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Ondo InsurTech looking at "absolutely huge opportunity" in the US

Ondo InsurTech PLC

Contact Details Proactive Proactive UK Ltd +44 20 7989 0813 uk@proactiveinvestors.com

November 21, 2022 06:41 AM Eastern Standard Time

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AdEPT Technology Group reintroduces interim dividend

AdEPT Technology Group PLC

Contact Details Proactive Proactive UK Ltd +44 20 7989 0813 uk@proactiveinvestors.com

November 21, 2022 06:19 AM Eastern Standard Time

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Aimbridge Hospitality, the Largest Hospitality Management Group Worldwide, Selects ACFN As Preferred Vendor, Opening Up New Growth Opportunities

ACFN Franchised Inc.

Interested in being part of the ACFN growth story? Click here to get started! In October, ACFN Franchised Inc. formalized its preferred-vendor status in an agreement with Aimbridge Hospitality, a global hospitality company with approximately 1,500 branded and independent properties. ACFN is the only company providing ATM services to be granted preferred-vendor status by Aimbridge. The agreement came just as both companies made headway on ambitious growth plans. ACFN Becomes An Official Preferred Vendor As Ambridge Enters Rapid Expansion Phase Aimbridge reportedly saw major growth in 2021 and 2022. The hospitality company expanded its operational divisions to focus on acquisitions and growth across multiple geographical regions and hospitality verticals, including the addition of dozens of extended-stay properties through its partnership with Three Wall Capital and its entry into the Mexican market with the acquisition of Grupo Hotelero Prisma’s portfolio of 42 properties. Going into 2023, the hospitality company is continuing to invest in new acquisitions, especially focused on continued expansion across Latin America and Europe. “As the official preferred vendor, ACFN is excited about the new opportunities for ATM placements across Aimbridge’s rapidly expanding portfolio of properties,” said Jeffrey Kerr, Founder and CEO of ACFN. ACFN Is Also Building Expansion Momentum Of Its Own While expansion plans for the largest hospitality-management group in the world are good news for ACFN, the company isn’t solely riding the momentum of its biggest corporate clients. Since its founding in 1996, ACFN has grown into a leader in the ATM industry, providing full-service ATM placements for its 2,700 corporate clients across the nation, including major hotel companies like Aimbridge, Hilton Hotels & Resorts and IHG Hotels & Resorts. That’s largely thanks to strong organic growth generated by ACFN’s inside marketing team. “In 2018 and 2020 ACFN completed two acquisitions that added over 450 new locations to our portfolio and increased transaction volume by 26.5%,” said Kerr. Notable deals in the last 30 days include two new deals to install ATMs at Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles and Hilton New York Times Square in New York City. Now, the company has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise up to $5 million to fund more acquisitions as it prepares for an influx of new opportunities. The opportunities are the result of the global mergers and acquisition (M&A) market seeing an uptick in deal volume and a decline in average deal value. With M&A activity trending toward smaller but more frequent deals, ACFN already has three more distinct opportunities in its sights. The deals the company hopes to fund with this latest round of crowdfunding are aimed at scaling its business by absorbing competitors that have been hit hard by soaring fuel prices and inflation. In addition to acquiring direct competitors, ACFN is working on adding new revenue streams, including the recent addition of cell phone charging stations and pharmacy vending machines to its product line. Founded in 1996 and franchised in 2003, ACFN Franchised Inc. (“ACFN”) provides services to 2,700+ businesses in 46 states in collaboration with our network of 220+ franchise owners.Since inception, ACFN has provided a cumulative $5,000,000,000 of spending power to support and increase sales for our partner businesses. In just the last 12 months a total of $367,566,000 was dispensed through our network, generating more than $14,500,000 in fee revenue for ACFN. This post contains sponsored advertising content. This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be investing advice. Contact Details Jeffrey Kerr Investor-Relations@acfn-solutions.com Company Website https://acfn-solutions.com/

