SEC - Page 5

Zug, Switzerland, October 2nd, 2024, Chainwire

Poland’s second-largest bank, Pekao S.A., used the Aleph Zero L1 blockchain to tokenize and preserve internationally renowned Polish artworks.

Bank Pekao, Aleph Zero, and Degen House are proud to announce the launch of Archiv3, a project to tokenize and preserve Polish cultural heritage on the Aleph Zero blockchain, with digital reproductions securely stored in the Arctic World Archive (AWA). This initiative combines blockchain technology with a commitment to cultural preservation, ensuring the safekeeping of Poland’s artistic legacy for future generations.

With Archiv3, Bank Pekao becomes the first universal bank to tokenize historical art specifically for preservation purposes. This initiative follows the bank’s earlier “Unique” project, marking its role in integrating blockchain technology with traditional banking. It also highlights the bank’s ongoing commitment to modernizing its services and expanding the reach of digital assets. Notably, Archiv3 is the first project to tokenize artworks for long-term storage in the Arctic World Archive, known as the “Doomsday Library.” In its press release, Bank Pekao pointed out that the deciding factor in using the Aleph Zero blockchain has been not only its speed and security but also its attention to optimizing for a low carbon footprint and its carbon offset program.

“We have chosen Aleph Zero for their privacy-focused, top-class technology combined with sound experience in cooperation with large institutions,” says Michał Walęczak, Director of the Private Banking Strategy and Development Department at Bank Pekao S.A. “Minimal carbon footprint as well as low storage costs were also important factors in our decision-making process. Tokenization of art requires modern and flexible technology, unforced creativity and some out-of-the-box thinking; these features we were happy to find in co-operation with Aleph Zero.”

ARCHIV3 involves the meticulous digitization of masterpieces from iconic Polish artists, such as Jan Matejko, Stanisław Wyspiański, Wojciech Kossak, and others, facilitated by Degen House, the bank’s technological partner, who also managed the Aleph Zero integration. The process began with the creation of high-quality, museum-grade 3D scans using ultra-sensitive cameras, which capture every detail of the original artworks. These digital replicas were then minted as NFTs on the eco-friendly Aleph Zero blockchain, which ensures minimal carbon footprint during the process. The tokenized versions are subsequently archived in the Arctic World Archive, where they are expected to remain secure for at least 1,000 years.

The artworks in the Archiv3 collection span a range of historical periods, primarily featuring 19th-century works and select modern pieces, such as those by contemporary artist Lia Kimura. This initiative aims to preserve these treasures not only for their cultural and historical significance but also as a resource for future study, conservation, and potential virtual exhibitions.

Preserving Art for Future Generations

The Arctic World Archive, located on the remote Svalbard archipelago, serves as a highly secure data vault designed to protect invaluable cultural, historical, and scientific information from natural disasters, cyber threats, and other risks. Established in 2017, the archive uses advanced storage technology to ensure data longevity without the need for electricity or human intervention, making it one of the safest places in the world for preserving irreplaceable records.

The AWA already houses manuscripts from the Vatican Library, documentation from UNESCO and UNICEF, the entire GitHub code repository, as well as literary works by Nobel Prize laureates Olga Tokarczuk and Wisława Szymborska. Bank Pekao is the first financial institution to archive culturally significant artworks at the AWA, while doing the same using decentralized storage, setting a precedent for how blockchain technology can be used to bridge traditional art with new digital solutions.

For any enquiries about this release, please contact josh@serotonin.co 

About Aleph Zero

Aleph Zero is a privacy-first ecosystem of blockchain solutions that are engineered for speed, data confidentiality, and ease of development. It achieves efficiencies akin to conventional web2 systems, upholds rigorous standards for data protection via zero knowledge proofs, and offers a comprehensive toolset for development across web3 that ranges from WASM-based Rust to EVM-based Solidity environments. Aleph Zero’s versatility is highlighted by over 40 use cases being actively developed, showcasing its adaptability across various sectors and applications. These use cases are part of an engaged community and growing ecosystem of web3 applications that are supported by Aleph Zero ecosystem development programs.

For more information, users can visit https://alephzero.org/ 

About Bank Pekao S.A. 

