Last week, one of South Korea's largest firms announced plans to develop a blockchain-based music copyright management system. The digital copyright system reportedly employs a major technology firm's Managed Blockchain Service to maintain a history of the broadcasting of copyrighted songs. The system also aims to improve fairness and transparency in the copyright industry by offering the owners and users of the intellectual property to share the resulting ledger and develop an equitable payment scheme for the use of such property.

Also last week, Nebula Genomics, a privacy-focused personal genomics company, reportedly became the first personal genomics company to offer anonymous purchasing for genetic testing services. According to reports, users can purchase whole-genome sequencing and submit samples without revealing their name, address or credit card number through pseudo-anonymous payments enabled by cryptocurrencies. Nebula Genomics reportedly also offers anonymous sample collection by delivering saliva collection kits to USPS P.O. boxes and a blockchain-based product that facilitates transparent and controllable genomic data sharing with researchers.

According to recent reports, Helium, an Austin-based IoT startup, is now shipping its crypto-mining modems to 263 cities in the United States. Helium is a network that aims to aid IoT devices (e.g., e-scooters, simple sensors and pet trackers) in the transmission of low-volume data to the Internet quickly and at low costs. Helium hotspots that perform tasks useful to the network, such as verifying the location of nodes, the sequence of data and the location of devices sending data over the network, are rewarded with Helium tokens, while companies that want to transmit data using Helium hotspots must pay with a second token, data credits. Through this system, the reward for setting up hotspots and connecting them to the network also functions as an incentive to deploy the network on Helium's behalf.

Also in recent news, the University of Cambridge released its 2nd Global Enterprise Blockchain Benchmarking Study that focuses on the state of network deployment and evaluates the development of ongoing enterprise blockchain-based projects. The study summarizes survey data from more than 160 startups, established companies, central banks and other public sector institutions from 49 different countries around the world and 67 live enterprise blockchain networks. Some highlights from the study: 1) banking, financial markets and insurance industries are responsible for the largest share of live networks; 2) Hyperledger Fabric appears to be the platform of choice across all industries; 3) 81% of covered networks have a leader entity dominating the governance process; and 4) the median enterprise blockchain project takes 25 months from first proof-of-concept to launch, with some large-scale networks taking more than four and a half years for the full launch.

For more information, please refer to the following links:

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.