It’s been a busy couple months at Bancor, here’s the latest:
In Memoriam: The Passing of Bernard Lietaer
Earlier this month, we mourned the passing of Bernard Lietaer, President of the Bprotocol Foundation and its Chief Monetary Officer.
Bernard was appointed by the European Central Bank to architect the Euro, and later emerged as a renowned author and advocate for financial inclusion through the use of “complementary” currency systems. His ideas are the driving force behind the Foundation’s vision for freedom of currency.
We first met Bernard when he came to Israel to give a talk on community currencies at the University of Tel Aviv. It was intimidating and also exhilarating to directly share our findings and ideas with a hero who had inspired our work via YouTube videos we discovered while researching in 2011. We then reconnected several years later after he read the Bancor Protocol whitepaper and believed it to be the breakthrough he had been searching for in his decades of work on complementary currencies.
In the days following his passing, Bancor Co-Founder Galia Benartzi and work, from his early days at MIT to his time at the Central Bank of Belgium, to his discovery of Bancor and his work with Sarafu, the first Bancor-powered community currency network deployed last August in Kenya.
As Galia wrote, “It is with great sadness and also fierce determination and deep gratitude, that we continue to share his ideas and research with the world, and to innovate towards fair, free and fluid financial systems that serve people — just as resilient, natural ecologies serve the planet.”
Bernard is survived by his loving wife and partner, Helga Preusse. He will be truly missed.
Sneak Peek: Bancor’s Upcoming Unified Experience Launch
Bancor’s new unified experience is going live soon, allowing single-action conversions between ERC20 and , as well as intuitive management of your and and accounts, all from one interface. We are building towards a world where wallets function seamlessly between dApps on different blockchains, just as browsers allow for seamless surfing between websites.
This is the next step in Bancor becoming a -agnostic network, and abstracting away the experience in favor of frictionless conversions and management. Among its many new features, the Bancor Wallet will now provide users with a free account, enough resources to get started and built-in management of RAM, CPU & NET:
Bancor’s cross-chain conversion functionality is based on the ability of BNT — the Bancor Network — to operate concurrently on multiple chains. By utilizing BNT, any can be instantly converted into other in the network, no matter their underlying .
With this release, we’re aiming to offer a simple way to use your on multiple blockchains, so you can more easily share value between the dApps you love, and the ones that will emerge.
Stay tuned for the upcoming launch!
Building Bridges: Good Luck to our Friends at LiquidApps!
Are you following the ecosystem? If so, you’ve probably been hearing about the growing challenges with MainNet resource availability, and the excitement around the announcement of , which will soon be releasing their first product to address this issue — vRAM.
We are truly excited about this innovation for many reasons. First, Bancor’s vision has always been to create a liquidity network that supports millions of long-tail , enabling any community to create a that is easily convertible. However, in order for this vision to become reality, we need stable technological infrastructure that enables innovators and developers to do this in a scalable and affordable way. And continuous (automated) liquidity, of course 🙂
While Bancor was an early adopter of the , we were also excited by ’ ability to enable 1-second transactions and zero transaction fees for users. But comes with its own set of scaling issues — which LiquidApps is tackling head on.
Leading up to the Mainnet launch, Bancor’s then head of operations, Beni Hakak, created , a block producer based in Israel, along with Tal Muskal, who joined as the CTO of LiquidEOS. While building LiquidEOS, Tal and Beni learned a great deal about the system, its advantages and the gaps it has to overcome on the way to scalability. This led to them discovering an innovative solution that would lead to the creation of LiquidApps. Beni is now the CEO of LiquidApps and LiquidEOS; Tal is the CTO of LiquidApps and LiquidEOS.
As longtime entrepreneurs, Bancor’s four co-founders, Guy, Galia, Eyal and Yudi, recognized and supported Beni and Tal’s ingenuity and drive, and joined Beni and Tal as non-operational co-founders and advisors. Bancor’s four co-founders maintain their full-time operational roles at Bancor, and remain fully focused on delivering a liquidity solution that serves creators, no matter their size or . Bprotocol Foundation (Bancor), LiquidEOS and LiquidApps are separate entities.
We wish Beni, Tal and the LiquidApps team the best of luck in their upcoming launch. Learn more at and follow LiquidApps on .
On the Road Again: Meet Us in Hong Kong and Amsterdam
We’re extremely excited to attend and speak at March 13–15. Bancor co-founder Galia Benartzi will join the panel, “The Push Towards A Billion Crypto Users”, alongside Bill Barhydt (co-founder and CEO of ), moderated by Ernst and Young. We have never been shy about our vision to empower the long-tail of , bringing crypto to the masses, and we are thrilled to have the opportunity to reflect on the industry’s progress towards making this a reality.
We would love to connect with the community there so let us know if you’re also attending. We’ll be hosting a side event (details to follow), so drop us a line and we’ll be in touch: contact@bancor.network
Galia will also be keynoting the panel at in Amsterdam May 9–10, speaking on how diverse communities can be transformed into economies via new models.
Published at Fri, 15 Feb 2019 08:13:22 +0000
