Day: May 9, 2018

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

China’s social messaging giant WeChat has halted a third-party blockchain mini-tool running inside the application, citing a violation of rules. 

A crypto Youtuber is launching his own television series that is fully paid for by bitcoin. They will air on CBS, the CW, and Roku. The first 13 episodes will air on CBS in selected areas, featuring topics such as crypto security, exchange trading, initial coin offerings, crypto crashes, mining, and the future of cryptocurrency.

Also read: Yahoo! Japan Confirms Entrance Into the Crypto Space

Crypto Crow Show

Youtuber and investor Jason Appleton announced on Monday that he is launching a bitcoin-funded television series “on CBS, the CW and Roku to over 47 million homes.”

CBS, a flagship property of CBS Corporation, is one of the three major traditional commercial broadcast television networks in the US, alongside ABC and NBC. The CW is operated by the CW Network, a joint venture between CBS Corporation, the former owners of United Paramount Network (UPN), and Warner Bros. Roku provides streaming content to set-top devices and apps.

According to the announcement:

This will be the first time a cryptocurrency Youtuber has launched their own television series fully paid for by bitcoin. All promotional sponsors, features and the like are paid by bitcoin.

Appleton is known on Youtube as Crypto Crow. At the time of this writing, he has 73,005 followers on Youtube. He began publishing videos on the site in November last year. While emphasizing that he is not a licensed financial advisor, his videos include Initial Coin Offering (ICO) reviews and investment tips.

13 Episodes on CBS

Appleton has signed an agreement with CBS Television Networks “to air 13 episodes of the Crypto Crow Show in select markets as a test market in hopes of spreading nationally.” The first season is scheduled to begin in the week of June 25 on the CBS New York WLNY network, serving approximately 7.3 million homes, the announcement details, adding:

Each episode will feature educational information focused on helping newcomers to the crypto space such as researching, investing and how to stay secure in their efforts while featuring ICO and cryptocurrency companies and how they affect the industry.

The 13 episodes planned are on topics such as what are cryptocurrencies, crypto security, exchange trading, ICOs, bot trading for profits, swing trading, crypto cycles and crashes, crypto mining vs investing, crypto predictions and the future of cryptocurrency.

Crypto Shows Gaining Popularity

The number of television shows featuring cryptocurrencies is growing. Last month, news.Bitcoin.com reported on the cable network Cheddar launching a 30-minute show about cryptocurrencies called Crypto Craze. In February, Krypton Capital announced the launch of Crypto TV which focuses on breaking crypto news, panel discussions and live interviews. Eight pilot episodes of this show are being produced.

Regular TV shows have also featured cryptocurrencies in selected episodes. Award-winning CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory, for example, aired an episode in November called “The Bitcoin Entanglement.” USA Network’s Mr. Robot has also made many references to bitcoin.

This week, HBO’s Silicon Valley featured an ICO while Showtime’s Billions featured a Ledger Nano S hardware wallet.

What do you think of this crypto TV series? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, CBS, Ledger, Twitter, and Jason Appleton.

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After about two days of pre-ICO, all-in-one cryptocurrency platform Holdvest.com released an announcement about closing the ongoing round of crowdsale. As stated in their official Medium blog announcement, they are going to restructure their ICO profile,  and the amount that was collected already is quite enough to continue work and prepare for the main stage of their crowdsale in June.

HOLDVEST is a unique new trading platform – which is already working in beta – combines several different features and technologies to make trading crypto and maintaining a winning portfolio straightforward. The platform is built around its flagship liquidity aggregator to allows users to trade with dozens of different exchanges, ensuring the best price for every buy and sell just in one click. The initiative is based on the idea that crypto services need to be easier to access and traders shouldn’t need any special expertise to gain the best prices on the market.

All team members are professionals in the IT business and bring their considerable experience and relevant expertise to the HOLDVEST project. One of the prominent examples is technical director Alexey Koloskov, who has been active in blockchain and cryptocurrency circles for many years and is best known for designing and developing Waves DEX: the platform’s flagship decentralised exchange.

For more information and participating in the ICO, visit http://www.holdvest.com

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The popular Kik messaging app has announced it will fork the Stellar blockchain to create its own zero-fee cryptocurrency. Kik provides free instant messaging by using WiFi, which is very useful for people without phone plans and has hundreds of millions of registered users.