November 18, 2022 02:08 PM Eastern Standard Time

Bybit CEO Lays Out His Transparency Roadmap

Bybit

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - Media OutReach - 18 November 2022 - Ben Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Bybit, the world’s third most visited crypto exchange, has called on the industry to step up together and help reassure nervous customers and governments that crypto is a valuable contributor to the financial system and has a central part to play in the future of financial services. Zhou made his remarks after laying out a comprehensive framework designed to re-establish trust and commit to comprehensive, industry-wide transparency. Zhou also looked to manage expectations by highlighting that a robust, comprehensive, proof-of-reserves program would need time to develop and could not be created, installed, and implemented overnight. “Bybit is committed to an industry-wide, fully transparent proof-of-reserves (PoR) solution that demonstrates without a doubt that we hold our client's funds in custody, and are worthy of their full trust — and that is what we are working on,” said Zhou. Zhou highlighted the complexity of crypto businesses in terms of scale, scope, and reach, noting that it will take some months for Bybit to complete and provide a comprehensive and true picture of its accounts that is acceptable to every stakeholder and helps re-establish trust — rather than patchy information that could ultimately confuse. He believed that exchanges must be proactive in creating a new type of transparency, one that improves on those used by traditional financial institutions, which still remain opaque and backward. The proper way to achieve this is to take a snapshot of all the clients' UID and balance; package that so it fits into a Merkle tree; send the tree to an independent auditor, and then work with them to verify the numbers. The final step: provide our wallet address and test it to show the auditor that we own the address. He said Bybit is now engaged in developing this fully transparent solution to show its reserves in real-time using an independently-audited Merkle tree. Bybit is also engaging a reputable auditor to prove its reserves and audit the company’s books and operations. Zhou reiterated, “To us, proof-of-reserves is a fully transparent solution that proves our clients’ funds are in custody — that is what we are working on.” This has been a difficult time for many in the industry — customers and many players have been betrayed and deceived by the magnitude of recent events. He reassured clients that Bybit’s mission, as the Crypto Ark, is to provide true value and live up to customer trust and confidence. Bybit has always been a supporter of affordable and accessible financial access for all. Zhou also struck a defiant tone. “The crypto community is stronger than one rogue actor and provides many benefits over traditional financial markets. We are at the forefront of financial innovation, and with the continued support of our customers, we will continue to be so. About Bybit Bybit is a cryptocurrency exchange established in March 2018 that offers a professional platform where crypto traders can find an ultra-fast matching engine, excellent customer service and multilingual community support. Bybit is a proud partner of Formula One racing team, Oracle Red Bull Racing, esports teams NAVI, Astralis, Alliance, Virtus.pro, Made in Brazil (MIBR), City Esports, and Oracle Red Bull Racing Esports, and association football (soccer) teams Borussia Dortmund and Avispa Fukuoka. For more information please visit: https://www.bybit.com/ For updates, please follow Bybit's social media platforms on https://discord.com/invite/bybit https://www.facebook.com/Bybit https://www.instagram.com/bybit_official/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/bybitexchange/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bybit/ https://t.me/BybitEnglish https://www.tiktok.com/@bybit_official https://twitter.com/Bybit_Official https://www.youtube.com/c/Bybit Contact Details Media Contact press@bybit.com

November 18, 2022 09:11 AM Eastern Standard Time

Laser Photonics Sells First CleanTech Laser Blaster to Emerson Automation Solutions

