Our London Correspondent Nick Ayton the Sage of Shoreditch reports on another exciting week in London where Hackers are up to off planetary stuff and the first Coin synced to Moon cycles released.

How the Future was hacked

Last weekend I hosted the #HacktheFuture. The Blockchain Hackathon draws the best in London at an event run by Larson Digital inspiring core Ethereum developers to take on some of the toughest challenges to compete for $35,000. The best hackers in town turned up and didn’t disappoint.

The winning team Proof of Donation Distribution (PODD) delivered a joined up solution that made sure donations and foreign aid not only arrived at the point of ‘humanitarian need’ but also monitored and tracked progress down to an individual project level, showing a decent front end app and Hyperledger back end Blockchain.

With Dimtry Koval at Blockwise and Nick Johnson with his Ethereum card solutions place behind the winner going some way to solving the vulnerability of cryptographic signatures and the protection of digital assets.

Altcoin helps members cope with change

Cointelegraph caught up with Dr. Cornelius Lupin at the Bike Shed in Shoreditch an expert in Lycanthropic activities where he gets his hairy body clipped daily.

Cointelegraph: So Dr. Lupin or can I call you Cornelius, tell us about LupinCoin?

Dr. Lupin: We have been playing with ShapeShift technologies for several centuries but always struggles to synchronize accurately with moon cycles.

CT: Can you be more specific.

DL: Our members run their lives adjusting to monthly lunar cycles building up to the big one.

CT: Full Moon.

DL: Our members prefer to call it the ‘change’ as the Waxing Gibbous ends. It also depends on what side of the equator you are and why some members have larger snouts and a deeper howl.

CT: So what does LupinCoin do?

DL: Our members buy LupinCoin that are time and date stamped and stored on our permission Blockchain with nodes in Romania, Hungary, Macedonia, Albania and Slovenia known as the Cranack the Elders territories.

As you know Lycanthropy is a medical condition. Members each have collars that supplies a dose of a new drug (we have been working on for 700 years) that stops the Shapeshift and gives our members a better quality of life without having to hide during the ‘full moon’ or explain why they have just ripped a human to pieces. Their Wallets are synced to moon cycles that automatically check they have paid using LupinCoin, as this drug is very expensive to produce.

CT: Dr. Lupin you are part of the Vourdalak Family are you not, that experimented with hypertrichosis…

DL: How did you know that…

And with that, the conversation ended as it was not a good idea to upset Dr. Lupin the day before Waxing Gibbous.

ICO RoundUp

It’s been a big week again for ICOs with Humaniq becoming the second most successful ICO in terms of a number of individual investors with more than 12,000.

“We raised just over $5 mln” explained Dinis Guarda, its CEO.

“But the really interesting part is our investor profile, given our focus is delivering social impact (Humanitarian banking) for the long term that didn’t attract the normal ‘crypto whales’ but the crowd itself. Investors with a social conscience.”

The hot space appears to be Music Film and Entertainment where Back to Earth has bagged $1 mln in the first few days of their ICO, integrating gamification into storytelling.

With Spotify acquiring Mediachain Labs in what seems a degree of ‘panic at the disco’ as all of a sudden the value of distribution platforms are called into question. It seems the Music Fat Cats and Hollywood are coming under attack from all sides with The 21 Mln Project ICO due in early June 2017.

Up and running are Exscudo that sits in the middle of Capital Markets and crypto Capital Markets, and huge expectations around Storj and Metal.io dues next.

Satoshi spotted in Vauxhall

Satoshi questioned by secret police according to Vittalark Buttering

CT: So what can you tell use Vittalark

Vittalark Buttering: I was following him just as we came out of Vauxhall Tube Station. I was about 100 meters behind him.

CT: You were stalking him?

VB: Then two black range rovers pulled up and bundled him into the vehicle. And shot off.

CT: What happened then?

VB: I managed to get a taxi and asked them to follow the Range Rovers.

CT: Where did they go…

We headed towards the city and went down Cornhill to Bank. Then the vehicles went down a private entrance behind the Bank of England.

CT: What then?

VB: I had heard rumors for months that Satoshi was working for a bloke called Mark at BoE designing a new cryptocurrency…

I couldn’t hang around so went home. I had a feeling something big was happening and it makes sense now that Satoshi works for the UK Government, so they really do control Bitcoin then…

Well, I am not sure about that Vittalark but it is good to know BoE is starting to take cryptocurrencies serious.

Banks close ranks and brace themselves

It comes as no surprise the Ripple payment consortium is gaining new members and although R3 creaks from time to time with the odd bank J P Morgan breaking ranks, it confirms one thing.

Banks who do not normally play nicely together clearly find safety in numbers or is it they have a herd mentality and know what is coming…

Or are they only going through the motions using the consortia as a means to keep tabs on one another and why J P Morgan who has really got behind Blockchain decided they didn’t want to share anymore, following in the footsteps of Morgan Stanley, Santander, Goldman Sachs and National Australia Bank who are hardly small banks.

Or are these banks working out the cost of playing at Blockchain versus really getting on and doing it? Interestingly R3CEV promotes its involvement with what they say are the world’s largest banks but rarely mention that the three biggest banks in the world are in China preferring to mention Deutsche bank that teeters on the edge being more overleveraged than Lehmann Bros - and we know what happened then.

BOOM!