Kik initially launched its native cryptocurrency, Kin, in a successful initial coin offering (ICO) which raised USD 98 million. Kin was issued with an Ethereum ERC-20 smart contract, where investors deposited Ethereum and received the newly-issued token in return. ERC-20 provides an easy mechanism to create new cryptocurrencies that use the Ethereum blockchain, making them highly secure since there is an immense amount of mining power maintaining Ethereum, as it is the second most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap.

However, the developers of Kin decided to move their cryptocurrency off the Ethereum blockchain due to high transaction fees and slow confirmation times. Kik CEO Ted Livingston said that “Ethereum is the dial-up era of blockchain”. To solve this problem it was originally decided that Kin would be moved to the Stellar blockchain, where transactions are confirmed in only a few seconds and fees are much lower.

Stellar transactions cost a tiny amount of money which is paid in its own digital currency, Lumens, so if Kin were a Stellar token it would require paying Lumens for each transaction. The Kin team originally planned on subsidizing the Lumens needed by users to send Kin, and this was not a problem since Stellar transaction costs are so low. However, malicious spammers could attack Kin by spamming it with unnecessary transactions to burn off the subsidized Lumens.

Kin developers have now decided to fork Stellar and create a new blockchain with zero fees to avoid any issues associated with subsidizing transaction fees. This would allow users to send each other micropayments of a penny or even smaller, stimulating the growth of a digital economy where photos and stickers are exchanged between users. Zero transaction fees could also promote a tipping culture like that seen on the Dogecoin subreddit.

The Kin Foundation has set aside a large amount of coins for the Kin Rewards Engine which will reward entrepreneurs on a daily basis according to how much economic activity its app produces.

Since there are going to be zero transaction fees, there will be no reward for maintaining and securing the Kin blockchain. However, nodes will still be required for the blockchain to function. The Kin Foundation will maintain the first node, and it expects business partners to run nodes out of the shared interest of seeing the Kik economy succeed.

Image Source:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kin_Logo.svg – Wikimedia Commons under MIT License

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Oftentimes in this cutthroat world, one emerging technology replaces another. Just think about your alarm clock, Rolodex, or camera. And as for fax machines and cassette players? No one’s shedding a tear over their demise. But sometimes different technologies can actually complement each other, rather than remove and replace.

Here we are in 2018, standing on the cusp of never-ending possibilities. We don’t know yet how far-reaching the implications of blockchain technology are, nor that of AI. And when these two powerhouse technologies collide, amazing things can happen (if not just a little creepy).

A Tailor-Made Travel Experience

If you like to get away from all things tech when you go on vacation, it may seem illogical that technology can help you to do just that. Australian blockchain company Chozun is building a travel ecosystem powered by data science and AI. The point? To personalize your travel experience and make your vacations more relaxing and enriching (or adrenaline-packed and unfulfilling, depending on your preferences).

So if you typically waste valuable tanning time debating where to go and what to do, Chozun can match you with the best places to visit according to your tastes. The technology behind it learns over time what you like and don’t like, saving you the hassle of lining up to see a monument that leaves you less than impressed.

And the blockchain component incentivizes travelers with a token-based loyalty rewards scheme, including peer-to-peer exchanges, compensation for leaving reviews, and flight and hotel upgrades.

Blockchain-Powered Chatbots

With most of us more interested in speaking to computers than to human beings these days, chatbots are on the up. But now they’re being powered by blockchain tech. And how does blockchain work with AI-powered chatbots? By ensuring the integrity of data, to start with.

Summarizebot is a startup company that developed a blockchain-powered chatbot for text and multimedia analysis. It’s basically the modern version of CliffsNotes, so you don’t have to read an entire text – just walk away with the highlights. Awesome news for time-pressed executives and idle students alike.

“SummarizeBot is an AI and blockchain-powered chatbot that analyzes a document, web link or multimedia file, extracts its main ideas, and puts them into a short summary,” explains CTO Alex M. “Using blockchain helps us to collect more accurate data for training, with blockchain protocols to validate data label quality, ensuring the most accurate datasets possible.”

Preventing Attacks Before They Happen

In what feels very Minority Report (for those of us who weren’t in diapers when it came out), AI combined with blockchain can prevent certain events from happening. At least, when it comes to cybersecurity.

Worldpay Vice President and Head of Global Cyber Defense & Security Strategy Peter Tran says, “AI and blockchain become a symbiotic combination for cybersecurity where the right hand will always know what the left hand is doing … it’s the checks and balances to provide monitoring, visibility, and early detection.”