Laser Photonics Corporation

Laser Photonics Corporation (NASDAQ: LASE) announced the sale of the first CleanTech Laser Blaster Cabinet to Emerson Automation Solutions. Wayne Tupuola, chief executive officer of Laser Photonics, commented: "This is the only CleanTech Laser Blaster Cabinet with the FDA's Center for Device and Radiological Heath (CDRH) approval. Having a Blue Chip company like Emerson as our first customer for this product certainly validates the value of our innovative solutions for a variety of applications. We look forward to working with them on future opportunities." The cabinet was installed at Emerson Automation Solutions' subsidiary, Fisher Controls International's Texas facility. Fisher Controls provides process flow control technologies-related services to industrial companies in a variety of industries. The CleanTech™ Laser Blaster Cabinet is a self-contained, industrial laser cleaning machine. This system is the only laser cleaning machine in the world that incorporates the exclusive power of a fiber laser with a handheld laser-blasting head inside an enclosed 30" x 26" work area. This system is designed for speed, precision, safety, and flexibility. It is the only laser blasting cabinet manufactured in compliance with CDRH FDA and OSHA regulatory compliance. As a first-of-its-kind product, LPC has added an extra level of security - a redundantly switched safety interlock system that helps prevent accidental exposure to excess laser radiation. Additionally, the system is equipped with an electrical power manual reset, a key-locked laser power switch and a remote interlock connector. There is an exhaust outlet for the Fume Extractor, powder coated for industrial durability, which provides excellent protection for laser radiation according to CDRH requirements, and a Class IV operator-safe yellow transparent laser-rated acrylic viewing port for visualization of lasing processes and easier alignment. Finally, the system has audible and visible emission indicators with five-second emission delay settings. More information can be found here https://www.laserphotonics.com/cleantech-laser-blaster-cabinet Image sourced from Unsplash This post contains sponsored advertising content. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice. Laser Photonics is a vertically-integrated manufacturer and R&D Center of Excellence for industrial laser technologies and systems. LPC seeks to disrupt the $46 billion, centuries old, sand and abrasives blasting markets, focusing on surface cleaning, rust removal, corrosion control, de-painting and other laser-based industrial applications. LPC's new generation of leading-edge laser blasting technologies and equipment also addresses the numerous health, safety, environmental, and regulatory issues associated with the old methods. As a result, LPC has quickly gained a reputation as an industry leader for industrial laser systems with a brand that stands for quality, technology and product innovation. Currently, world-renowned and Fortune 1000 manufacturers in the aerospace, automotive, defense, energy, industrial, maritime, space exploration and shipbuilding industries are using LPC's "unique-to-industry" systems. This post contains sponsored advertising content. This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be investing advice. Contact Details Brian Siegel, IRC®, M.B.A. Senior Managing Director Hayden IR brian@haydenir.com Company Website https://www.laserphotonics.com/

November 18, 2022 09:10 AM Eastern Standard Time

ChainUp leverages Multi-Party Computation (MPC) to provide highly secure digital asset custody solutions & ensure clients’ trust

ChainUp

Amidst recent escalating concerns over digital asset security, global blockchain solutions provider ChainUp Group announced today that it is utilizing the multi-party computation (MPC) technology as part of a multi-layered security architecture to ensure the highest security standards of its digital asset custody solutions. The multi-layered security architecture developed by ChainUp Custody showcases the company’s commitment to fully safeguard clients’ assets and provides the necessary assurance to ensure continued trust from clients. This is particularly significant against the backdrop of recent industry developments. Mr. Sailor Zhong, Founder & CEO of ChainUp Group commented, “The security of our clients’ assets has always been our priority. As part of our multi-layered security architecture, we combine MPC technology with hardware isolation technology to distribute the storage of encrypted information, which exponentially enhance system security and ensure that only users will be able to access their digital assets.” Other pillars of ChainUp Custody’s security architecture include risk monitoring mechanisms, comprehensive KYT and KYC services, as well as SOC 2 compliance. SOC 2 defines the security criteria for managing clients’ data based on the five principles of security, availability, processing, integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. MPC works by splitting the traditional private key into multiple shards and distributing them in various places to ensure that no one person has full access to the traditional private key. The implementation of MPC technology ensures that the private key shards will be co-managed by multiple parties which allows users to have complete control rights over assets that will not be restricted by time or location. About ChainUp Group Founded in 2017, ChainUp is a leading end-to-end blockchain technology solutions provider covering infrastructure development and ecosystem support. Built on the mission to empower businesses through blockchain technology, ChainUp’s innovative and all-around compliant solutions include digital asset exchange systems, NFT trading systems, wallet solutions, liquidity solutions, and digital assets custody and management. Headquartered in Singapore and with offices around the world, the company has served more than 1,000 clients in 30 countries, reaching over 60 million end-users. For more information, please visit: www.chainup.com. Contact Details ChainUp Group Xue Zhen Yeo pressrelease@chainup.com

