Day: November 24, 2017

Online banking service Swissquote has launched a bitcoin exchange-traded certificate that it claims will curb the cryptocurrency’s volatility.

The world of Bitcoin forks has got a degree stranger after Bitcoin Diamond suddenly appears.

Set to bring smart contracts and new scalability to bitcoin, RSK  has partnered with Coinfirm and brought it into its federation to address AML/CTF through the team’s expertise and recognized blockchain AML/CTF Platform.

LONDON, November 22, 2017  — RSK, the company behind smart contracts for bitcoin, and leading blockchain regtech Coinfirm announced today a partnership to address anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing compliance for the cryptocurrency marketplace.  RSK  has brought in Coinfirm’s AML/CTF Platform along with its proprietary algorithms and big data analytics into its Federation. RSK has now added another strong blockchain player to its federation that has created an ecosystem that provides them with the best potential for their large scale adoption and success. 

With both companies comprising themselves of blockchain experts in their respective fields, this collaboration will efficiently address regulatory compliance issues such as AML and CTF through Coinfirm’s platform. 

Not only having significantly improved smart contract capabilities in bitcoin, RSK has also been able to increase scalability within the ecosystem, having successfully accelerated transactions per second from 7 to 400. Subsequently, Coinfirm have been  one step ahead of the ever changing commercial scalability for bitcoin. A major strength of the Coinfirm AML/CTF Platform is streamlining and automating compliance processes for blockchain transactions, taking the process from a double digit percentage of labor and time expenses to a practical, automated utility.

“We are happy to welcome Coinfirm as part of the RSK Federation. We both share the vision about the importance of smart contracts powered by the Bitcoin network. Their strong commitment to compliance facilitates blockchain technologies becoming mainstream and the Internet of Value becoming a reality.”, said Ruben Altman, RSK’s COO.

Coinfirm Co Founder and CEO Pawel Kuskowski said, “RSK is bringing a needed element to Bitcoin and taking the network and ecosystem forward. Coinfirm understands their importance and they understand our unique role in the future commercial and mass adoption of bitcoin so our joint relationship was a natural step for both sides. Together we’re going to continue pushing the further adoption of bitcoin around the world.”

Recently the two entities linked up at Coinfirm’s monthly blockchain event Warsaw Block and spoke on RSK’s Federation and the role Coinfirm is playing as a part of it. Both RSK’s Ruben Altman and Coinfirm’s Pawel Kuskowski took to the stage to set out their planned collaboration on confirming transactions to create greater security and scalability within the blockchain ecosystem.

About RSK Labs

RSK Labs is the company behind the project codenamed ‘RootStock’, a smart contract platform with a 2-way peg to the Bitcoin Blockchain. RSK founders have been actively involved in the Bitcoin ecosystem and smart contract development since early 2013. The company was founded in 2015 and its initial white paper was later published on December 2015.

About Coinfirm

Coinfirm is a recognized leader in their field and ranked among the most influential blockchain and regtech companies and serves as a foundation for the safe adoption and use of blockchain. The Coinfirm AML & Compliance Platform uses proprietary algorithms and big data analysis to provide structured actionable data that increases efficiency, reduces costs and streamlines compliance to near automation. The blockchain agnostic platform not only benefits companies operating around blockchain but also major financial institutions, asset management companies and BI companies. Coinfirm has also recently released it’s AMLT Token to allow for market participants to help provide information and democratize the financial system.

This is a sponsored post and does not necessarily reflect the opinions held by any of The Merkle’s employees. This is not trading or investment advice; always conduct your own independent research.

Having hit a fresh all-time high of over $440 today, could high trading volumes push ether to new records over the weekend?

If there is one cryptocurrency that has attracted outsize attention this year, it has to be Ethereum. Although not all its news has been positive, the overall sentiment has remained bullish. Over the course of the past few years, there have been some interesting Ethereum developments that people should continue to keep in mind.

The Early Years of Ethereum

Everyone will acknowledge that an ecosystem such as Ethereum’s could not have launched without significant funding. The Ethereum ICO was organized between July and August of 2014 and attracted a lot of funding. With the money raised, the company known as Ethereum Switzerland GmbH could formally develop the software project itself. It took until July 2015 before the general public was introduced to Ethereum. At that time, around 11.9 million tokens were present on the network.

