Month: May 2024

Korok Ray, Bitcoin researcher and Associate Professor at the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University, announced plans to launch The Bitcoin Research Institute to drive academic research at the intersection of Bitcoin and artificial intelligence.

At the MicroStrategy World: Bitcoin for Corporations 2024 event, Ray made note of Bitcoin’s potential to enable secure multi-party computation (MPC), offering the example of poker players agreeing on the state of a particular game as a basic form of computation.

He expanded this example to include deep neural networks and agent-based reinforcement learning, whereby artificially intelligent agents could collectively perform computations in the context of the Bitcoin blockchain. Ray’s vision made note of new developments in the Bitcoin ecosystem such as BITVM, which allows off-chain Turing complete computation, as in the case of MPC, to be verified on Bitcoin.

Ray went on to propose his thesis, describing Bitcoin and AI combined as “The Undiscovered Country”:

Korok Ray at MicroStrategy World: Bitcoin for Corporations 2024

“The ultimate use case of Bitcoin in say one-hundred, two-hundred or five-hundred years, will not be humans, but machines…  as we are at [this] wave of massive technological progress, I believe the biggest opportunity will be deep integration between machines and the entire Bitcoin network at different levels.”

“The Bitcoin Research Institute is really to connect these two areas of research and development and bring Bitcoin together with a lot of the major advances in AI,” Ray explained. “There is an army of researchers and faculty out there, and we need [to bring] the best minds onto Bitcoin to make this a reality.”

For additional areas of research, Ray noted the potential rise of Chaumin mints as a means of scaling bitcoin payments, as well as the need for secure prediction markets enabled by Bitcoin, an innovation that may lead to more efficient insurance and financial products.

Ray’s speech also acknowledged the legacy of academic achievements in computer science that have led to both the creation of Bitcoin and artificial intelligence, suggesting that the two will build upon this success in research to drive innovation across all sectors of the economy.

Watch Korok Ray’s speech on the MicroStrategy World: Bitcoin for Corporations Livestream hosted on the Bitcoin Magazine YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn.

MicroStrategy revealed its latest innovation today, a decentralized identity (ID) platform built on the Bitcoin network, named MicroStrategy Orange, at the MicroStrategy World: Bitcoin for Corporations 2024 event.

JUST IN: MicroStrategy launches an enterprise platform for building decentralized identity applications on #Bitcoin — MicroStrategy Orange 👀 pic.twitter.com/P5PXz80kSD

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) May 1, 2024

“Today, I’d like to introduce MicroStrategy Orange, which is an an enterprise platform for building decentralized identity applications on the Bitcoin blockchain,” said Cezary Raczko, Executive Vice President at MicroStrategy. “The platform consists of three fundamental pieces. At the heart of it is a service cloud hosted that allows you to issue those identifiers to your users and your organization.”

The unveiling of MicroStrategy Orange marks a new milestone in the integration of Bitcoin into enterprise solutions. This platform is designed to empower organizations to use and manage decentralized identity applications utilizing the Bitcoin blockchain, leveraging its robust security and immutability features.

Raczko further explained that this new innovation allows you to deploy prepackaged applications that runs on the MicroStrategy Orange platform. “The orange apps are what’s going to be prepackaged, point solutions that address specific digital identify challenges,” he said.

“We see a huge opportunity and this is just the beginning,” the MicroStrategy EVP of Engineering said. “Custodial or non-custodial, the obvious thing is every Bitcoin wallet out there should incorporate the capability of creating a Bitcoin based digital identity. Many messaging platforms suffer from the same challenges that email does. When you get a text message, how do you know the person who sent you the text message…We would want to include an orange check for these different messaging platforms.” 

“And the other opportunity we see and we want to pursue is integrating the digital identity based on Bitcoin with this bigger verifiable credential ecosystem which opens up another large number of very interesting use cases,” Raczko concluded. “Where I can now credential my identity anchored to Bitcoin — with a university degree, with a course certification issued by a hyperscaler, with your medical record and present those and have those verified all in a decentralized way. But with the ultimate identity living and being anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain.”

Earlier this year in February, MicroStrategy announced itself as “the world’s first Bitcoin development company” during a presentation. Since then, MicroStrategy Orange has been the first technological innovation involving Bitcoin that the business intelligence and software company has announced.

The full announcement of MicroStrategy Orange can be viewed here.