Day: December 29, 2017

A recent event involving the abduction of an employee of one of the cryptocurrency exchange platforms caused a stir in the community. The employee, Pavel Lerner– an analyst at EXMO, a UK based exchange was reported to have been kidnapped by a group of unidentified people in a black Mercedes Benz while he was leaving work in Kiev, Ukraine on December 26, 2017. According to recent reports, the abducted EXMO has since been found and the company has established contact with him earlier today.

Following the latest developments, EXMO has officially released a statement addressing concerns regarding both the health of Pavel as well as the security of user funds on the platform. The official release from the company states —

“Pavel holds a role of a leading analyst at EXMO, and is a blockchain expert who leads an array of personal blockchain startup projects not related to the operations of the EXMO platform.

On December 26, Pavel was captured by a group of unknown masked people, and all the connection with him ceased for several days. On December 29, we managed to get a hold of Pavel. At the moment, he is safe, and there was no physical harm inflicted on him. Nevertheless, Pavel is currently in a state of major stress, therefore, he will not provide any official comments in the coming days.

The case is currently under investigation by the state security authorities.

We would like to note that the story of Pavel’s abduction has overgrown with rumors that might tamper with the official investigation. That said, EXMO currently refrains from any comments or suggestions of own versions of the possible scenario, until the end of the investigation.

We would also like to point out that Pavel’s activity at EXMO did not involve an access to financial assets of our users. Despite the aforementioned, the platform continues its usual operations.

EXMO team is deeply grateful to the cryptocurrency community and the media for their active support. We promise to timely provide any updates on the situation.”

The abduction was widely reported in all mainstream as well cryptocurrency media outlets and in few cases, Pavel was mistakenly reported as the CTO of EXMO.  In addition, the platform also became a target of DDOS attack during the same time span, causing panic among many EXMO customers. There were fears of the kidnappers coercing information from Pavel and using it to siphon off funds from the platform.

These concerns were addressed by the company by stating,

” …Despite the situation, the exchange is working as usual. We also want to stress that nature of Pavel’s job at EXMO doesn’t assume access either to storages or any personal data of users. All users funds are absolutely safe.”

With Pavel found safe and sound, the company is refraining from making any statements at the moment due to the ongoing investigation into the alleged kidnapping. More information from law enforcement agencies and EXMO is awaited.

The post Kidnapped EXMO Analyst Found Safe, Company Releases Statement appeared first on NEWSBTC.

Blockchains may be transformative for society, but if that’s the case, we should ask what society will remain, regulator Cab Morris argues.

After launching the first “off-chain” transaction solution for blockchain, Raiden Network (RDN) has significantly ramped up its business with a string of major partnerships.

“The pace of adoption of Raiden’s technology has exceeded expectations,” says Yubo Ruan, Co-Founder of Off-Chain Technology Group, an organization that develops blockchain transaction solutions. “We knew uRaiden made history by enabling blockchain to scale beyond ‘several transactions per second’ to millions per second.  And by reducing the time a blockchain transaction takes from a few minutes to under a second.  But we didn’t expect some of the largest and most promising crypto projects to embrace uRaiden so rapidly after launch.”

Raiden’s payment channel framework, uRaiden, launched on November 30, 2017.  In addition to scaling transactions on Ethereum, uRaiden makes possible “instant” transactions and cost-efficient micropayments.  It also significantly drives down machine-to-machine transaction costs.  

Key Partnerships in the Energy Sector and Computer Gaming

Grid+ (symbol: GRID), which raised over $40 million to enhance its always-on appliance that processes payments for electricity in real-time, will be using Raiden’s technology to accelerate use of blockchain in the energy industry.  “Electricity sales to consumers will be settled instantaneously every 15 minutes which makes Grid+ a perfect use case for uRaiden,” says Alex Miller, Grid’s Chief Technical Officer.   Rather than having to register a transaction on Ethereum every few seconds, Grid+ will batch transactions for electricity usage and submit them just once every 15 minutes, substantially reducing expenses for Grid when it comes to Ethereum transaction gas costs.  

