify risks, and respond strategically.

Execution Insights: SCCT’s state-of-the-art setup caters to the nuanced aspects of the supply chain health for multiple execution persona – analysts or managers at the DC level or fulfillment center to view the various KPIs. It provides them with information to monitor, measure, and manage different aspects of the supply chain, including transportation, inventory movement, and operational activities.

2. Use Case Approach for Autonomous Supply Chain

Global Supply Chain Control Tower Market 2020 Analysis and Market Expert Research Report – Blue Yonder Group, Inc., Viewlocity Technologies Pty Ltd., E2open, LLC, – KSU | The Sentinel Newspaper

The ideal supply chain control tower can guide leaders/managers to explore potential use cases. It will allow them to find the most critical challenges that profoundly impact the overall performance of the supply chain and use advanced analytics, such as machine learning, advanced forecasting, or advanced scenario planning. In this way, they can combine use cases with visualization and diagnostic capabilities and automate the supply chain as they mature.

Conclusion: Control Towers are Stepping Stones Towards Autonomous Supply Chain

The supply chain control tower provides complete visibility from high-level monitoring layers to execution details, so the executives can optimize, manage, plan and execute supply chain processes and operations faster and more accurately. The addition of anomaly detection, automated root cause analysis, and response capabilities will further simplify the transition towards a cognitive supply chain control tower.

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