Vaughan Emery, CEO of Atonomi, believes that blockchain tech and AI are fundamental in securing the Internet of Things. “The combination of immutable identity and blockchain-based reputation will help secure healthcare IoT. Especially when combined with machine learning and artificial intelligence that can identify aberrant device behavior, identity and reputation will provide the kind of real-time protection required to secure the Internet of Things.”

Another company getting serious about intelligent cybersecurity is HEROIC, which is combining blockchain technology and AI to fight current and future cyber attacks. “The combination of big data with artificial intelligence and the blockchain is a completely new paradigm for cyber protection,” reveals Chad Bennett, the company’s founder and CEO. 

From travel to data analysis, crime detection and cybersecurity, AI and blockchain seem to be a winning pair. But can they advance to a place where they can read our minds and stop real-world events from happening? A decade ago, people would have laughed in my face for asking that question. Today, I’m not so sure.

Bitcoin has jumped back to the $9,300 mark. The currency had recently been tested at $9,800, and was unable to surpass $10,000 mark over the weekend as so many analysts and users were hoping. It fell to $9,500 the following day, $9,300 after that, and ultimately settled at $9,100 during yesterday’s early morning hours. Overall, the total drop amounted to $700 over the course of three days.

Now that the currency has moved up, many are wondering if the bulls have once again taken the reins and are pushing bitcoin back up the financial hill. One source verifies that this might be true, and predicts that the coin could move beyond $15,000 by the end of the year. This is largely attributed to the new bitcoin trading desk up by Goldman Sachs. The sentiment remains that other Wall Street entities will follow in Goldman Sachs’ footsteps and try to pave the way for further cryptocurrency trades in the “big leagues.”

In fact, this is already starting to occur. Intercontinental Exchange (which owns the New York Stock Exchange) has been developing plans for a new trading platform that could potentially allow investors to buy and hold multiple forms of crypto. Digital currency trading could suddenly move from “obscure” to the “norm” in the coming months, and hike up both awareness and the present market cap’s value.

It is also mentioned that many cryptocurrency exchanges must now register with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which may seem scary at first, but is likely to bring further legitimacy to the industry in the long run. This legitimacy is certain to up both the price and the value of bitcoin and its many crypto-cousins, pushing the arena into further mainstream territory and carving a path that leads to spikes in trading.

The source forecasts changes in both the number of users and transaction volumes for each month over the rest of 2018. By examining the present data, it suggests a much stronger fundamental value for bitcoin, and believes that the price of the coin will grow steadily over the coming months as mainstream financial institutions continue to show acceptance.

In addition, many analysts and financial experts are boosting bitcoin’s reputation by promoting its benefits and working against the actions and words of figures like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. One of those people is Mark Wright, a BBC Apprentice winner and bitcoin investor. As a huge advocate for cryptocurrency, Wright completely disagrees with Buffett’s recent claims, commenting:

“Despite its volatile nature, the cryptocurrency sector has soared in recent years, with experts predicting it will hit a market valuation of $1 trillion by the close of 2018. This figure proves that Buffett is wrong, particularly when one accounts for how the value of bitcoin has developed since 2014 – the time when Buffett first expressed negative opinions on the sector. Despite his years of experience in business, Buffett’s comments show a terrible lack of engagement in technology and innovation.”

Bob Loukas – founder of Bitcoin.Live – agrees with Mark Wright. He mentions that bitcoin is beginning to gain trust in the financial marketplace, and that over time, healthy regulation will set it on the right path and allow for the currency to grow significantly.

Meet Wences Casares, the Argentine entrepreneur who has spent the past several years convincing Silicon Valley’s wealthiest investors that Bitcoin, and only Bitcoin, is the global currency of the future.

His startup, Xapo, has built a network of underground cold storage vaults across five continents, specifically designed to safeguard and protect large sums of the digital coin.

How Much Bitcoin Does Xapo Hold?

The company boasts some massive holdings. According to two clients, Xapo houses roughly $10 billion of Bitcoin. Another investor close to the venture, who spoke with Bloomberg, calls that figure an accurate approximation. The cache is remarkable as it amounts to about 7% of the global Bitcoin supply. This means that Xapo, a company only four years old, holds more ‘deposits’ than 98% of the roughly 5,670 banks in the U.S..

The large Bitcoin holdings at Xapo underscore the faith that Casares — an entrepreneur nicknamed ‘Patient Zero’ for helping bring the coin to Silicon Valley — has garnered among his peers and clients at major cryptocurrency investment firms like Grayscale and CoinShares.