Grid+ believes Raiden will give them the upper-hand on other energy marketplaces by cutting costs for its users.  With uRaiden, Grid+ expects that its costs will be 30 times less than they would be for a Visa transaction and 20 times less than the cost of an Ethereum transaction.

Raiden has signed additional partners in the energy industry including Energy Network Foundation, whose blockchain solution features nodes operated by energy giants such as Royal Dutch Shell, the sixth-largest company in the world, measured by revenue.  

In the computer gaming industry, Enjin (symbol: ENJ) will incorporate uRaiden into their ​smart contract ​platform ​that ​enables management of virtual goods for computer games.  With 18 million users, Enjin is the largest gaming community creation platform in the world.  It hosts over 250,000 gaming communities and sees 60 million views each month.  Enjin recognized early on the challenge of accepting in-game crypto transactions and processing them fast enough to make the digital good available to the player in real-time.  According to the company, “Enjin ​will be ​testing ​the ​Raiden ​Network ​for ​lightning-fast ​asset ​confirmation ​speeds.”  Enjin’s Chief Technical Officer, Witek Radomski, confirmed Enjin will begin implementation of uRaiden in Q1 2018.

Signs China Partnership & Important Partners in the Finance Sector

Raiden has also signed partners in Asia.  China-based SmartMesh will make off-Internet instant transactions possible by utilizing both Raiden technology and their own mesh network.  As for the advantages of partnering with Raiden, SmartMesh points to its “scalability, fast transaction, confidentiality, interoperability, and low cost”.  SmartMesh has begun implementation using uRaiden and, separately, plans to roll out a SmartMesh Raiden Light Node for Raiden Network in Q2 2018.  

In the finance sector, Raiden has signed on board Trade.IO, which facilitates asset trading and investment banking on the blockchain.  Raiden enables Trade.IO customers to trade tokenized assets peer-to-peer in a low-latency manner.   Raiden reduces Trade.IO’s cost structure by batching multiple transactions before sending them as “one bill” for settlement on Ethereum, as opposed to paying an Ethereum gas fee for each individual transaction.  Also in the finance industry, Raiden has signed on board MoxyOne, which will incorporate Raiden into its white-label financial infrastructure.

The Path Forward for Raiden

Called a “billion dollar coin” by Hacked.com, Raiden has delivered on the ambitious expectations set by crypto analysts during its ICO by shipping blockchain’s first “second layer” transaction network, uRaiden, on schedule.  Now with partnerships across key industries within weeks of launching, it shows why media outlets such as Crush Crypto described Raiden as likely being a “top-10 most valuable token because of the expected heavy usage”.   

“The quality of partnerships Raiden has secured right out of the gate shows its explosive market potential. It also suggests that a critical mass of companies have been waiting for a solution like Raiden to scale on Ethereum cost-effectively,” says Jorge Sanchez, Co-Founder of Off-Chain Technology Group.  “We expect additional announcements with major companies in the weeks ahead.”

This is a sponsored press release and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or views held by any employees of The Merkle. This is not investment, trading, or gambling advice. Always conduct your own independent research.

2018 prediction: Tech Investor Roger McNamee says 2018 will determine if the BTC “mania” will become a “real industry”. #NEWS

Emerging of new dApps is an extremely important iteration of Ethereum network development. Even taking a form of funny games they help masses to adopt digital crypto wallets and earn some profit in Ether.

It was “CryptoKitties” to generate $17 Million in sales of digital kittens (as of 27^th of Dec. 2017) with some crypto cuties traded from 0.1 ETH (approx. $40-60) up to $120 000-150 000 within a month. Its popularity has resulted in congestion of whole Ethereum network for a couple of weeks.

Fishbank is the new blockchain game on smart contracts announced for the beginning of 2018 that brings the classic PvP (player-versus-player) in P2P (peer-to-peer) environment.

