Andrew J. "Flip" Filipowski is a Polish American technology entrepreneur born in 1950 in Chicago. He is currently the executive chairman and CEO of SilkRoad Equity, a private investment firm, and founded Platinum technology in 1987. He is also currently the Co-CEO of Fluree PBC, a blockchain database technology company. He also founded and is the chairman of VeriBlock a technology company that provides Bitcoin security to the world's blockchain. He founded or co-founded Blue Rhino Corporation, Primo Water, SilkRoad technology Inc., DBMS Inc., the House of Blues, SolidSpace Inc., Onramp Branding, MissionMode, Unocoin and InterAct 911. Platinum technology was sold to Computer Associates in 1999 for $3.5 billion, a record at the time for a software company. Filipowski's personal proceeds from the deal were $290 million.
A smart contract is a computer protocol intended to digitally facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract. Smart contracts allow the performance of credible transactions without third parties. These transactions are trackable and irreversible.
Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) is an American company that owns exchanges for financial and commodity markets, and operates 12 regulated exchanges and marketplaces. This includes ICE futures exchanges in the United States, Canada and Europe, the Liffe futures exchanges in Europe, the New York Stock Exchange, equity options exchanges and OTC energy, credit and equity markets.
A cryptocurrency is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses strong cryptography to secure financial transactions, control the creation of additional units, and verify the transfer of assets. Cryptocurrencies use decentralized control as opposed to centralized digital currency and central banking systems.
The bitcoin network is a peer-to-peer payment network that operates on a cryptographic protocol. Users send and receive bitcoins, the units of currency, by broadcasting digitally signed messages to the network using bitcoin cryptocurrency wallet software. Transactions are recorded into a distributed, replicated public database known as the blockchain, with consensus achieved by a proof-of-work system called mining. Satoshi Nakamoto, the designer of bitcoin claimed that design and coding of bitcoin began in 2007. The project was released in 2009 as open source software.
Coinbase is a digital currency exchange headquartered in San Francisco, California. They broker exchanges of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Litecoin, Tezos, and many others, with fiat currencies in approximately 32 countries, and bitcoin transactions and storage in 190 countries worldwide.
Charles Shrem IV is an American entrepreneur and bitcoin advocate. He co-founded the now-defunct startup company BitInstant, and is a founding member of the Bitcoin Foundation. In 2014 he was sentenced to two years in prison for aiding and abetting the operation of an unlicensed money-transmitting business related to the Silk Road marketplace. He was released from prison in 2016. In 2017, he joined Jaxx and served as its chief operating officer, and founded cryptocurrency advisory CryptoIQ.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses cryptography to control its creation and management, rather than relying on central authorities. The presumed pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto integrated many existing ideas from the cypherpunk community when creating bitcoin. Over the course of bitcoin's history, it has undergone rapid growth to become a significant currency both on and offline – from the mid 2010s, some businesses began accepting bitcoin in addition to traditional currencies.
Ripple Labs, Inc. is an American technology company which develops the Ripple payment protocol and exchange network. Originally named Opencoin and renamed Ripple Labs in 2015, the company was founded in 2012 and is based in San Francisco, California.
Counterparty is a peer-to-peer financial platform and distributed, open source Internet protocol built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain and network. It was one of the most well-known "Bitcoin 2.0" platforms in 2014, along with Mastercoin, Ethereum, Colored Coins, Ripple and BitShares. It is a "metacoin"-type protocol. It provides such features as tradable user-created currencies, additional financial instruments and a decentralized asset exchange. In November of 2014, Counterparty added support for the Ethereum Virtual Machine to the Counterparty protocol and allowing all Ethereum decentralized applications to be run on the Bitcoin blockchain within the Counterparty protocol.
Satoshi Citadel Industries is a financial technology startup company building blockchain services and products for the purpose of financial inclusion in the Philippines. It was founded by Filipino entrepreneurs John Bailon, Miguel Cuneta, and Jardine Gerodias in March 2014, and is headquartered in Makati in Metro Manila, Philippines. It is responsible for the establishment of multiple products and services in the Philippine blockchain and bitcoin industry.
A blockchain, originally block chain, is a growing list of records, called blocks, that are linked using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data.
CoinDesk is a news site specializing in bitcoin and digital currencies. The site was founded by Shakil Khan and was subsequently acquired by Digital Currency Group.
Huobi is a Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange. Founded in China, the company now has offices in Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and the United States. In August 2018 it became a publicly listed Hong Kong company.
Kraken is a US-based cryptocurrency exchange, founded in 2011. The exchange provides cryptocurrency to fiat trading, and provides price information to Bloomberg Terminal.
Bitcoin Magazine is one of the original news and print magazine publishers specializing in Bitcoin and digital currencies. Bitcoin Magazine began publishing in 2012, and was co-founded by Vitalik Buterin and Mihai Alisie. It is currently owned and operated by BTC Inc in Nashville, Tennessee.
An initial coin offering (ICO) or initial currency offering is a type of funding using cryptocurrencies. It is often a form of crowdfunding, however a private ICOs which does not seek public investment is also possible. In an ICO, a quantity of cryptocurrency is sold in the form of "tokens" ("coins") to speculators or investors, in exchange for legal tender or other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. The tokens are promoted as future functional units of currency if or when the ICO's funding goal is met and the project successfully launches.
Dragonchain is a blockchain platform for enterprises. It was originally developed at The Walt Disney Company in Seattle in 2014 and then open-sourced in 2016. Despite extensive speculation, there is absolutely no relationship between Disney and Dragonchain. The open source code is maintained by the Dragonchain Foundation. And the commercial blockchain platform is maintained by the commercial entity named Dragonchain, Inc. Dragonchain is a public/private hybrid blockchain platform. Developers can use existing smart contracts from the library or write their own smart contracts and build (decentralized) blockchain applications in known languages.
The Lightning Network is a "Layer 2" payment protocol that operates on top of a blockchain-based cryptocurrency. It enables fast transactions among participating nodes and has been touted as a solution to the Bitcoin scalability problem. It features a peer-to-peer system for making micropayments of cryptocurrency through a network of bidirectional payment channels without delegating custody of funds. Lightning Network implementation also simplifies atomic swaps.
The bitcoin scalability problem is the limited rate at which the bitcoin network can process transactions. It is related to the fact that records in the bitcoin blockchain are limited in size and frequency.
