Monthly book recommendation

Radical Markets: Do omnipresent institutions like markets and democracy really allow fairness and prosperity in society? Radical Markets presents revolutionary ideas on how to bring about economic and political liberty for all by updating social mechanism design to contemporary technological means.

Keybox Becomes Avaloq’s Partner on Avaloq.one Platform

Keybox, our decentralized data security company, is partnering up with global fintech leader Avaloq to participate in Avaloq one, a new platform that connects leading fintechs with the world’s financial institutions.

Avaloq.one aims to seamlessly connect leading fintechs and their solutions to Avaloq’s global financial clients. The platform is designed to promote and showcase true fintech innovation and place Avaloq, its fintech partners and its clients at the forefront of the digital revolution underpinning the next generation of financial services.

Valuable bank customer data is vulnerable to hacks, whether stored in the Cloud or on-premise. Data at rest and data transfers between banks and third parties increase the risk of breaches. Key management and recovery remain an issue and current storage technologies rarely comply with data regulations and privacy laws (e.g. GDPR). Keybox addresses all of these issues.

Keybox stores data in encrypted fragments across multiple, decentralised private or public nodes, such that penetrating any node cannot yield any decipherable information. Authorised users recombine data from fragments using smart contract technology. Financial institutions can use their existing infrastructure to host the solution or can use the secure Keybox hosted node environment.

Read the full press release here

Maria on Equinix Diversity Panel

Diversity is not how you look but how you think and behave.

I had an insightful last week with the opportunity to take part in a diversity panel with Equinix women leaders network. A great panel with insights on how companies such as Accenture & Reed Smith LLP have brought diversity to the workplace. My co-panelists and moderator Harriët Wegloop shared actions they had already taken.

Additionally, I had the pleasure to hold an interactive workshop with a startup inga. (automated talent search). Many thanks to the truly diverse team and founders Corinna and Kim for their strive and energy to build a great culture with a diverse team. In my opinion, diversity is not how you look or your sex, but how you think and act. My preferred tool is Peili Consulting Oy, a behavior styles method that shows how behavior styles differ in their ability to encounter change and to build trust.

The key feature of Peili is the feedback from other people that is vital to get an objective view, since over 50% of people misinterpret how their behavior is perceived by other people. Our behavior effects how efficient we are in our communication. In a situation of change the understanding of different behavior styles helps us to communicate better. If you want change, it starts with you.

Anyblock Partnering with Chainlink

Anyblock has integrated its eth.events data with leading oracle provider Chainlink. The eth.events ElasticSearch API will serve as an oracle for Ethereum smart contracts requiring real-time blockchain data from any of Anyblock’s 17 indexed networks. This makes accessing on-chain information a lot easier and more flexible for smart contract developers.

As an example, the eth.events Chainlink oracle leverages the real-time capabilities of Anyblock’s enterprise software stack and enables a simple yet important use case: Real-time validation of transaction hashes.

It can not only provide information on whether a particular blockchain transaction exists and was successfully mined, but also return additional details such as sender and receiver, ETH value and the block number it was mined in.

Anyblock is planning to further extend the functionality of the adapter in the near future. For example, they could offer easily consumable gas price predictions for queries across all of our 17 indexed blockchains. Get in touch with them here and let them know what you need!

Venture Funding in Greater Rhine Main surpasses half a billion

Q3 of 2019 was another fantastic quarter in terms of venture funding. It beat Q3 of 2018 by 237% and brings the total venture funding of 2019 to record levels of $524.95 mn. The startup scene raised a total of EUR 57 mn which looks promising for our startup ecosystem.

We also just recently saw the first Frankfurt listed unicorn, BioNTech, complete its IPO, raising a total of $150 mn. These numbers will be inlcuded in Q4’s results and total startup funding is likely to surpass last year’s  374 mn by 70-80% by the end of the year.

The main driver of Q3’s results is Volocopter, the commercially certified electric helicopter manufacturer, raising $55 mn. In terms of deal count, fintech is way ahead of the other industries with blockchain companies coming in on second place.

Read the full article here

Ram at 3rd Hessian Innovation Congress

It was our pleasure to participate in the third Hessian Innovation Congress in Wiesbaden on October 30. Besides familiar faces, we met several interesting people and organizations from the Hessian startup environment. One of the most exciting talks was given by Richard David Precht, one of the most famous German philosophers. In his eyes, the labour market of the future will be dominated by machines that can take on more and more activities through advances in artificial intelligence. In order to accommodate these developments, he advocates a universal basic income.