A pair of Canadian companies have made recent announcements pertaining to the blockchain industry. These press releases further cement an on-going high level of industry acceptance in the nation.
Blackberry
Announced only yesterday, Blackberry has released details of a new partnership with ONEBIO. This partnership will result in the launch of a new flagship product. Blackberry has title this as BlackBerry Spark.
Blackberry Spark will function as a platform to securely share and store medical data pertaining to global healthcare. Long touted as the go-to specialists in mobile data security, Blackberry hopes to bring their vast experience to this project. In their press release, John Chen, CEO of Blackberry, stated, “We are applying our expertise in security, data privacy, and communication work in regulated industries such as automotive, financial services, and government to tackle one of the biggest challenges in the healthcare industry: leveraging healthcare endpoints to improve patient outcomes while ensuring security and data privacy.”
As noted, this platform is made possible through a partnership with ONEBIO. While Blackberry will be hosting and running the platform at their ‘renowned carrier-grade network operation center’, ONEBIO is being tasked with developing the blockchain ledger itself.
Of the many use cases for this project, Blackberry notes that perfect implementation would be for data to be, “…inputted by patients, laboratories, and IoT biometric devices, and then anonymized so this data can be shared with researchers.”
Lined up to be the first user of the platform is the Global Commission. This is a joint venture by Shire, Microsoft, and EURORDIS, with a goal of ending the “…diagnostic odyssey for children with a rare disease.”
Coinsquare & BMO
While new and innovative solutions are being announced by the likes of Blackberry and others, Coinsquare continues to plod along their path to offering Canadians the perfect crypto platform.
In a recent announcement, Coinsquare indicated that they have developed a partnership with one of Canada’s big 5 banks. Although they do not explicitly state that the partnership is with BMO, it is being reported by those using the Coinsquare platform, that this is indeed the case.
By forming this partnership, users of the Coinsquare platform will be able to both fund and withdraw fiat easier than ever before. This partnership was made possible after the successful completion of a third party audit of Coinsquare.
Speaking on this development was Coinsquare CEO, Cole Diamond. He stated, “This is a tremendous boost not only for Coinsquare but for the entire Canadian cryptocurrency industry…At Coinsquare, our motto has always been to ‘Do Digital Currency Right’. This announcement is one of many examples of how institutional third party partners put their faith in our approach to the cryptocurrency business. We’re thrilled to start a relationship with a major Canadian bank and we’re excited for what it means for our users.”
This announcement comes after various developments in recent weeks that show a changing of the tides in regards to the reception of mainstream crypto. We have seen Facebook and Google reverse advertisement bans to an extent, and now BMO appears to be relaxing their restrictions.
BMO, notably, was the 2nd of the big banks to prohibit dealings in crypto in early 2018. In the time since, Canadians that want to purchase crypto have been forced to turn to services like Local Bitcoins, or flexepin.
With each of these announcement, it is clear that Canada has been, and will continue to be, at the forefront of the blockchain industry.
