Bitcoin Daily: Ripple Tapped By CIMB For Southeast Asia DLT Tech; Bitcoin Cash’s Hard Fork Goes Live

CIMB, a banking group that operates in countries such as Malaysia, Cambodia and Thailand, has inked a deal with Ripple in order to bring the company’s blockchain technology to its SpeedSend remittance offering, Cryptovest reported. Through the offering, the bank hopes to take on the inefficient, sluggish and costly process for settlements with distributed ledger technology solutions in the ASEAN region. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said in a press release, “we’re seeing banks and financial institutions from across the world lean into blockchain solutions because it enables a more transparent, quicker and lower cost payments experience.” He added that the group’s network already includes close to 800 branches and involves 15 countries.

In other news, the hard fork for the Bitcoin cash has gone live as the currency now has two different protocol implementations, according to Coindesk. SVPool reportedly mined the last “common block” – number 556,766. The two different implementations involve one by Bitcoin ABC and one called Bitcoin SV (the SV stands for “Satoshi’s Version.”) While the Bitcoin ABC version brings out upgrades, Bitcoin SV brings back code that was retired from the bitcoin protocol. According to the outlet, it’s not yet known if the protocols will “co-exist” or if one will be dominant in the future.

And Microsoft is rolling out an Azure-powered kit for blockchain development on the cloud, TheNextWeb reported. The kit is said to include internet of things (IOT) device integration, mobile client support, and voice as well as short message service (SMS) interfaces. It will also reportedly work with more than one ledger technology, such as bitcoin and Ethereum. According to the outlet, Marc Mercuri, Microsoft blockchain engineering lead, said, “This kit extends the capabilities of our blockchain developer templates and Azure Blockchain Workbench, which incorporates Azure services for key management, off-chain identity and data, monitoring, and messaging APIs into a reference architecture that can be used to rapidly build blockchain-based applications.”