Update: this article has been updated to include statements made by Charley Cooper, managing director at R3. While last year R3 had implied that the company had a larger goal of raising $200 mln in funding, R3 told Fortune that the figure came from a now-cancelled plan to sell a stake in a research subsidiary. The unnamed former R3 employees told Fortune that the consortium’s internal financial targets are “10X short” of their revenue, with the figure described as “laughably off.” Charley Cooper, an R3 managing director, told Fortune that the company is not in danger of running out of …

Multinational software company SAP has launched a blockchain-as-a-service platform, SAP Leonardo Blockchain, the company reported Wednesday, June 6. The platform is designed to let corporate customers build applications and networks using blockchain technology. SAP’s official announcement notes that the new blockchain service will support Hyperledger Fabric and MultiChain, and will be built on top of SAP’s SAP HANA data management system. Gil Perez, SAP’s senior vice president for product and innovation as well as head of digital customer service initiatives, explained that SAP will not commit to any one underlying distributed ledger technology in order to be more flexible as …

Transport and logistics company AP Moller-Maersk (a.k.a. Maersk) has begun using blockchain platform Insurwave for maritime insurance, Seatrade Maritime News reports Friday, May 25. Developed by EY and Guardtime, Insurwave uses distributed ledger technology from cloud platform Microsoft Azure and follows global insurance standards. At the beginning of May, Microsoft Azure had announced the release of its blockchain app creation service, Azure Blockchain Workbench. In the first year, Maersk will use Insurwave to manage 1,000 vessels and support over 500,000 digital ledger transactions. Lars Henneberg, the head of risk and insurance at Maersk, told Seatrade Maritime News that since, “marine …

Microsoft-powered search engine Bing has joined other internet giants in announcing it will ban cryptocurrency-related advertisements on its network by July 2018, according to an official blog post today, May 15. According to the statement, the main reason for the company’s decision to ban “advertising for cryptocurrency” and “cryptocurrency related products” is the current unregulated status of cryptocurrencies, which allegedly increases risk for Bing’s users: “Because cryptocurrency and related products are not regulated, we have found them to present a possible elevated risk to our users with the potential for bad actors to participate in predatory behaviors, or otherwise scam …

Bitcoin, and the idea of digital cash, has taken hold of the banking sector as banks and financial institutions start to experiment internally with blockchains and cryptocurrencies in order to be at the forefront of these technologies. This, coupled with the fact that government organisations and even global leadership bodies such as the G20 are looking to regulate cryptocurrencies, again give more legitimacy and longevity to the industry. The latest wave of adoption is now coming from corporations who, traditionally have come to be successful thanks to their centralized domination over different aspects of the market. Microsoft, in the world …

Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure formally announced the release of its blockchain app creation service, Azure Blockchain Workbench, on May 7. In a press release, the company highlighted blockchain as a “key topic of interest” as it also kicks of its annual Microsoft Build conference this week. Workbench will allow businesses looking to create bespoke blockchain apps to speed up the development process by automating infrastructure setup. This, Microsoft Azure general manager Matthew Kerner says, means “developers can focus on application logic, and business owners can focus on defining and validating their use cases.” The computing giant’s optimism around both …

Microsoft’s Windows Defender Antivirus has blocked an attack of more than 400,000 attempts over a span of 12 hours for trojans to infect users with a cryptocurrency miner, according to a Microsoft blog post on March 7. Windows Defender’s research showed that a little before noon (PST) on March 6, Windows Defender Antivirus began detecting these sophisticated trojans, which are new variants of an application called Dofoil (or Smoke Loader), attempting to inject cryptocurrency mining malwares through “advanced cross-process injection techniques, persistence mechanisms, and evasion methods.” The majority, or 73 percent, of these instances came from Russia, with 18 percent …

Two years ago, in January 2016, Cointelegraph published an interview with David Sonstebo, the CEO of IOTA, who listed out his vision for a Blockchain-less cryptocurrency and explained about the technology behind IOTA. From its humble beginnings, IOTA is now ranked in top-10 world’s cryptocurrencies. Cointelegraph caught up with David again for a conversation about the recent events and the overall journey of IOTA. Cointelegraph: IOTA’s price exploded abruptly after the Microsoft Partnership announcement, only to drop down after ‘the clarification.’ What do you think happened there? Was it just a misconception or could there be any deliberation from any …

Yesterday IOTA announced a major platform release allowing data monetization using micropayments through their distributed ledger technology. The data solution has already garnered huge partnerships from Microsoft, Fujitsu, Bosch, Deutsche Bank Telekom, and others. IOTA has already issued its tokens of the same name under their token sale earlier this fall. The company has created what it considers a better option in Blockchain technology evolution called ‘tangle.’ Through this system, the company is creating a way for connected devices to be able to transfer, buy and sell diverse datasets while creating access to data that often sits unused, all with …

Software giant Microsoft and the recently released cryptocurrency EmerCoin have officially formed a partnership. This partnership will minimally span 2016 and will aim at further developing what Microsoft Azure is calling “Blockchain as a Service”. Together they will work on innovating the field and developing scalable products for their users. A notable effect is the price of EmerCoin, which doubled 1 day after the announcement of the partnership. What is EmerCoin? The partnership has had immediate positive effects for EmerCoin, particularly where its value is concerned. EmerCoin’s market cap is currently around 3 million US dollars, with EmerCoin trading for …