PayStand, a blockchain business-to-business payments platform, has completed a $6 million funding round through BlueRun Ventures.

Brian Behlendorf, leader of the Linux Foundation's effort to establish standards for blockchain, likens the invention of cryptocurrencies to the moon launch and says banks, open-source developers and others are working to make the underlying technology commercially viable.

Canada's payments modernization initiative is using a distributed ledger to expedite processing across a nationwide network, providing scale that could open the technology to wider use elsewhere if successful.

The advent of blockchain technology may prove to be disruptive to traditional credit reporting agencies by decentralizing data aggregation and allowing consumers to take ownership of their data through a personalized wallet they could share with prospective lenders, writes Alexander Koles, CEO, founder and managing director of Evolve Capital Partners.

Investors should ask questions about the market necessity of the coin, which economic model underpins it, and how transparent the company is being about its progress to date, writes Shidan Gouran, president and COO of Global Blockchain Technologies Corp.

Beyond the initial coin offerings — a fundraising process, similar to an IPO, in which blockchain companies sell crypto tokens instead of shares — and myriad science projects, is there anything substantive occurring with blockchain?

There's talk of a bubble, but cryptocurrency creates value in different ways, so traditional market analysis doesn’t work, writes Mariam Nishanian, a representative for Dentacoin.

While some are bullish on strong use cases for the industry, others are still skeptical about when — or even if — CUs will be willing and able to dive into blockchain.

When a coder locked $150 million of digital currency stored in Parity digital wallets last week, many bankers probably saw it as another reason to ignore cryptocurrencies. Instead they should recognize the business opportunity (key custody) that the incident presents.

Financial institutions process hundreds of thousands of interbank payments per day on behalf of their clients, which can be revolutionized by blockchain, writes Angel Diaz, vice president of technology and advocacy for IBM Digital Business Group.