“Everyone who isn’t keeping keys themselves is keeping them with Xapo,” said Ryan Radloff of CoinShares, which has more than $500 million of Bitcoin stored at Xapo. “You couldn’t pay me to keep it with a bank.”

Xapo’s billionaire backers include LinkedIn Corp. co-founder Reid Hoffman and former Wall Street trader Mike Novogratz, who just today launched the Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index (BGCI), designed to track the performance of the 10 largest and most liquid digital currencies.

Bitcoin’s astonishing rise in recent years has seen the development of thousands of rival cryptocurrencies, the biggest ones by market cap being Ethereum and Ripple. What’s interesting is that, despite the relative success of these other coins, Xapo only safeguards Bitcoin because of Casares’s belief that it alone will succeed. Because of this hardline stance, Xapo routinely turns away customers looking to store other cryptocurrencies.

How Does Xapo Safeguard Its Holdings?

Xapo’s solution to protect its massive amounts of Bitcoin is to bury cold storage devices in heavily-protected areas like mountainsides and decommissioned military bunkers, and pair these with layers of electronic safeguards.

The company has a well tested protocol in place to protect customer’s digital assets. Xapo requires a thorough verification of a client’s identity and an authentication of the request before it will manually sign the transactions with private keys from multiple vault locations. Approval from three separate vaults is required for any transaction to be authorized. As an added safeguard, the entire process of retrieving one’s Bitcoin from the vault takes about two days.

“Every part of their DNA is geared to security,” said Sean Clark, founder of First Block, who noted the vault’s fingerprint scanners were equipped with a pulse reader to prevent amputated hands from being used. “Whenever we make big transfers they FaceTime us, we have duress words, if it’s big enough they’ll fly out to see us.”

Featured image from Shutterstock.

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In 2017, the crypto market demonstrated that its value is limitless. ICOs have increased tremendously in popularity because they provide entrepreneurs with a more convenient way to raise money in order to fund their startups. As a consequence, trading cryptocurrency is now a favorite activity of investors looking to diversify their portfolios. Binance is the perfect example of a company that proves investors can attain excellent returns on their investment and become leaders in their niche with excellent marketing techniques and a high-quality product.

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However, trading cryptocurrency or promoting a crypto exchange business poses challenges that newbie investors may not fully understand. The best alternative is to settle on a white label solution to spend less on development, make sure their business lives up to their expectations, and stand out in the cryptocurrency exchange market. The problem is, most white label solutions available feature costs between $20,000 and $120,000.

In the absence of a platform to streamline cryptocurrency exchange, Stoxum aims to do more than that. The project is looking to become a hybrid crypto exchange by incorporating benefits from both decentralized and centralized exchanges. The end goal is to develop an aggregated liquidity pool where all Stoxum token holders are co-owners of the platform.

Convenient white label solutions for businesses

In the cryptocurrency market, custom white-label solutions help business people restructure and rebrand their cryptocurrency exchange websites. They can change the name, the features, and the design to make them more appealing to their customers. Since many startups cannot handle the development process of an exchange platform all on their own, a white label solution comes into play with easier to use, ready-made package. However, the prices involved for such packages can easily exceed $100,000.

On Stoxum, you can launch your brand with a single click without investing a fortune in development. Users get to choose the coins traded, as well as set their own trading fees. With allocation percentages between 60 and 80 percent, businesses can also connect their own currencies and leverage their own developers to change their website’s design. Furthermore, the platform will also feature “from the box” AML-KYC functionalities to allow companies to get a compliant license for their exchange business.

By combining perks of centralized and decentralized exchanges, business owners will benefit from a fully transparent and secure ecosystem powered by detailed reporting on all transactions in real time.

A hybrid business model for exchanging cryptocurrency

Stoxum aims to become the world’s first decentralized cryptocurrency exchange with a hybrid business model. Powered by an aggregated liquidity pool, the platform will make STM token holders exchange co-owners entitled to receive a share of its profit based on the total amount of tokens they have.

With a unique operating system and customized white label solution in place, Stoxum will begin by listing the five best-rated cryptocurrencies on the market: Bitcoin, Ether, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin and Ripple.

To ensure complete transparency, users will decide which new coins to bring onto the platform through a unique voting system. Based on the amount of tokens they hold, users will also receive a fair share of the platform’s profit in the form of dividends. In terms of plans for future development, Stoxum plans to add ready-made trading bots to limit losses and help investors predict profit logic.