November 18, 2022 07:00 AM Eastern Standard Time

DeFi Needs To Radically Change, And This Project Could Lead The Way

Radix

Web3 has grown massively since the creation of Bitcoin (BTC) in 2009, and despite its volatile market activity, many suggest that Bitcoin opened the gates to a new financial future. Since then, the spectrum has broadened greatly - notably with the launch of Ethereum in 2015. Among the most unexpected developments on the general-purpose smart contract platform was the emergence of the Decentralized Finance industry. What Is DeFi And How Does It Work? DeFi (decentralized finance) was one of the fastest-growing segments of the crypto industry over 2020 and 2021. Powered by the same public distributed ledgers used by cryptocurrencies, the underlying tech behind DeFi allows it to operate without a centralized intermediary such as a bank. In its early infancy, the total value locked (TVL) in all DeFi protocols rose from $601 million in January 2020 to about $20 billion by the same time the next year. 2021 saw its TVL rise exponentially to $256 billion by year-end. The term DeFi is broadly used to describe financial products and services within this decentralized system, such as trading, borrowing, and lending, that are delivered autonomously. DeFi has since grown to become one of the most important sectors of the crypto economy; and just as crypto itself disrupted the concept of currencies, decentralized finance is poised to disrupt finance itself from its traditional ways of operating through banks, other financial institutions, and stock markets. Slowed by Complexity And Beset By Hacks, DeFi Is In Need Of A Paradigm Shift The DeFi ecosystem has hundreds of decentralized applications and smart contracts, developed on programmable blockchains such as Ethereum. Apart from being transparent and efficient, one of the greatest potential superpowers of DeFi is atomic composability, meaning that products and services can easily be connected to interact with each other to build more advanced and complex financial offerings. In recent years, DeFi protocols have been subject to multiple hacks, where vulnerabilities and complexities of smart contracts or other aspects of the DeFi service have been exploited by hackers for financial gain. In 2021, cyber attacks launched on DeFi caused $1.8 billion in losses, and as of the half year 2022, DeFi attacks accounted for a whopping 79% of the $2 billion lost in crypto attacks overall. Smart contracts conceptualized on Ethereum, as well as other platforms, have mostly focused on improving scalability with some success, but have failed to deliver what developers need to take DeFi mainstream and generate true mass adoption. Radix To The Rescue? This is where Radix comes in. Radix is a purpose-built decentralized smart contract platform made for DeFi, that aims to support the $400 trillion financial system through its innovative and transformative distributed ledger technology. Radix has developed a solution to effectively address the vulnerabilities in DeFi, with its core developers having worked on the project for nine years - assessing and improving concepts to resolve the current issues faced by DeFi. The minds and community behind Radix believe the tools that exist in the space today are inadequate, and it could take developers years to become competent enough to develop applications using these tools and validate & test them to build a genuinely secure, scalable & usable DeFi ecosystem. On December 8, Radix will unveil how DeFi will become mainstream at RadFi 2022, a free virtual event. Head here to learn more & sign up to the event. With billions of dollars worth of hacks still occurring annually in the crypto space, the team behind Radix believes that innovative new tools are needed for DeFi to deliver its promise of a radically better financial system. They suggest there are four things absolutely required of the DeFi development paradigm before a future world of global-scale DeFi is possible. At the core, the way developers build smart contracts needs to be easy, safe, reusable, and composable. Composability is the ability of financial products and services being offered through dApps (decentralized