In August, Cere Network has completed a $3.5 million funding round. Binance Labs, a venture arm of major cryptocurrency exchange Binance, was among the participants.
Second layer blockchain scaling platform Celer Network has partnered with customer relationship management (CRM) startup Cere Network to launch a decentralized CRM solution.
Low-cost CRM platform for business inclusion
According to a press release shared with Cointelegraph on Oct. 7, Cere Network’s capacity will be increased “to provide for the world’s largest enterprises with a low-cost, fast, and accurate CRM platform” as a result of this partnership. Co-founder and CEO of Cere Network Fred Jin added:
“Current CRM solutions are facing poor business inclusivity, low employee participation, and mostly require costly custom implementations. … We’re excited to be partnering with Celer to leverage their industry-leading innovations in off-chain solutions that will bring a whole level of extensibility for our customer data needs that will benefit business of all types.”
Deep collaboration
Interestingly, Celer Network’s initial coin offering has taken place in March on Binance Launchpad, the token launch platform of the same crypto exchange. The press release suggests that their collaboration spurs from this relationship and will grow deeper with time:
“Both as part of the Binance Family, Cere Network and Celer Network will not only work together on technology collaboration and product integration, but also build a community ecosystem together.”
As Cointelegraph reported in August, blockchain project Neo is considering integrating Celer Network’s second layer scaling protocol to improve the platform’s scalability.
Central Banks Mull Creating a CBDC, but Not on a Blockchain: Survey
Central banks in 46 countries are considering creating a central bank digital currency (CBDC) using a constrained form of distributed ledger technology (DLT), according to a new survey. But they’re leery of blockchain.
London-based journal Central Banking, a specialized publication supported, among others, by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and the European Central Bank (ECB), found in its inaugural CBDC survey released last week that 65% of respondents had actively researched digital currencies.
But the survey, conducted in February, found only one central bank would use blockchain as the basis for a CBDC. Described as a «small African central bank,» the survey noted that bank said it would only consider using blockchain «if found to be the best available platform.» That and the other 45 banks were not identified.
Central Banking’s survey doesn’t delve much further into why central banks don’t want to use blockchain. One North African central bank said it had concerns about blockchain’s security and scalability issues. Whether this was an attitude held by other survey respondents isn’t clear.
While most central banks dismissed blockchain, 71% of respondents said they would consider building a CBDC on DLT – a broader category of network architectures, blockchain being one of them – if they reached the issuance stage.
The survey added the caveat that the majority of central banks researching CBDCs had no plans to actually move forward with issuing one.
DLT includes private and permissioned networks, shared with a handful of known and trusted nodes. In the survey, banks indicated there was a trade-off with decentralization: distributed frameworks created operational resilience against a single point of failure; but there were also privacy issues, with more parties likely having ready access to confidential transaction data.
The survey also cites the Bank of England’s CBDC discussion paper from March, which shows that while there are clear benefits to using distributed networks, they also represent a major shakeup of the existing monetary system, for which some financial institutions may be ill-prepared.
This report doesn’t offer many surprises about central bank intentions for CBDCs, but it indicates change may be afoot. Decentralization used to be considered a binary concept: It either was or it wasn’t. But that’s not a choice many new entities entering the space want to face. For them, it’s finding the right balance – the happy medium – between a decentralized and more resilient operating system, while at the same time maintaining user privacy.