Bank Pekao S.A., founded in 1929, is one of the largest financial institutions in the Central and Eastern European region and the second-largest universal bank in Poland with assets of 316 billion PLN. With the second largest branch network, Bank Pekao serves 6.9 million customers. As a leading corporate bank in Poland, it serves every second corporation in Poland. Its status as a universal bank is based on its leading market position in private banking, asset management, and brokerage activities. Bank Pekao’s diversified business profile is supported by a leading market balance sheet and risk profile reflected in the lowest risk costs, strong capital ratios, and resilience to macroeconomic conditions (Pekao proved to be the most resilient bank in Europe, ranking first in the stress tests conducted by the EBA in 2023 amongst 70 banks). Since 1998, Bank Pekao has been listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange and participates in several local (including WIG 20 and WIG) and international indices (including MSCI EM, Stoxx Europe 600, and FTSE Developed). Pekao is one of the most dividend-paying listed companies in Poland over the past 10 years, paying out a total of approx. 20 billion PLN over a decade.

About Degen House

Degen House is a full-stack blockchain solutions provider with a proven track record of collaborations spanning major CEE banks and top global blockchain ecosystems. The company offers comprehensive end-to-end solutions, from strategic consulting and product development to targeted marketing and sales.

Contact

PR Manager
Josh Adams
Aleph Zero
josh@serotonin.co

Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands, October 2nd, 2024, Chainwire

Sui becomes the first blockchain to enable the most secure modern alternative to the Border Gateway Protocol

Sui, the Layer 1 blockchain offering industry-leading performance and infinite horizontal scaling, announced that it will be the first blockchain to provide validators with a comprehensive defense against Internet routing attacks that have caused significant downtime on other networks, addressing the risks to Web 3.0 at the layer of the underlying Internet infrastructure and fortifying what is already the most secure and reliable Layer 1 blockchain, with 100% uptime since its mainnet launch. The new infrastructure is based on a networking technology called SCION and is currently live on Sui’s testnet.

The protocol that routes data packets between the independent networks that form the Internet is called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and was created in the late 1980s. At that time, achieving scalable global routing was the main focus, without consideration for security. Since then, the Internet has become much more important and dangerous, but unfortunately, the security of BGP has not kept pace with the increasing risks.

The current lack of security enables malicious actors to reroute traffic toward their own infrastructure and then either drop it, or worse, impersonate the intended communication partners. For example, in 2018, attackers rerouted DNS traffic and redirected visitors of MyEtherWallet to their own servers – stealing over $17 million in Ethereum. Notably, the attackers didn’t just take on any small DNS server but AWS’s Route 53 service, one of the world’s largest DNS services. In 2022, an attack on KLAYswap was possible despite the fact that KLAYswap followed security best practices. Simply rerouting traffic allowed the attacker to bypass state-of-the-art security protocols DNSSEC and TLS.

So far, no blockchain has a comprehensive defense against this class of attacks. Sui will be the first blockchain to integrate SCION, which is a next-generation network architecture that solves these major vulnerabilities. Importantly, the principals from the team of Swiss researchers that invented SCION have brought their unique knowledge and skills to Mysten Labs – forming the core of the team implementing this critical infrastructure technology for Sui.

“SCION is the security layer that the Internet desperately needs: it is built from the ground up with security in mind,” said George Danezis, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Mysten Labs. “With the integration of this technology, Sui will be the first blockchain to provide validators with access to a next-generation internet that is cryptographically protected against attacks”

The SCION technology being implemented on Sui’s network is an Internet architecture, which, like today’s Internet, coordinates multiple smaller networks. However, on Sui, SCION radically alters the way the Sui network will find paths toward external destinations and leverages cryptography to ensure that it cannot be influenced by unauthorized parties. This renders the type of attacks described above ineffective against Sui. 

Implementing SCION arms Sui with unique resilience to network hijacking attacks and the ability to fall back from one network to another results in: 

• More resilient consensus participation. For individual validators on Sui, the ability to fall back from one network to another in the event of attacks against either network will mean higher resilience to network attacks that attempt to take the validator offline—an event which can impact epoch rewards.
• More available state-sync. For full nodes on Sui, this means higher available connections to their syncing full nodes or validators, offering an alternative to retrying other, possibly more distant nodes, and the ability to circumnavigate network bottlenecks.
• Robustness in the case of IP DDoS attacks. In the event of IP DDoS attacks, in which it is targeted by an attack utilizing multiple sources of attack traffic, Sui will be able to prioritize communication over SCION instead of over IP, rendering the attack against the validators ineffective.