apps) to combine freely and instantly. One of the issues currently being faced by developers, while building dApps on other platforms, is that - as more and more dApps are composed together, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to create applications that are secure. The team behind Radix believes the development has the answer to the issues currently faced by DeFi, and says that smart contracts and how they execute need to be thought through from scratch to be able to support the needs of DeFi. Which leads us to the Radix Engine and the Scrypto programming language. Traditional DeFi built on Ethereum and current platforms are built using a “message-oriented approach" that works with digital tokens. To create a token on Ethereum for example, developers deploy a contract called ERC-20, which creates and maintains an internal list of balances for account addresses, which define who "owns" each token. In other words, users don't actually hold or directly control their tokens. They're completely reliant on the smart contract and its ability to maintain its list of balances correctly. This message-oriented approach is complex and insecure, requiring a convoluted transaction process that's entirely reliant on the function of smart contracts, and attackers invariably exploit these complexities and bugs in smart contracts to hack them. Radix is building “the future of DeFi” on an asset-oriented approach where users will actually hold their tokens within their own smart contract account on ledger. With asset-oriented DeFi, users would no longer need the approval of other smart contracts to spend their own tokens. The user can also define exactly how many tokens they intend to pass or receive back from smart contracts. In practice, this would be a revolutionary approach to DeFi that's not just safer but easier to work with, too. It is an approach where developers can create dApps with exactly the same kind of functionality as Ethereum, only through a much simpler and more secure process. Not only that, but applications which are impractical to build on Ethereum or other platforms are practical on Radix. This is because developers won’t be required to carefully craft a complex tangle of counter-intuitive code to get the functionality they want. Scrypto: A New Language To Leap-Frog DeFi’s Potentiality To make the advantages of an asset-oriented paradigm real and usable for developers, a suitable programming language would be needed that enables the Radix Engine’s unique features while maintaining a much-improved development experience with expressive logic. Radix’s custom-built development language Scrypto is said to do precisely this. Scrypto is based on Rust – and keeps most of Rust’s features – but adds a range of specific functions and syntax. Scrypto’s asset-oriented features, and the lifecycle of a “component” (a Scrypto smart contract), should naturally allow developers to focus on their own business logic and lean on the Radix Engine for intuitive, safe handling of assets. The team behind Radix believes that building DeFi in Scrypto provides the much sought-after ease, safety, reusability, and composability that DeFi needs to fulfill its world-changing potential. By making dApps simpler and easier to build while simultaneously scaling back the possibility of smart contract hacks, the team building Radix believes its version of asset-oriented DeFi can serve as the foundation of a platform that's able to scale globally, to support potentially billions of users - and make possible the robust dApps that are needed to revolutionize and remake global finance for the better. Interested to hear more? On December 8, Radix will unveil how DeFi will become mainstream at RadFi 2022, a free virtual event. Head here to learn more & sign up for the event. To learn more about Radix, visit the website. DeFi needs to be better - and it’s about to get radically better with Radix. Get your free ticket to join RadFi2022 on December 8 and learn what the future holds for decentralized finance. Find out how. This post contains sponsored advertising content. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice. Contact Details Amy Wilkinson amy.wilkinson@rdx.works

