The Takeaway: Crypto lending startup Celsius raised $50 million in a token sale in 2018. Lending volume has surged since then, with 10,415 Celsius users taking out fiat loans after locking in crypto collateral. BitGo confirmed to CoinDesk that it held $1 billion worth of crypto deposits from Celsius over the past year. CEL tokens...Read More
September 6, 2019 21 Views This past Thursday, dapp.com closed a $1 million Pre-A Investment round led by Hashed, a South Korean blockchain VC firm, and Du Capital. Dapp.com provides data analytics for decentralized app products built on blockchains such as ethereum, EOS, tron, steem, and others. In a statement, Dapp.com Founder and CEO, Kyle...Read More
One of bitcoin’s most experimental startups has grown dramatically over the past year, highlighting both the opportunities and pitfalls of open source development. Now Adam Ficsor, co-founder of zkSNACKs – the firm behind the privacy-centric Wasabi Wallet – is stepping down from his role as CTO to focus on research as the company matures. “I was...Read More
This essay is presented as a part of No Closing Bell, a series leading up to Invest: Asia 2019 focused on how the Asian crypto markets are interacting with and impacting global investors. To keep the conversation going in person, register for Invest: Asia 2019 coming up in Singapore on Sept. 11-12. Since the cryptocurrency boom and...Read More
A partnership between two cryptocurrency firms could bring 20 new bitcoin ATMs to cities around Colombia. The bitcoin exchange, Paxful, and crypto ATM company, CoinLogiq, announced the partnership Sept. 5. By integrating the Paxful kiosk feature with CoinLogiq hardware, users will be able to purchase BTC using cash, credit and online debit transfers. According to...Read More
September 5, 2019 33 Views Samsung Electronics is releasing a new edition of its Galaxy Note 10 smartphone that will come with a pre-installed cryptocurrency wallet in its bid to further boost adoption for blockchain. According to a Wall Street Journal article on Thursday, the new product is a variant of Samsung’s flagship product Galaxy Note 10...Read More
Software giant Oracle has admitted Hydrogen, a developer of ethereum-based enterprise blockchains, into its Cloud Marketplace. The listing, announced Wednesday, means New York-based Hydrogen’s APIs are now available to nearly half a million Oracle customers to develop applications for banking, investing, savings, insurance and wellness. Oracle Cloud Marketplace is a leading provider of platform as a...Read More
On Friday, Sept. 6, bitcoiners around the world are vowing to run in memory of the late Hal Finney. Anyone is invited and dozens of the technology’s enthusiasts have already pledged to join. Finney has long been touted as one of the first people to see the promise of bitcoin, long before it had a...Read More
September 3, 2019 31 Views A Norwegian savings bank dating back to the mid-1800s has just invested in a cryptocurrency exchange set up by local business magnate Bjørn Kjos. In a press release posted on the Oslo Stock Exchange, Sparebanken Øst said it had taken a 16.3 percent stake in Norwegian Block Exchange (NBX) for 15 million Norwegian krone (around...Read More
Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has launched not one, but two test platforms for its planned crypto futures products. Dubbed Futures A and Futures B, the new testnets are now open to users for testing, with new competitions to encourage traders to get involved. On Monday, Binance announced on its website that users will be able to vote...Read More
Noelle Acheson is a veteran of company analysis and CoinDesk’s Director of Research. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own. The following article originally appeared in Institutional Crypto by CoinDesk, a free weekly newsletter focused on crypto assets. Sign up here. For a primer on crypto custody concepts, you can download our free report here. ...Read More
Telegram’s new blockchain project will be compatible with ethereum, according to a tech startup building tools for the network. The messaging company is expected to release the code to run a node on the Telegram Open Network (TON) on Sunday, allowing users to trial its project in advance of the project’s expected mainnet launch on...Read More
The Electric Coin Company (ECC), the for-profit company that supports the development of the zcash cryptocurrency has issued its Q3 transparency report, revealing it has so far avoided layoffs during the bear market despite financial losses. According to the report, the company ran an average a monthly deficit of 30 percent in Q1. The ECC...Read More
Malta-based crypto exchange Binance wants to spur greater research in open-source blockchain development. To that end, the exchange unveiled Binance X on Thursday, announcing that it was funding more than 40 developers conducting research into open-source crypto software. Binance X also hopes to facilitate collaboration in the Binance ecosystem by providing resources to projects in various...Read More
A top United Nations (UN) official said cryptocurrencies are making international efforts to combat terrorist financing, money laundering and cyber-crime “exceptionally difficult.” Neil Walsh, chief of the Cybercrime and Anti-Money Laundering arm of the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime, said that the anonymizing and pseudo-anonymizing attributes of cryptocurrencies provide a “new layer of secrecy...Read More
