Blockchain

With Australian power prices being some of the highest in the world, there's plenty of room for innovation. The latest offering comes in the form of a Virtual Power Plant (VPP), made up of home battery storage across Australia. Essentially you get to trade your stored energy (captured by the sun with solar panels). This trading runs on the newly developed blockchain technology, the...

A new type of smart money, powered by blockchain, has been successfully trialled by CSIRO’s Data61 and the Commonwealth Bank (CBA). The trial demonstrated that programmable money, could be used to help manage insurance payouts, budgeting and the management of trusts and charities in Australia. The technology was trialled with 10 participants and carers in the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) using a prototype app. The prototype...

A new property development in Kurnell (New South Wales) will connect 12 homes via their home battery power storage solutions turning these into a virtual power plant, whereby homes will have the unique ability to share power. This development is the first of its kind in Australia and outside of Europe. These will use blockchain technology to share power between the homes in the development,...

Aussie company Webjet have launched the first working blockchain initiative in the hotel distribution industry. While most people's minds immediately turn to cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology has far greater uses and this implementation by Webjet aims to resolve disputes over expenses and reductions in labor costs. Webjet's been in the game for around 2 years with their blockchain initiative, Rezchain, but is now enabling participating travel...

This morning I was driving and had the radio tuned to 100.90, our local ABC Radio station when something fairly noteworthy happened. As the presenter read out the currency values and exchange rates for AUD to US dollarrs, the price of gold, S&P changes, it was the final data point that got my attention. The price of Bitcoin is now being read, by ABC Radio,...

What happens when the panda people hold a hackathon? Recently the charity WWF-Australia partnered with Schneider Electric, University of Technology Sydney (UTS), NAB and Hackathons Australia, to host the second Future Cities Hackathon. Also on hand was Brooklyn-based, ConsenSys, a blockchain venture production studio. Held at UTS, the hackathon brought together some of the best and brightest from the fields of sustainability, design and technology, the corporate and...