It offers more aggressive kind of gameplay – no more breeding, just fighting. The core aim of the game is to grow the predatory fish and hunt opponents to gain part of their weight.  The bigger fish is the stronger it is the more fights it can win the more valuable it is on the market.

Every predatory fish has three major characteristics: Power, Agility, and Speed those values define the rarity of the fish (Common, Legendary or Epic).

All fishes are cryptotokens owned 100% by the player and stored in Ethereum blockchain acting just like any other cryptocurrency – they can be easily transferred, traded or gifted.

Fishbank states there would be something that can be generally referred to as “hardfork effect” in blockchain ecosystems — rare crypto fish token as a new year gift for every owner of Gen 0 crypto kitten as of 1st January 2018. Indeed, fish was always something that cats adore a lot.

After Alpha launch there would be three ways to obtain a Fish Token:

1. Buy it on Fish Market from other players,
2. Catch random Fish Token in Aquarium,
3. Invite a friend to join The Game (in case he buys a Fish as of 1 or 2).

There is a chance to get the Alpha Fish to participate in game tests by inviting friends for helping to spread the word about the project.

TThe team behind the Fishbank called” Chatrobotic” specializes on gamification of extraordinary environments and is popular by its 3 chatbot game titles running on the messengers platforms (Telegram, Kik, Facebook) with more than 500 000 players on board and 2.5 million messages served daily.

It’s quite obvious that an army of CryptoKitties clones will evolve on the market next year and it will be a good challenge for Ethereum network to stay the crypto animals invasion.

More Info

Website: https://fishbank.io
Whitepaper: https://fishbank.io/whitepaper
Telegram Chat: https://t.me/fishbank
Telegram News Channel: https://t.me/fishbank_en
Twitter:  https://twitter.com/chatrobotic

The post Crypto Fish War Is Coming — Stop Breeding and HODL the Kitten! appeared first on NEWSBTC.

The post Ivy Playground for Bitcoin: Experimenting With the Future of Bitcoin Smart Contracts appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

The post Vector, Nexus Join the Space Race With Plans for Satellite-Based Blockchain Network appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Considering you’ve got to pay a network fee every time you want to transfer cryptocurrency, you’d be justified in wanting to avoid excessive exchange fees. It’s bad enough that the dollar value of Bitcoin transaction fees can be upwards of double digits, so there’s no need to get gouged on withdrawal and trading rates by your favorite exchange. That’s why we compiled this handy list of low-fee exchanges so that you can get the best bang for your buck investing that crisp Benjamin your granny gave you for Christmas.

Our Pick of the Litter

GDAX

This technically isn’t the exchange with the lowest fees on this list, but it’s one of the cheapest and easiest options if you’re looking to purchase crypto directly with fiat.

GDAX is Coinbase’s exchange counterpart, and conveniently, if you have an existing Coinbase account, you can automatically link it with GDAX. The exchange charges 0% for maker trades, 0.25% for Bitcoin taker trades, and 0.30% for Litecoin and Ethereum taker trades (maker trades provide liquidity by creating a new buy/sell offer that is not immediately filled, while taker trades remove liquidity by taking a standing buy/sell offer and are filled immediately). GDAX does not charge for deposits or withdrawals.

Coinbase, on the other hand, charges a 1.49% fee for currency purchased using a bank account and 3.99% (yikes) for purchases using a credit/debit card. When we compare the two – and factor in the fact that you can use GDAX with your Coinbase account – GDAX is a no-brainer for fiat-to-crypto trading pairs.

Binance

Once you’ve got your wallet loaded with some coins, Binance is a great exchange option if you’re looking to take that Ethereum or Bitcoin and turn it into some altcoins.

Binance offers incredibly low rates, charging a flat 0.1% for all buy and sell orders with no deposit fee. Withdrawal fees vary on a coin-by-coin basis.

Even better, if you’re trading with Binance’s own coin (BNB), all exchange fees are cut in half to 0.05%. That’s hands down the lowest you’ll see an exchange charge for trading on its platform.