We have seen quite a few changes made to Ethereum over the past few years. Right now, we are in the Metropolis stage, or at least the first part of it. Prior to this, we saw the release of Frontier in July 2015 and Homestead in March of 2016. The second phase of the Metropolis hard fork has yet to receive an official launch date, although it will probably be in either Q2 or Q3 of 2018. There is at least one more version coming after this release, which goes by the name of Serenity. 

Not all of these milestone upgrades have gone off without a hitch, though. The most controversial development occurred in 2016 when The DAO raised US$150 million through an initial coin offering. Sadly, the project backfired due to sloppy smart contract coding, and an emergency hard fork had to be introduced. It was this fork which caused Ethereum to lose its immutability and also spawned Ethereum Classic. Ever since that time, both blockchains have coexisted peacefully, even though Ethereum gets a lot more attention these days.

There have been other attacks against the Ethereum network as well. Two major problems were averted through subsequent hard forks in Q4 of 2016. The upside of these forks was that they resulted in increased DDoS protection, far less blockchain bloat, and a reduction in the effectiveness of spam attackers to nearly zero. That doesn’t mean Ethereum is completely safe and secure, though. The recent Parity client issues show how “easy” it is to ensure others can’t spend their own funds. For now, this problem remains unresolved, although developers are working on an imminent fix.

Despite all of these challenges, the price of Ethereum has continued to increase over the years. At the time of writing, one Ether is valued at US$319.24, with Ethereum’s total market capitalization hovering around US$30.3 billion. That’s a staggering amount for a project that didn’t even exist three years ago. It will be very interesting to see how the Ethereum ecosystem evolves in the coming years. This currency is clearly not competing with Bitcoin, as their respective use cases and infrastructures are completely different. No one knows what the real value of Ether should be at this point, though, as the current price is still mainly driven by speculation.

Initial crowdsale or ICO is redefining the way people make contributions to projects. It has an enormous amount of potential since everyone can participate. ICOs have boomed in popularity in 2017, with over $2 billion raised since the start of the year. However, there is also a great amount of risk associated with cryptocurrency.

It is a highly volatile environment and the promise of high rewards can also turn into major losses. This creates a gap between the state of unexplored potential and the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies.

The dangerous side of the crypto market is speculation. Usually, people are contributing in well-hyped projects; projects with a powerful marketing strategy and a good idea, but most of them don’t deliver any results except the rising of the price (pump & dump effect) on exchanges. We also have examples of crypto companies, which are earning very good profits from their services, on the other hand their token price went down to the bottom (initial contributors helped to the company to start with the project and in exchange for that they got the tokens, but because the token is only connected to the exchange price they are not the part of the company’s success).

We have to understand that the crypto society is still very small in comparison to other investment markets (gold, stock market…). The crypto market is also very complex, unregulated and we will need some time to attract people, who are interested in safe contributions. We certainly cannot talk about safe investments in the crypto world yet, since the volatility is extremely high. We can witness changes in the price of over 100% on the daily basis. This is a sign of trouble for all the people contemplating to enter the crypto world. At the moment, investing money in a cryptocurrency equals spending the money at the casino. One of the biggest issues, which occur is the greediness of the project’s owners and the usefulness of the tokens, which is almost nonexistent.

That is why we are setting up new initial contribution rules. Our goal is to make projects more financially transparent for the contributors, by offering an initial contribution buyback guarantee in the event that the contributor is not satisfied with the progress of the project in the future.

We would like to incorporate this functionality into all future crypto projects. The changes are necessary because people who are initial contributors are the reason the crypto world even exists.

Till today early adopters were not protected and they couldn’t get their initial contribution back if a project didn’t deliver the results. We are about to change that. Our mission is to become some type of escrow account in the new ecosystem of Token Sale 2.0 for every new crypto project.

Any project with clearly defined goals and the focus to develop the product will have no problems accepting this guarantee. Initial contributors require much more information regarding the development of the project and success of the company than just the price of the token on the exchange. The usefulness of the token is definitely a factor that affects its success.

In addition to token usability, ATRIX is also constantly focusing on introducing innovative technological solutions, which will accelerate the further development of the existing market. However, our vision extends far beyond the current state – we commit ourselves to closely collaborate with regulators and make our own contribution to bringing clarity and safety to the evolving crypto space. By helping the decision makers to regulate the unregulated and remove uncertainty, we aim to become a synonym for the further extension of distributed technologies and to eliminate the existing borders. In the fast-evolving crypto environment, we see ourselves as one of the leaders in the industry’s self-regulation.

