Category: Blockchain

From soft and hard forks to protocol upgrades, to the implementation of Segwit and to the future outlook of the Lightning Network (LN), the Bitcoin network has come a long way since its inception in January 2009. As of Sept. 18, 2018, the average block size on the Bitcoin network is .8MB and the average number…

Dairy Farmers of America (DFA), a U.S. national milk marketing cooperative, has teamed up with food fintech startup ripe.io to pilot a blockchain-powered project aimed at improving the food supply chain, according to an announcement published September 25. DFA is a cooperative owned by dairy farmer-members in 48 states, the net income of which totalled…

Just a few days ago, Crowd Machine was working to build a crypto replacement for Amazon Web Services. Today, it is facing questions about its survival. On Saturday, according to a post by the Crowd Machine team, a hacker compromised the company’s cryptocurrency wallet and stole a large number of the application’s native Crowd Machine…

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO)   An Australian federal science agency has completed a global test on a blockchain network it developed with the University of Sydney, which, the two said, indicated the system can process 30,000 cross-border transactions per second. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) released the test…

Not really Blockchain (it is a private Ethereum implementation) – but let’s not be too picky, it goes in the right direction.   A major blockchain payments trial launched by JPMorgan, Australia’s ANZ and the Royal Bank of Canada has just gained over 75 new banks as participants. As reported by CoinDesk, the three banks set…

Standard procedure for any serious bug. Over half of bitcoin’s mining hash rate has upgraded to the patched software version, meaning the attack can no longer be used.   This week’s major bitcoin bug was even worse than developers initially let on. The bug originally rocked the bitcoin world when it was reported the vulnerability…

Compare to yesterday’s announcement by Russian Bitfury for their new 14nm ‘Clarke’ ASIC Bitcoin (BTC) mining behemoth Bitmain has unveiled its next-generation ASIC chip soon to be used in the firm’s new “Antminer” crypto mining machines, Reuters reports September 21. An Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) chip is a piece of tailored mining hardware geared to…

Blockchain firm Bitfury has come up with a novel product aimed at making it easier to pay for products with bitcoin. A specialized engineering team within the company has developed a coffee vending machine capable of connecting to the Lightning Network, a second-layer transaction protocol designed to make bitcoin more scalable by processing transactions off…

A blockchain team from Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has left to start a blockchain “venture studio” called Chorum. Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, Richard Crook, who headed up the RBS innovation team, takes with him engineers Mark Simpson, Ben Wyeth and Farzad Pezeshkpour. Their move is the latest in a string of departures by enterprise…

Bitcoin (BTC) mining software manufacturer Bitfury Group has launched a new generation of its BTC mining hardware based on its Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) chip Bitfury Clarke, according to an announcement published September 19. An ASIC chip is a piece of mining hardware geared to mine digital currency based on a specific hashing algorithm. An…

Switzerland-based consortium Crypto Valley Venture Capital (CV VC) has launched a blockchain incubator with a $100 million goal, swissinfo.ch reported September 20. CV VC has reportedly launched its initial incubator dubbed “Genesis Hub” in the canton of Zug, also known as Switzerland’s Crypto Valley. The Crypto Valley Association was founded as a government-backed consortium in…

Major U.S.-based content delivery network (CDN) CloudFlare has introduced a new decentralized content gateway via its InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), the firm announced in a blog post September 17. The announcement was made during Cloudflare Crypto Week, a week devoted to the adoption of new cryptography-powered technologies. Cloudflare’s IPFS Gateway is the first product to…

Funding for Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) has seen its hardest slump in 16 months, Bloomberg reported September 10. Analysis from Autonomous Research shows that in August, startups raised $326 million, which is the smallest amount since May 2017. According to Autonomous Research, Ethereum (ETH) blockchain-based ICOs have been recognized as the spark for the ETH…

At the heart of ethereum lies a “virtual computer”. Stored across tens of thousands of nodes that make up the platform, the ethereum virtual machine, or EVM, is responsible for executing the countless tokens, dapps, DAOs and digital kittens of which the blockchain is comprised of. It’s an engine on top of which the entirety of…

Chinese holding company Wuhan General Group (China), Inc. has entered negotiations to transform a U.S. Defense Department facility into a crypto mining farm, according to a press release published September 11. Per the press release, in case of a successful outcome to the negotiation, the company will receive the first order of rigs in late…

Things haven’t been easy of late for Bitmain. After CoinDesk revealed the China-based crypto mining giant was planning an initial public offering (IPO) for September, the company has faced a wave of perhaps unprecedented scrutiny. On social media, allegations emerged Bitmain was everything from insolvent to presenting a rosy outlook for its financials, all the while…