HitBTC

Like Binance, HitBTC is another solid choice for low-fee trading. While it may not be as popular as other exchanges and includes fewer markets, HitBTC only charges a 0.1% fee on buy/sell orders.

For deposits, HitBTC does not charge a fee, but rates for withdrawals vary by coin.

Bitfinex

Bitfinex charges a bit more than Binance and HitBTC do, but not by much. This exchange charges a 0.1% maker fee and a 0.2% taker fee. This is compared to Bittrex, which charges a constant 0.25% for both taker and maker trades.

As you probably guessed by now, Bitfinex has no deposit fee, but like those before it, there’s a withdrawal fee that varies from coin to coin.

Honorable Mentions: Kraken and Poloniex

These two are at the bottom of our list because while they still have lower fees than some of the other choices out there, the exchanges we’ve listed so far have them beat.

On Poloniex, maker fees come in at 0.15%, while taker fees will run you 0.25%. Funnily enough, Kraken is just 0.01% higher on both fronts, with 0.16% and 0.26% for maker and taker trades, respectively.

You already know what’s coming, don’t you? Yep: no deposit fees, and withdrawal fees vary.

Happy trading!

Ripple’s token XRP nearly doubled within one week, becoming now the third largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

The establishment of the US-based nucleus team at Hcash is a move which will propel the company to the forefront of Blockchain technology. The current aim of the development team, concerning the direction of Hcash, is focused on interoperability, private transactions, security, quantum resistance, while maintaining a high transaction speed.

The event, held at the Cisco Meraki building in San Francisco, was lead by the two leaders of the nucleus team.

Mo Sen is a distributed systems engineer with a background in computer science at Purdue, Stanford and Tsinghua Universities. With over a decade of software development experience, he has led infrastructure development projects with clients including Citrix, Google/Motorola and numerous others.

John Woeltz is an applied cryptographer with over 5 years of experience developing, architecting and applying cryptography for Blockchain software and firmware ranging from the world’s first SCRYPT ASIC miners, to Artificial intelligence data gathering, and model building.

The two will be leading a team of core developers, as well as a team of ecosystem developers across Silicon Valley and the US, and will be coordinating with teams across Asia to develop Hcash.

The panel was a highlight of the event. Speakers Mike Pozmantier, Nipun Gupta and Paul Neubecker are all highly knowledgeable not only in their respective fields, but in the Blockchain sphere. They gave some very interesting and relevant insights.

(left to right) | Mo Sen | Nipun Gupta | Paul Neubecker | Mike Pozmantier

Mike, who is a security consultant, having worked for the US Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity research department, spoke about cryptography, as the central focus of most forms of cyber security. He described Blockchain-based, decentralised systems, which have cryptography built in from their inception, as having natural advantage, in terms of security. This is especially useful for enterprise use. He brought some of Ethereum’s current weaknesses to light, explaining that Hcash solves these issues by having considered them from the beginning of the project. He continued with an emphasis on how useful Blockchain technology is from a government’s perspective, especially in sectors such as IoT, border protection, identity management, and voting systems. He finally pointed out that a main issue with the current Blockchain industry, is that individuals need to be technically proficient in order to become users of the technology, creating a barrier to entry and a hinderance for widespread adoption, which is overall negative for the industry.

Nipun works with Deloitte’s innovation Partnerships team, with a focus on quantum computing and cryptography, having previously worked as a security engineer with iSec Partners, and PwC. From his perspective, even though quantum computing may be 5-10 years from becoming practical, there needs to be work done on ensuring the readiness of a defence system, especially for the sensitive information a Blockchain can contain. He explained that the encryption system Hcash has decided to implement is robust for the reason that it has been around for longer than other options, giving developers a chance to poke holes in the system, and improve its robustness over time. He then described the lack of adoption of Blockchain systems by large corporations in the past, and how that is quickly changing, with big players such as IBM having created their own internal Blockchain systems, and Google having contributed technology to public Blockchains.

