About author: Joseph Young

The inflation rate of the Venezuelan bolivar has increased to triple digits, leading to a financial turmoil which Venezuelans have struggled to cope with over the past two years. As a result, families and households have turned toward bitcoin, a decentralized digital currency, to mitigate the financial damage inflicted by the plummeting value of the Venezuelan bolivar. In January 2017,...

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Matt Hall and John Watkinson, the co-founders of Larva Labs, a mobile app development studio that has created some of the most popular iOS and Android applications, released their latest project called CryptoPunks, an Ethereum-based tokenized ecosystem wherein digital creators can distribute artworks in a more transparent, secure and efficient manner. The CryptoPunks platform is currently in its early stage...

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The Bancor Network, a blockchain project endorsed by prominent billionaire investor Tim Draper, recently raised $150 million in an initial coin offering (ICO). However, the development team behind Bancor was criticized for the abrupt extension of investment period and its untested code. On June 12, Bancor extended the investment timeframe of its ICO by three hours due to supposed attacks...

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Singaporean blockchain startups are continuing to attract more investors to this emerging sector. On June 9, early-stage startup accelerator Coinsilium announced a SGD$100,000 ($72,500) investment in Singaporean blockchain-based Linkedin-like professional network Indorse. According to the official press release, the deal was secured with the issuance of a convertible loan which granted Coinsilium an undisclosed number of the native tokens of...

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On June 6, the Tel Aviv district court announced its official ruling on the dispute between Israeli bitcoin exchange Bits of Gold and the country’s second largest financial institution Bank Leumi. The court ruled in favor of Bank Leumi, dismissing the case of Bits of Gold and the denial of banking services for bitcoin startups and service providers in the...

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Oil giant BP, the world’s eighth-largest energy company by revenue ($222.8 billion), has officially begun collaborating with Canadian blockchain startup BTL Group. After a few months of successful testing, BP, Italian oil and gas company Eni, and major German energy company Wien Energie all plan to enter a six-month production phase with BTL’s Interbit platform built on top of the...

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On June 3, an insider source told Chinese cryptocurrency news agency CnLedger that two of the largest Chinese bitcoin exchanges Huobi and OKCoin are currently working on the development of an off-chain payment channel similar to the Lightning network to lower transaction fees. CnLedger reported: “Chinese exchanges Huobi and OKCoin are working on building a Lightning Network-like channel, to lower...

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An increasing number of central banks and governments are working on digitizing their national currencies. China and Russia are investigating the potential of Ethereum as the base protocol for a digital Yuan and Ruble respectively. Currently, the Royal Chinese Mint, the subordinate unit of China Banknote Printing and Minting, is testing Ethereum and its ERC 20 token standard to digitize...

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On May 30, LG, one of the largest electronics company in South Korea behind Samsung, officially announced its partnership with R3CEV as a part of a larger vision to target the South Korean fintech and finance industries with distributed ledger technology. Over the past few years, many leading financial institutions and banks in the world have joined R3CEV, including South...

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At the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy held over May 22-24, MIT researchers presented a paper on a new encryption method which utilizes the underlying technologies of Bitcoin to prevent identity theft and encryption attacks. Alin Tomescu, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, and his thesis advisor, Srini Devadas, the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of...

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