November 17, 2022 12:20 PM Eastern Standard Time

Lexion Surveys Hundreds of Legal Professionals: Hiring Freezes and Layoffs to be Offset by Adopting New Technology

Lexion

Lexion, an AI-powered contract management system, today announced the results of a survey of 450 legal professionals on the current state of legal technology. Respondents include General Counsel, in-house counsel, legal operations and contract managers across a variety of industries, and the results were published in the report: ‘ The State of Legal Technology: Improving Efficiency with Existing Staff and New Technology as Hiring Slows.’ Respondents were asked to provide insight into what legal teams are doing in anticipation of an economic slowdown. “This year’s State of Legal Technology carries a sense of urgency given this moment we find ourselves in,” said David Wang, chief innovation officer at Wilson Sonsini. “We know 65 percent of legal professionals are worried about impacts of the uncertain economy and 69 percent anticipate cutting spending through reduced outside counsel consultation, hiring freezes, and layoffs. These worries are well-founded, but we know economic challenges do not decrease risk. In fact, they tend to surface risks previously covered by the rising tides and create new tempests and conflicts. It’s time to leverage technology to increase the legal team’s efficiency, better measure risks and outcomes, and deliver greater value to our clients and stakeholders.” Key findings include: Companies plan to slow down hiring (or freeze hiring altogether), while reducing outside counsel spend and conducting layoffs. Yet respondents remain optimistic that innovations in technology can increase efficiencies as companies struggle to do more with less. Of the challenges in-house counsel identified as significant barriers to doing their jobs well, ‘too much time spent on low value tasks’ rose to the top. Over one third of respondents specifically identified time wasted on finding, tracking and versioning documents, despite the fact version control solutions have been around for decades. “In-house lawyers are bullish on using technology to alleviate increasing workloads,” said Gaurav Oberoi, cofounder and CEO, Lexion. “Yet finding the right technology platform – one that doesn't take months of implementation and training – has remained elusive, and legal teams have been cautious as a result. The slowing economy is pushing legal teams to find and adopt high ROI systems that fill the headcount gap, while requiring minimal change management." Lexion offers an end-to-end contract management solution for in-house legal teams that helps them capture key metrics and accelerate deals while using AI and automation to help them scale. Unlike other contract management systems, stakeholders can work with Lexion entirely via email, eliminating the need for complex configuration and training. About Lexion We built Lexion at Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s artificial intelligence research institute (AI2) and are backed by the same investors that funded OpenAI (Khosla Ventures), helped launch Amazon (Madrona Venture Group), and have advised Google (Wilson Sonsini). With a top notch and experienced team from Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, we built a company that CB Insights ranked the #1 most promising AI legal tech startup in the world two years in a row (2020, 2021). Lexion is a Top 40 Intelligent Application based on votes from Goldman Sachs, Madrona, Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and many of the top AI investors in the world. Most importantly, fantastic brands trust Lexion to manage their contracts: Outreach, OfferUp, Blue Nile, Apptio, Brooks, and many more. Visit https://lexion.ai for more. Contact Details Forrest Carman +1 206-859-3118 forrestc@owenmedia.com Company Website https://lexion.ai/

November 17, 2022 09:00 AM Pacific Standard Time

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Claravine Recognized As A Cool Vendor in 2022 Gartner® Cool Vendors™ in Marketing Data and Analytics report

Claravine

Claravine, a pioneer in data integrity for the global enterprise, has been included in 2022 Gartner Cool Vendors in Marketing Data and Analytics report. The Report highlights interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services designed to help digital marketing leaders improve the usability of their marketing data, specifically in the areas of data collection, quality and activation. "We are thrilled to be included in the 2022 Gartner Cool Vendors report," said Verl Allen, CEO of Claravine. "Marketers are challenged with using quality data to gauge digital campaign performance. Our platform has demonstrated excellence in helping analytics teams to be more efficient and effective, standardizing marketing performance data attributes across the enterprise by greatly accelerating analysis and simplifying the process of aggregating data. I’m incredibly proud of our team's dedication to helping the Fortune 100 get the most of their data and digital dollars.” This recognition comes on the heels of Claravine’s recent 2022 AdExchanger Award win for Best Data Technology, 2022 Programmatic Power Player inclusion, and being recently recognized as a Momentum Leader in Data Governance Category and Best Enterprise Relationship Index for Data Governance in the Spring 2022 G2 Rankings. Claravine’s solutions also received recognition in the G2 2022 Spring Reports as an Enterprise High Performer and for “Easiest to Do Business With.” Marketers using Claravine consistently report a 10% to 15% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS) for each new dollar tracked, 100% data format, tracking code, and tag compliance, and more than an 80% reduction in time spent on data quality processes. Earlier this year, Claravine closed a Series B funding round of $16M and recently announced expanding its media integrations library to include top companies like Google Ads, Snap, and Pinterest. GARTNER and COOL VENDORS are registered trademarks and service marks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. About Claravine Claravine is a pioneer in Data Integrity for the global enterprise. We empower a proactive approach to marketing measurement by activating data standards across people and technology, bridging the silos that limit speed and decisions. That’s why nearly a quarter of the Fortune 100 use our platform, The Data Standards Cloud, to define, apply and connect standards across their ecosystem for faster decisions, greater agility, and increased ROI. www.claravine.com Contact Details Kite Hill PR +1 704-960-2295 claravine@kitehillpr.com Company Website https://www.claravine.com/

November 17, 2022 10:16 AM Eastern Standard Time