That is why we at ATRIX are proud to say we have the first token in the world, which offers its users a minimum of 80% buyback guarantee for the period of 5 years, based on their initial contribution. Furthermore, our focus is to create a 100% transparent crypto token, which provides access to the ATRIX loan scheme, allowing you either to access a loan fully commission free through the ATRIX platform or to apply for a loan at traditional banks and securing it with the ATRIX token as a credit guarantee. We aim to create an environment where your ATRIX token will be considered as a fully useful and secure asset also used as priority pass for new projects, which will use the BUYBACK GUARANTEE SYSTEM.

Atrix is a game changer in the world of initial crowdsale.
Join us on telegram : https://t.me/atrix_token
Website: https://www.atrix.io/

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Air New Zealand partners with Winding Tree to create new Blockchain technology solutions for ticketing, baggage and security.

Zen is a decentralized financial platform that allows its users to buy, sell and create financial instruments without any third parties having control over the transactions. It is a parallel blockchain to Bitcoin which allows users to create assets that react to events on the Bitcoin Network. Zen targets financial use cases such as trading and creating new kinds of assets. These assets connect to digital agreements with powerful, programmable abilities to process information and grant rights.

The Zen protocol allows Zen contracts to depend on transactions which happen on the Bitcoin Network. The cross-chain can be used for side-chain functionality and for cross chain contracts. Users, therefore, do not have to convert their Bitcoin to Zen coins and then interact with a smart contract, they can easily send Bitcoin to a normal Bitcoin address.

Zen has a rare native token for contract activation which is not intended for wealth competition. The native token lowers the cost of using Zen by subsidizing the miners who secure the chain. Zen also produces verified contracts for transactions. The contracts are pay-per-block, that is, they pay miners for every block in which they are active. Only contracts that affect the blockchain  are cached in memory

How Zen Differs From Other Platforms

The Zen protocol eliminates some of the problems experienced with Ethereum smart contracts. In the case of Ethereum, all transactions must be paid in Ether. For Zen, only contract creation requires the native token while the rest of the transaction fees can be paid with any asset. Another problem arises when gas has run out when sending out a transaction. When this happens, the transaction stops and your currency is returned. On the Zen platform, transactions will not be executed unless the correct amount of “gas” is included and the miners know the cost beforehand.

ICO

The token sale will begin on 30^th November and go on until 30^th December. A total of 12,000,000 tokens will be distributed to the public for sale, 6.5M will be distributed among the team members and 1.5M will be retained for future incentives. The token can be purchased using Bitcoin. The price of 1 Zen is set at  $2.75.

More information about the Zen platform is available at – http://www.zenprotocol.com/

The post Zen Protocol Extends Smart Contracting Capabilities to Bitcoin Network appeared first on NEWSBTC.

So it is Friday morning out of Europe and we have come to the end of the week as far as our intraday session bitcoin trading efforts go. Late last night, as part of the second of our twice daily bitcoin price analyses, we noted that we would love to see a continuation of the sort of action we were seeing throughout the midweek session. Specifically, price had given us plenty of opportunities to jump in and out of the markets and, not only that, but had also served up plenty of sustained momentum subsequent to signaling our entries. When we get sustained momentum subsequent to an entry it means we can stay in a trade for a fairly decent period of time and, by proxy, pull out a decent profit from the market.

So what happened overnight?

Well, more of the same. We are entering the session this morning on the back of a pretty solid run and, with a look, things will play out similarly today.

So, with that noted, let’s get some levels in place that we can use for the session this morning and see if we can’t replicate our success heading into the weekend. As ever, take a quick look at the chart below before we get started so as to get an idea where things stand and where we are looking to get in and out of the markets as and when things move.

It is a one-minute candlestick chart and it has our range overlaid in green.

As the chart shows, the range we are looking at for the session this morning comes in as defined by support to the downside at 8169 and resistance to the upside at 8222.

If we see a close above resistance, we went along towards a target of 8250. Conversely, a close below support will have us in short towards a downside target of 8120.

Charts courtesy of Trading View

The post Bitcoin Price Watch; Here’s What We’re Looking At This Morning Out Of Europe appeared first on NEWSBTC.

Overstock subsidiary tZERO is adding features to its upcoming security token, allowing investors to use the coin to purchase a handful of services.