After successfully raising more than $500,000 in the private pre-sale, Stoxum will launch its public pre-sale on May 10. All participants will benefit from declining bonuses that start at 30 percent down to 3 percent, and will be based on the total amount of STM tokens they wish to purchase. 1 STM token is priced at 0.00002 BTC.

A new blockchain startup is coming out of stealth Wednesday and boasting a significant cast of investors.

Bloomberg has partnered with Michael Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital Capital Management to launch a cryptocurrency index.

Multinational software giant Oracle Corp has announced its plans to roll out a platform-as-a-service blockchain product this month followed by decentralized ledger-based applications in June, according to Bloomberg.

With 430 customers in 175 countries, the California-based company is one of the world’s largest software companies, in 2015 only second-largest by revenue after Microsoft. The company specializes primarily in developing and marketing database software and technology, cloud engineered systems and enterprise software products — particularly its own brands of database management systems. In 2017, the company generated USD 37.3 billion in sales.

This is not the company’s first blockchain project, as in 2017 it launched the Blockchain Cloud Service, described by Oracle as a “comprehensive distributed ledger cloud platform to provision blockchain networks, join other organizations, and deploy and run smart contracts to update and query the ledger”.

Company president, Thomas Kurian, has also revealed that the company is currently working on other blockchain projects, and plans to make a further impact using the technology with a project in Nigeria logging customs and import duties, and a collaboration with the Banco de Chile, attempting to link interbank transactions to a hyperledger.

Many large software companies are now watching the blockchain space with interest. According to Microsoft News Centre UK, in March, UK financial technology firm Nivaura that uses Microsoft Azure, successfully registered, cleared and settled two Principal Protected Notes (PPN) linked to the FTSE 100 – one through the traditional clearing infrastructure and a second using an open public blockchain. This made it the world’s first blockchain-based investment product, according to Microsoft.

Also, Bitcoin News reported recently that global credit card giant, Mastercard, announced that it was looking to expand its offices based in Dublin, Ireland, with 175 new technology developers recruited for roles such as blockchain experts, software engineers and information security specialists.

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Financial entities have shown an increased interest in blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. It now appears there are multiple efforts underway which have been kept in the dark for some time. The owner of the New York Stock Exchange, for example, has been working on a Bitcoin exchange. That is a pretty interesting development which could impact the cryptocurrency industry in a positive manner.

ICE Wants a Bitcoin Exchange?

It is always interesting to see how financial firms look at Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Over the past few years, it has become evident that there is a lot of bias toward this new form of money. As such, big exchanges have kept tabs on Bitcoin but never made any proper plans to embrace this technology or do anything with it. That is how it appeared on the surface, anyway, as the owner of the New York Stock Exchange apparently has very different ideas.

For those who don’t know, the New York Stock Exchange is a subsidiary of Intercontinental Exchange. A few weeks ago, it became apparent the latter company had an interest in cryptocurrency, although its exact plans were kept under tight wraps, for obvious reasons. New information came to the surface earlier this week confirming that ICE is building an online platform which will allow people to buy cryptocurrencies. It will include support for Bitcoin as well as other undisclosed cryptocurrencies.

With this major financial entity paying attention to the cryptocurrency industry (and not in a bad way), an interesting situation has been created. It is not the first Wall Street firm to be going deep into the Bitcoin waters, but this may be the biggest project to date. While many financial experts may still oppose cryptocurrency, it is evident that Wall Street firms are prepared to enter this market and hit the ground running.

It is not the first venture of ICE in the cryptocurrency industry either. The firm introduced a cryptocurrency data feed earlier this year, which allows investors to keep tabs on the price of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other currencies. With other banks and financial service providers attempting to launch Bitcoin trading desk-like services in the future, the competition is heating up rather quickly.

For the time being, it remains a bit unclear if and when ICE plans to launch this cryptocurrency trading platform. There is no indication as to how much of the work has been done already and whether or not the launch is imminent. It is still a “potential project” at this stage, albeit one that would allow institutional investors to buy vast amounts of cryptocurrency without friction. It is possible the platform will also offer swaps linked to Bitcoin, although that has not been officially confirmed.

The cryptocurrency industry is certainly headed in an interesting direction as of right now. There are futures contracts, trading desks, dark pools, OTC trading, and – hopefully soon – a proper trading platform for institutional investors. All of these developments will have a positive impact on the industry sooner or later, although it remains to be seen if they will affect the Bitcoin price at all. One cannot deny that financial firms are interested in cryptocurrency, even though their impact may be minimal at the end of the day.