In this year's midterm elections, West Virginia conducted a statewide pilot utilizing a private blockchain, smartphones and facial recognition so that Americans abroad could vote more easily. One election security expert advised this would likely be superior to submitting absentee ballots by email but far less secure than in-person voting.

In another recent pilot, hardware manufacturer Seagate and a large, global technology company will seek to stop counterfeiting in the computer hard-drive supply chain. Hard drives produced by Seagate for the other company's servers will include a physical marker and corresponding electronic key, which will be stored on a blockchain platform, where it will be available for verification at any time.

In a digital supply chain use case, smart contract outfit OpenLaw created an end-to-end demonstration of how artists can utilize their smart contract tools to manage fragmented ownership interests and commercialization strategies for their intellectual property in a more automated way – from proving ownership and issuing licenses to receiving royalty payments. In the demo, the artist uploads art as a nonfungible token on the Ethereum blockchain, then creates licenses linked to that token and finally enters into a written contract with the counterparty through a partially automated process. By tying the smart contracts to the token, OpenLaw aims to have the payments mechanism follow the license each time it is transferred. In related news, a U.S.-based software company was awarded a patent for a blockchain-based platform that would seek to prevent spam email.

Following our previous coverage of TradeLens, reports state the platform may have hit tumultuous tides as competitors attempt to work together, and efforts to achieve a network effect have fallen short with respect to carriers. One contributing factor may be that carrier Maersk is essentially steering the ship. On the other hand, customs authorities, logistics companies and a total of 94 players have reportedly integrated with TradeLens, and this week, the Port of Authority of Valencia in Spain joined as well. Still, multiple carriers have sailed over to a competing consortium, the Global Shipping Business Network (GSBN), affiliated with the Ocean Alliance. The recently announced GSBN is composed of ocean carriers serving the trans-Pacific market that collectively represent approximately one-third of global container ship capacity.

A major global enterprise software firm recently announced its HANA blockchain, which leverages the company's databases and cloud platform and is compatible with Hyperledger Fabric and MultiChain and soon will be compatible with Quorum. In addition, Hyperledger Fabric recently announced support for Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode smart contracts. Among other features, Fabric now integrates with Solidity, a popular programming language used to write smart contracts.

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