Earlier this week, Russian tech startup Waves announced it has been testing a blockchain solution for payments in the retail electricity sector. The pilot program was initiated by Rosseti, Russia’s national energy grid operator, which is looking to automate and make transactions between energy producers, suppliers and consumers more transparent. Now that the first stage has been successfully completed, the partners will proceed to scale up their efforts. Ultimately, they envision rolling the blockchain-powered solution out nationwide. Blockchain and energy: What makes them work together? According to Wood Mackenzie, a global natural resources research and consultancy group, the first documented …

Russia’s largest darknet marketplace is looking to raise $146 million in a token offering that would allow it to go global. As Forklog reported on Dec. 11, the token sale is almost certainly illegal — in this case not merely for flouting securities laws or other financial regulations. “A new era in the West” The operators of the marketplace, known as “Hydra,” have ambitions to roll out their model of anonymized, rogue trading for illicit substances at a massive scale. An investment memorandum, accessible only via dark web browsers like Tor, claims the platform’s global expansion “will start a new …

Abkhazia, an autonomous region in northwest Georgia, is planning to intensify the works on the identification of cryptocurrency mining farms in the region. According to a news release published on the Cabinet of Ministers’ website on Dec. 12, Prime Minister of Abkhazia Valeri Bganba held a meeting dedicated to the current state of the region’s electricity grids. The meeting saw the presence of representatives of the State Security Service, the Ministry of Economy, and the state electric utility Chernomorenergo RUE, among others. Significantly increased loads on electric grids During the meeting, some of the participants brought to notice that the …

Open-source blockchain platform Waves is launching Gravity Hub, a blockchain-agnostic protocol resolving the interoperability issue. It will also operate as a data oracle, feeding data from the outside world to the blockchain. Sasha Ivanov, founder of Waves platform and Waves Enterprise, announced the new project on Dec. 11 at the Waves Meetup in Berlin. Trying to decide the problem of blockchain interoperability Gravity Hub is essentially a blockchain that doesn’t have any tokens, but that can communicate with other blockchains, such as Waves platform, Waves Enterprise or Ethereum. Sasha Ivanov explained the importance of the blockchain agnostic protocol in an …

Russia’s national energy grid operator Rosetti is testing a blockchain solution for payments in the retail electricity sector. The system — initiated by Rosseti and developed by the Russian distributed ledger technology (DLT) startup Waves — aims to automate and make transactions between energy producers, suppliers and consumers more transparent, as a Dec. 10 blog post from Waves has outlined. Domestic energy sector battling debt Waves indicates that the main driver for the project is the inefficiency, opacity and mounting debt that currently besets the domestic industry. The blog post cites data from the government of the Russian Federation, which …

Russian mining and smelting giant Nornickel has commenced testing its digital platform for metals trading. As Bloomberg reported on Dec. 5, Nornickel began trialing its platform for digital metal tokens in collaboration with physical commodities trading group Trafigura Group Ltd., metals finance and logistics firm Traxys SA and materials technology and recycling group Umicore SA. Specifically, the platform is designed to enable clients to purchase digital tokens backed by metals and then trade them for physical supplies. Big plans Commenting on the product rollout, Nornickel CEO Vladimir Potanin said that the company is “imply packing existing business links into a …

Major cryptocurrency exchange Binance listed four Russian ruble trading pairs, according to an announcement on Dec. 2. The first trading pairs featuring the ruble include Binance Coin (BNB), Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and XRP. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao commented on the development in a tweet sent the same day. Binance’s addition of trading pairs follows the introduction of ruble trading on the platform in late October when Zhao announced that users could then deposit and withdraw fiat funds in rubles. Zhao has previously lauded Russia’s position as an important jurisdiction for the crypto and blockchain industries, recognizing the wealth of …

Coming every Sunday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link. Top Stories This Week Crypto exchange Upbit confirms theft of 342,000 ETH Another week, another hack — leaving us all with a distinct sense of déjà vu. On Wednesday, the major South Korean crypto exchange Upbit confirmed that a whopping 342,000 Ether (ETH) had been stolen from its hot wallet — funds worth an estimated $50 million at the …

Russia is allegedly preparing a ban on the use of cryptocurrencies to pay for goods and services. A report from Izvestia on Nov. 29 cites several sources allegedly familiar with ongoing discussions at the country’s central bank, financial regulator and Ministry of Finance in support of a ban. Legal measures not yet officially confirmed At present, cryptocurrencies can be used for e-commerce and many Russian freelancers, including programmers, designers and copywriters, agree to receive their salaries in Bitcoin (BTC) or Ether (ETH), Vladislav Antonov told Izvestia. Antonov, an analyst at Alpari Information and Analytical Center, noted that while they are …

The largest data center in the former Soviet Union, BitRiver, opened about a year ago in the Siberian city of Bratsk and most of its clients use the facility to mine Bitcoin (BTC), Bloomberg reported on Nov. 24. The data center allows cryptocurrency miners to take advantage of cheap energy in what once used to be the world’s largest aluminum smelter. The plant was built by the USSR in the 1960s with the still-active hydropower plant to power its operations. Cold climate, cheap energy The data center’s location also benefits from a cold climate, allowing mining hardware to work at …

Russia’s largest bank, the state-owned Sberbank, has pioneered a blockchain solution for repurchase agreements — also known as repo. According to a Sberbank announcement on Nov. 19, the bank has been awarded a patent for the solution, which uses smart contract technology to automate repo transactions between parties. Repo markets Repurchase agreements are widely used in wholesale funding markets and serve as a vehicle for banks and non-banks to access liquidity via short-term funding agreements that are collateralized by underlying securities. In a repo transaction, a bank (or other entity) buys a security and pays for the purchase by immediately …

$450 million worth of lost cryptocurrency from the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange WEX may have been transferred to a fund belonging to Russian intelligence agency the Federal Security Bureau (FSB), according to an investigation by the BBC’s Russian Service published on Nov. 15. The BBC’s recent investigation into the BTC-e crypto exchange case, in which co-founder Alexander Vinnik stands accused of fraud and laundering as much as $4 billion in Bitcoin (BTC) over the course of six years, has revealed new details which allegedly connect lost customer funds to the FSB. Demands to hand over crypto assets to the FSB The …