A year after China banned local fiat on-ramps for crypto exchanges, Chinese traders continue to drive the market forward by using the dollar-pegged stablecoin tether (USDT). “Crypto trading businesses are restricted from accessing banking services in China, but they are thriving nonetheless,” Dragonfly Capital Partners co-founder Alexander Pack told CoinDesk. Traders generally work around such...Read More
A code vulnerability that could have forced computer shutdowns was found on Tuesday in the second most popular ethereum client. Parity connects over 3,000 computer servers around the globe to the ethereum blockchain network. On Thursday, Parity Technologies, the startup responsible for building and maintaining the ethereum client, released updated code to fix the bug. Only...Read More
Hedera Hashgraph, a blockchain-like public network for enterprises, is adding a U.S. financial giant to its governing council. Hedera announced Thursday that FIS Global will become the ninth addition to its 39-member council. Hedera also announced that it intends to launch its mainnet in beta on Sept. 16. The company claims its distributed ledger technology...Read More
Algo Capital, an investment firm exclusively focusing on the Algorand blockchain ecosystem founded by the MIT professor Silvio Micali, has raised $200 million for a new fund dubbed Algo VC Fund. The company said in an announcement on Tuesday that those who committed include investors like NEO blockchain’s NGC Ventures, TechCrunch founder’s Arrington XRP Capital...Read More
George Harrap is CEO and co-founder of Hong Kong based Bitspark, a bankless money transfer ecosystem focused on Asia and Africa. This essay is presented as a part of No Closing Bell, a series leading up to Invest: Asia 2019 focused on how the Asian crypto markets are interacting with and impacting global investors. To...Read More
Craig Wright must turn half of his bitcoin holdings and intellectual property to the estate of Dave Kleiman, a judge ruled Monday. The ruling applies to holdings and IP from before 2014. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart recommended that plaintiffs be awarded 50 percent of the bitcoin that Wright held prior to Dec. 31, 2013, as...Read More
The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) is teaming up with fintech firm Digital Asset and VMWare to move its current exchange platform onto distributed ledger technology. Announced today, ASX and Digital Asset have signed a three-party memorandum of understanding (MOU) to build a replacement platform for the existing Clearing House Electronic Subregister System (CHESS) onto DLT....Read More
A cryptocurrency exchange claiming to settle bitcoin futures contracts physically just landed $10 million in financing from Polychain Capital and Bitcoin.com chairman Roger Ver, among others. The exchange, CoinFlex, launched in February of this year and says it is the first exchange to close futures contracts in bitcoin as opposed to a cash settlement. Speaking with...Read More
Michael J. Casey is the chairman of CoinDesk’s advisory board and a senior advisor for blockchain research at MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative. The following article originally appeared in CoinDesk Weekly, a custom-curated newsletter delivered every Sunday exclusively to our subscribers. In case you missed it, a new self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto came out of the woodwork last...Read More
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), has settled charges it filed last year against four promoters of crypto-denominated multi-level marketing schemes. Following a federal trial in a Florida court, the operators of the fraudulent investment schemes are ordered to pay restitution and have been barred from operating or participating in other such MLM schemes, according to...Read More
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire says the U.S. lagging behind China’s development of a national digital currency could alter the way Western companies transfer payments. Speaking on the Global Coin Research podcast this week, Allaire said China is setting the pace in the development of a digital currency equivalent of its fiat currency, the renminbi, and...Read More
Bitcoin wallet and blockchain explorer provider Blockchain announced a partnership with the largest bitcoin processor, BitPay. According to a blog post published today, Blockchain will integrate BitPay’s payment architecture into its wallet service. This partnership will allow Blockchain wallet users to pay merchants online or on mobile. BitPay processes approximately $1 billion in bitcoin alone...Read More
Developers will soon be able to test applications on a live version of blockchain interoperability protocol Polkadot. Kusama, an experimental and unaudited version of the $1.2 billion network, was launched on Friday at the tail-end of Berlin Blockchain Week. As highlighted in a blog post by Polkadot creator Gavin Wood, it will be somewhere between...Read More
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) may incorporate blockchain to improve drug and medical products reviews and recalls. In a speech at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT Third Interoperability Forum, on August 22, principal deputy commissioner Dr. Amy Abernethy, said the FDA is looking to modernize the way health care providers,...Read More
Many litecoin (LTC) miners working to secure the blockchain and compete for block rewards have been unplugging their machinery following the cryptocurrency’s recent “halving” event, network data shows. Litecoin’s mining difficulty – a coded-in measure of how hard it is to solve the mathematical puzzles used to write blocks on the network – has dropped...Read More