In contrast to the Internet Protocol (IP), which is used to send and forward packets in the current Internet, a SCION-enabled Sui node can select among multiple paths towards the intended destination and encode their choice in the packet’s header. SCION’s support for the simultaneous use of multiple paths allows Sui nodes to serve different types of traffic over different paths, such as assigning consensus and sync to different network paths with different properties.

In addition to the security benefits it provides, by employing SCION’s new packet-forwarding protocol, Sui enables new control for end hosts that also further improves the networks already industry-leading speeds. Experiments with the SCION-enabled network showed that the latency between distant nodes could be reduced by over 10%, through automatic path choice and optimization available via SCION-enabled Sui nodes. 

The steps to SCION-enable a Sui node, in brief, involve obtaining a SCION connection from a SCION-enabled Internet service provider or network operator and running a SCION network appliance that is accessible by the Sui node (e.g., colocated with the node or on a separate host). As the SCION network is running side-by-side with the Internet, network connectivity is achieved on Sui if either IP or SCION connectivity is operational – achieving an unprecedented level of availability. Consequently, the new infrastructure further enhances Sui to become the prime blockchain for critical infrastructure use cases.

The SCION infrastructure was established in collaboration with Anapaya Systems, which was responsible for building the router software and other tools necessary for the Sui SCION network implementation, Cyberlink and InterCloud, which operate the global SCION infrastructure interconnecting the Sui validators, and Martincoit Networks, which helped design and coordinate the rollout of the SCION/Sui project. Karrier One is providing SCION network connectivity in Canada and beyond, and is building up SCION-enabled data center hosting services. The SCION Association, which recently welcomed Mysten Labs as a member, was involved as the organization responsible for propagating the technology.

Contact

Sui Foundation
media@sui.io

Zug, Switzerland, October 1st, 2024, Chainwire

Energy Web’s innovative app enables EV owners to decarbonize charging sessions with renewable energy 

Energy Web is proud to announce the beta launch of AutoGreenCharge, a mobile app designed to decarbonize electric vehicle (EV) charging. With AutoGreenCharge, users can ensure that every EV charging session is powered by renewable energy. The app is accessible to owners of popular electric vehicles, including Tesla, BMW, Mercedes, and others, bringing the promise of green charging to a worldwide, mainstream audience.

Powered by the decentralized technology of Energy Web’s EnergywebX and secured by the Polkadot blockchain, AutoGreenCharge offers a simple, secure, and verifiable solution to ensure EV charging is not just electric, but 100% renewable. By integrating renewable energy certificates (RECs), the app will automatically match EV charging sessions with clean energy, providing verifiable green charging in real time. While in the beta phase, users can familiarize themselves with the app’s core features and experience the future of EV charging firsthand.

AutoGreenCharge allows EV owners to easily connect their vehicles through a partnership with Smart Car. Once connected, every charging session is automatically tracked, giving users detailed insights into their energy consumption and environmental impact. As the app evolves toward full production, users will be able to retire real renewable energy certificates with each charging session, ensuring their cars are powered by clean, sustainable energy sources. Additionally, they will have the option to specify preferences for the type and location of renewable energy, offering personalized access to solar, wind, and other clean energy sources from around the globe.

Mani Hagh Sefat, CTO of Energy Web, shared, “AutoGreenCharge represents a major step forward in the electrification and decarbonization of transportation. By providing EV owners with a seamless way to ensure their cars are charged with renewable energy, we’re empowering drivers to make more sustainable choices and actively contribute to the global energy transition.”

AutoGreenCharge’s integration with the Polkadot blockchain ensures that every transaction and certificate retirement is securely recorded and verifiable, enhancing transparency and trust in the system. This cutting-edge app is a key development in the broader mission to build a more resilient, efficient, and sustainable energy system.

With the beta version now available, EV owners are encouraged to download the AutoGreenCharge app and start participating in this transformative initiative. The app can be easily found on the testflight Apple and Google Play Stores. As the app moves towards its full production release, users will play a crucial role in refining its features and improving the future of green charging.

For more information, users can visit Energyweb.org

About Energy Web

Energy Web is driving the global energy transition through cutting-edge, open-source, decentralized software solutions. By leveraging blockchain technology, we create new market mechanisms and decentralized applications that empower energy companies, grid operators, and consumers to actively shape their energy futures. Our mission is to build a more resilient, efficient, and sustainable energy system for all.

Contact

Jonathan
jonathan@distractive.xyz