Paul is a founder of Blockchain Buffalo and brings an investor’s perspective to the panel. He has previously worked as a senior associate in the banking and capital markets group with PriceWaterhouseCooper, and currently works in venture capital, at Softbank Capital NY. Paul expressed his concern with most Blockchains current inability to scale to meet their rapidly increasing demand, and the need to increase the amount of transactions they can handle, also to meet demand. The second focus was privacy, with Paul’s view being that privacy is fundamental to a cryptocurrency, users needing a sense of freedom to feel fully comfortable using the technology. He also touched on quantum resistance, stating that it is interesting to consider which populations in the world will benefit the most from the development of these countermeasures. He explained that those who live in parts of the world where relationships with the nation state are most fractured, have the highest need for this, as governments are the most motivated and well resourced in being able to censor or seize unwanted technologies. He explained, that in terms of a prudent investment strategy, there needs to be a valid reason for the project in question to run on a Blockchain, with an incentive structure to keep the project running in a truly decentralised fashion. In the long term, utility is what adds real value to a token. The more useful and practical a coin is, the more demand there will be, and if supply is fixed, the price will naturally increase.

Mo brought the panel discussion to a close by stating: “Hcash is improving on Blockchain technology by aiming to be an interoperable network, and its foundation is looking to collaborate with many projects such as Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies for mutual and industry benefit. Describing itself as an information carrier between Blockchains, Hcash will enable the exchange and value between differing Blockchin systems.”

With the efforts of current teams, lead by the expertise of the nucleus team, Hcash hopes to keep up with the leading edge of innovation, whilst maintaining relationships with its community, exchanges, other projects and research partners.

This is a sponsored press release and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or views held by any employees of The Merkle. This is not investment, trading, or gambling advice. Always conduct your own independent research.

The overall cryptocurrency market seems to have stabilized after a correction that lowered its total capitalization to below US$450 billion last week. That said, the market has yet to convincingly bounce back to pre-correction levels, as its market cap continues to drift between US$500 billion and US$600 billion.

The Bears are Back

November and December saw record highs across most cryptocurrency markets. The total market cap increased a staggering US$350 billion from the beginning of November to its December peak, and top 10 coins repeatedly hit new all-time highs over the course of this latest market run-up.  

Nothing lasts forever, however, and these fortunes faded almost as quickly as they had arisen. Last week, the market went into a nosedive, leaving assets across the board bleeding as crypto’s market cap bottomed out at US$422 billion. Bitcoin dove to lows below US$12,000, Ethereum’s price touched just under US$500, and Litecoin fell to US$196.  

The days following this correction saw a swift recovery. Bitcoin found support around US$15,000 as the overall market capitalization rose back to US$600 billion. But the market has had trouble maintaining this recovery, dipping back below US$500 billion over the course of the Christmas holiday.

Since this Christmas dip, the market has made slow but steady strides back to US$600 billion. It’s since retreated to the US$500 billion range, losing around US$50 billion over the last 24 hours. At the time of writing, crypto’s total market capitalization is US$554 billion.

News that the South Korean government plans to ban anonymous trading accounts and enforce stricter regulations on Korean exchanges may be partly to blame for the recent price trend. Rumors circulating that Korean officials were instituting an all-out ban on cryptocurrency may have also adversely affected market-wide prices.

Diamonds in the Rough

Even in a current of selling that has dragged prices downward, a few crypto assets are treading well in these unfavorable waters.  

Ripple, for instance, has continued its healthy rise. Currently, it’s up 11.49% over 24 hours and sitting at a comfortable US$1.47, evading the downtrend that has affected most of the market, the top 10 included.

A bit lower in the rankings, RaiBlocks continues to impress, up 17.63% in 24 hours at US$11.10. At the beginning of this month, RaiBlocks was trading at just US$0.20.

There are a few other notable 24-hour gainers in the top 100, including KuCoin Shares (+41.86%), Byteball Bytes (+19.86%), and SALT (+9.24%).