Bison Trails, a Blockchain infrastructure-as-a-service provider, has created double-signing protection software, or DSP, which aims to address the slashing penalties associated with double signing messages. According to the company, many digital asset holders consider slashing penalties to be one of the “main risks” of Blockchain participation, as they make it more difficult for the network to reach consensus. Speaking with Cointelegraph, Aaron Henshaw, CTO and co-founder of Bison Trails, stated that such penalties could be dangerous for anyone participating with their stake in a network as “it represents a place where token holders and validators can actually lose existing funds, …

Cardano’s native cryptocurrency, ADA, may be listed on Coinbase by the end of 2020. This news comes following an announcement that ADA holders will soon be able to stake their assets in Coinbase custody. More announcements coming in 2020 A spokesperson from IOHK — Cardano's development company — released the following statement to Cointelegraph replying to the question of whether a Coinbase listing is also in the works: “With the release of Adrestria, our new suite of libraries and APIs, allowing for a seamless, modular process of integrating Cardano with exchanges, we’ve been working closely with a number of exchanges, …

Hedera Hashgraph is positioning itself as a “Consensus-as-a-Service” blockchain, serving other enterprise chains with a hybrid network model. The concept was explained by Hedera CEO, Mance Harmon, at a May 14 speech on Consensus Distributed. Cointelegraph followed up with Harmon right after the panel to learn more about the concept of providing consensus as a service. Hybrid enterprise consensus Hedera is a thoroughly enterprise-centric product, though it also has a public token named HBAR. Its consensus model can be described as a hybrid between a locked-in federated consensus and a delegated Proof-of-Stake model, like that found in EOS. Hedera is …

Cambodia’s central bank will launch a distributed ledger technology (DLT) network to enable greater interoperability in the country’s payments sector and to take on the almighty greenback. Consumers will be able to make near instant payments via the platform, using a mobile app and QR codes. During Consensus: Distributed on May 11, the assistant governor and director-general of the National Bank of Cambodia, Serey Chea, revealed the primary goal of the DLT network was to undermine the popularity of the U.S. dollar. “Cambodia is probably the most dollarized economy in the world. The whole financial system or actually our whole …

Last year, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) asked global jurisdictions to adopt its anti-money laundering, or AML, guidelines for crypto. As the apparent deadline is just a few weeks away, some regulation experts believe that the deadline is not the case, while the actual adoption is a matter of years. On May 12, global legal and regulatory experts alongside executives in the crypto industry gathered at a Consensus: Distributed panel to discuss the FATF’s crypto guidelines. Travel rule’s June 2020 deadline “is a bit of a myth” At the virtual event, Siân Jones, a convener of the Joint Working …

During a fireside chat as part of Consensus: Distributed on May 12, Changpeng Zhao, the chief executive and founder of Binance, said that the top cryptocurrency exchange is seeing a spike in user registrations. Zhao noted that new registrations amid the Bitcoin (BTC) halving have recently approached levels last witnessed at the peak of the 2017 bull run. “The new user registrations are picking up very aggressively, like getting close to the sort of [new users] generated under 2018,” Zhao said. New user registrations increase "aggressively" Binance’s CEO also noted that the exchange’s customer support department is receiving a high …

A number of countries such as China and Sweden are already experimenting with central bank digital currencies, which are also referred to as CBDCs. The implementation of this new type of money requires a number of aspects including technology advancement and specific regulation. According to a key official at the European Central Bank, the main challenge of CBDC is philosophical rather than technological. Yves Mersch, an executive board member at the ECB, has again discussed CBDC issues at an "ask me anything" session hosted by Consensus: Distributed on Monday. At the session, the ECB executive reiterated that the central bank …

Crypto industry leaders and law experts debated the privacy implications of central bank digital currencies, known as CBDCs, during the "Money Re-Imagined" panel as part of Consensus:Distributed on Monday. Lawrence Summers, the former United States treasury secretary and former chief economist of the World Bank, argued that the current fiat monetary system exhibits issues of too much privacy, advancing that a CBDC should seek to facilitate greater oversight capabilities. The current monetary system has "too much privacy" Summers argued that supporting the anonymous movement of multimillion-dollar sums of money should not be an objective of financial policy: “Of all of …

Major cryptocurrency event, Consensus 2020, has officially kicked off in virtual mode. Consensus: Distributed, Coindesk’s first ever fully virtual conference, featured European Central Bank (ECB) key legal official, Yves Mersch, as the first speaker. On May 11, ECB board member Mersch delivered an exclusive keynote devoted to central bank digital currencies (CBDC), a central bank digital currency that can be used by consumers. Speaking at 6:45 a.m. ET, the ECB official outlined that the bank is mainly focused on a retail implementation of CBDC. The ECB voices its focus on retail CBDC implementation Opposing retail CBDCs to wholesale central bank …

As cryptocurrency markets are highly volatile, crypto players can’t stop arguing about what really impacts the price of certain coins and what does not. Some crypto pundits believe a larger amount of tokens staked in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains could push the price upwards by reducing the circulating supply, making the remaining tokens more valuable. But blockchain and crypto analytics firm Messari has crunched the numbers and reports that there is little correlation between the two. Announcements correlate with price though In an April 1 blog post, Wilson Withiam, a researcher at the Messari analytics team, provided an analysis of 21 …

Consensus, a major global cryptocurrency and blockchain-focused event, is another industry conference that had to change its plans due to intensifying coronavirus fears. In line with the increasing number of industry events being delayed or canceled in response to the coronavirus outbreak, Consensus will not be hosting a conference in New York this year. Consensus 2020 will be hosted in virtual reality at no charge However, that doesn’t mean that Consensus 2020 will not happen. According to an official March 13 announcement by Coindesk, the industry publication that coordinates the event, Consensus 2020 will now be a “completely virtual experience,” …

Blockchains and the related field of decentralized technologies represent a massive opportunity for humanity — not to mention the fact they appeared with almost perfect timing. Our largest institutions have become so powerful that they can take advantage of normal people without repercussions. Look no further than Facebook spying on its users and the surveillance state run by the Communist Party of China. Fortunately, blockchain technology, cryptography and other distributed systems act as a counterbalance to this extreme consolidation of power. They are defensive technologies that empower the many against the few. Like BitTorrent disrupting the music industry, cryptocurrencies and …