Brian Armstrong, CEO of major United States cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, believes that crypto mass adoption mostly depends on volatility, scalability and usability. Armstrong made his claim during a live ask-me-anything (AMA) session on April 2. Armstrong ran the 45-minute AMA on Tuesday, answering selected questions submitted by the crypto community. Addressing the first question, on the potential for mass crypto adoption, Coinbase’s CEO said that a cryptocurrency can achieve mass adoption by improving scalability and usability, while reducing volatility. As per volatility, if the crypto markets keep swinging dramatically, it will be hard to get more traditional investors involved, Armstrong …

Blockchain scalability project Coda has completed a new $15 million funding round for O(1) Labs, Coda announced on April 2. According to Coda, the new funding round involved major technology investors such as Accomplice, Coinbase Ventures, Paradigm, and General Catalyst. As specified on its website, Coda is a cryptocurrency protocol with a “tiny portable blockchain,” swapping the traditional blockchain for small cryptographic proof, which enables a cryptocurrency to be as accessible as any other app or website. Specifically, Coda aims to address blockchain’s scalability problem by compressing blocks and providing zero-knowledge proofs rather than most crypto-related firms, whose blockchains reach …

Offchain Labs, a blockchain startup co-founded by a professor at Princeton University, has raised $3.7 million in a seed round led by crypto hedge fund Pantera Capital, TechCrunch reports on April 3. The new funding round was also supported by Compound VC, Raphael Ouzan of Blocknation, Jake Seid, managing director at Stone Bridge Ventures and others. With the investment, Offchain aims to solve major problems associated with enterprise blockchain implementations by bringing more scalability and privacy. By deploying its own protocol, Arbitrum, Offchain developers intend to bring make smart contracts more scalable. Offchain co-founder Ed Felten said that the firm …

Over the last few weeks, Bitcoin’s (BTC) second-layer scaling protocol, called the Lightning Network (LN), has gained a lot of traction, steadily proving to become a viable solution to BTC’s infamous scalability problem and even potential competitor to American payments giant Visa. Thanks to the community-driven Twitter experiment called “the Lightning Torch,” the LN has now been co-signed by Jack Dorsey, who says that integrating the protocol on Square’s popular Cash App is a question of “when, not if.” On top of raising awareness, the social media campaign has also shown what the LN technology is ready to offer in …

Blockchain development company Lightning Labs has announced the initial release of the Lightning Network offramp Lightning Loop in a post on its blog published on March 20. Per the announcement, the software provides a non-custodial way to receive funds through the Bitcoin (BTC) scalability solution Lightning Network, through on-chain settlement with the “Loop Out” function. The Loop Out function attempts to solve an issue which can affect Lightning Network users. The post explains that, after having received a certain amount via the Lightning Network, users can sometimes not receive more until he or she moves the funds on-chain, which can …

Blockchain development company Blockstream has released a new version of its Bitcoin (BTC) scalability software, c-lightning, a post on the company’s blog reveals on March 1. C-lightning is an implementation of the off-chain Bitcoin scalability solution, the Lightning Network (LN), that is written in the C programming language. Per the announcement, this latest version, c-lightning 0.7, is the first major release in 8 months and brings performance enhancements, bug fixes, augmented privacy and new features, as well as improved documentation. The main new feature is plugin supports, which allow developers to extend the capabilities of the software with plugins written …

As reported by Cointelegraph on Jan. 24, the press service of the Massachusetts Technical Institute (MIT) announced the development of a new cryptocurrency design based on the proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol. Ethereum — Algorand’s closest competitor, according to the existing estimates — will launch its PoS system sometime between 2019 and 2021. Scheduled updates required for a gradual transition from the proof-of-work (PoW) to a PoS algorithm have been regularly postponed by the Ethereum Foundation due to network vulnerabilities and failures in the process of the network’s upgrade. Trilemma: It's all about scalability The term “trilemma” was first used by Vitalik …

Amid a seemingly constant stream of new concepts claiming to be key to crypto to breaking through to the financial mainstream, one immovable issue remains ever-present: scalability. The crypto community is abuzz with new projects relating to the issue, from the Bitcoin (BTC) Lightning Network to a brand new cryptocurrency designed by some of the top names in crypto and American academia. Cointelegraph takes a look at the latest scalability developments and what they can bring to blockchain and crypto. Some of the United States’ finest academic and technological have come together in a new project aiming to launch a …

Blockchain can allow for the creation of a borderless economy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Silvio Micali claimed in a interview on Bloomberg’s Daybreak Asia, Jan. 21. Speaking on the show, Micali outlined three major properties of blockchain systems that must function simultaneously to enable a more inclusive and borderless economy — security, decentralization and scalability. According to MIT’s Ford Professor of Engineering, until recently, only two of those three basic properties could have been achieved simultaneously at any time. When asked about scalability in particular, Micali stressed that a decentralized system really needs superior technology to provide the …