The global spread of the coronavirus played a major role in the dramatic 2020 stock market crash. The bailout bill for saving the world’s economy is $7 trillion and rising fast. Bitcoin bull Tim Draper believes this confluence of factors may be the tipping point that allows innovations such as Bitcoin and smart contracts to flourish. In an interview on April 6, the global venture capital investor said he was skeptical about the government’s infinite money printing bailout plan and said it would take years before that money “permeates” the global economy. “They are gonna be printing all this money …

Amid the global pandemic crisis, the importance of ensuring trusted information is getting more crucial as fake coronavirus news poses a direct threat to life and health of people worldwide. While some global jurisdictions are imposing fines and imprisonment for spreading false coronavirus information, a major news agency in Italy is hoping to stop fake news by implementing blockchain technology. All the news that’s fit to hash ANSA, Italy’s main news agency and an international publication owned by 24 national newspapers, has launched a news tracking system based on blockchain to bring more trust between the company and its readers. …

Cryptocurrency wallet provider ZenGo has built a testnet to demonstrate a major security flaw prevalent among decentralized application (DApp) wallets. On March 23, ZenGo published an article highlighting that, when authorizing a specific transaction, many DApp wallets actually grant access over all of that particular token stored in the connected wallet: “As a result, if the DApp is vulnerable to a security issue or is rogue to begin with, attackers can abuse these highly excessive privileges to steal ALL of the DApp’s users holdings (in the approved tokens) without any further user consent. They can do so at any point …

Amid some notable recovery of Bitcoin (BTC) after a number of subsequent market crashes last week, billionaire investor Tim Draper delivered another optimistic forecast about Bitcoin. In a March 16 interview with 415 Stories podcast, Draper outlined decentralization powered by Bitcoin and other new technologies as a major tool that has the “ability to transform the biggest industries in the world.” “It will be Bitcoin, not banks and governments that save the day” According to Draper, Bitcoin will be one of the most crucial tools in the times of the recovery of the ongoing global financial crisis, opposing the major …

Russian blockchain firm Waves has announced updates to its enterprise platform, including accelerated smart contract execution, licensing fees and inter-chain anchoring. On March 17, Waves wrote that the new Version 1.2 of Waves Enterprise will enable an increase in containerized smart contract execution speeds by up to 70 times. The company has sped up execution times by replacing the platform’s former REST communication protocol with Google’s Remote Procedure Call (gRPC) — which containerizes contract execution by removing guest operating systems from the protocol. The speed-up in contract execution will facilitate scaling so that clients can process billions of transactions each …

Chainlink, a major smart contract technology supplier, has tapped a new partnership to streamline one of the biggest issues around smart contracts. According to a March 11 tweet, Chainlink has partnered with Hdac Technology, a blockchain startup founded by Dae Sun Chung, CEO of software firm Hyundai BS&C and member of the Hyundai family. By bringing their forces together, the firms intend to jointly develop a system for delivering off-chain data on blockchain in an attempt to bolster smart contract execution. Specifically, Chainlink and Hdac will be addressing the blockchain oracle problem, which is considered to be the biggest obstacle …

A noncustodial smart wallet for both cryptocurrencies and decentralized applications has sealed fresh funding as its attempts to challenge existing offerings in the industry. Speaking to Cointelegraph on March 9, Itamar Lesuisse, the co-founder and CEO of the wallet’s developer, Argent, revealed that the London-based startup had raised $12 million in a Series A funding round led by the Sequoia Capital-backed fund Paradigm. Paradigm is led by Coinbase’s co-founder Fred Ehrsam and ex-Sequoia partner Matt Huang. This week’s funding for Argent apparently represents the fund’s first investment in Europe. The simplicity of traditional finance apps Lesuisse outlined that the Argent …

On March 5, CryptoKitties creator Dapper Labs announced the launch of Flow Playground — an interactive interface that lets developers experiment with developing applications on the company’s Flow blockchain. Developers are able to write and run smart contracts, and will be able to explore Dapper Labs “new resource-oriented programming language” Cadence. The language is designed to simplify programming tokenized assets and includes features from Swift and Rust. Flow Playground also lets users create non-fungible tokens, mint fungible tokens, and build a marketplace. Flow blockchain built to alleviate “pain of implementing smart contracts” Dieter Shirley, the CTO of Dapper Labs, told …

Global taxation and transaction advisory firm EY have announced the launch of their open-source Baseline protocol. Baseline comprises a smart contract and tokenization platform built for enterprises on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Baseline was founded by EY in partnership with Microsoft and ConsenSys, and was developed in collaboration with many companies operating in the cryptocurrency sector, including Chainlink, MakerDAO, Unibright and AMD. The platform’s code has been made available to select entities by invitation and will see a public release before April. Baseline features zero-knowledge proofs and off-chain storage to protect privacy In a video published by development partner …

Earlier in January 2020, Block.one released EOSIO 2.0 as an upgraded set of protocol improvements for the software underlying the $3.2 billion EOS blockchain. Following the release of the new version of EOSIO, some crypto exchanges like Coinbase have raised issues with the performance of the network, temporarily halting deposits and withdrawals. Meanwhile, the EOS community voted on a proposal to slash the network inflation from 5% to 1%, marking blockchain’s second massive token burn event since the second quarter of 2019. While some EOS proponents point to these milestones as proof of increasing decentralization, critics say vote-buying and the …

Human resources firm Ranstad, which recently became global leader in the sector, has chosen to further automate its workflow using a smart contracts-focused blockchain. The firm’s 40,000 employees will be using an enterprise blockchain solution from New York-based Cypherium, which has struck partnerships with major cloud providers Google Cloud Wing, IBM Cloud, and Amazon Web Services. All of the paperwork-intensive processes involved in HR allocation, Randstad revealed on Feb. 28, will soon be automated using the platform in conjunction with Google Cloud. Automating verification Cypherium has a hybrid design, combining two consensus mechanisms: Proof-of-Work (PoW) and HotStuff (also used for …

Customers can now integrate smart contracts on Amazon Web Services’ Quantum Ledger Database, or QLDB, thanks to tech company Blockchain Technology Partners. Blockchain Technology Partners, or BTP, unveiled general availability for its DAML incorporation, accessible through its Sextant for DAML platform, allowing those working with Amazon’s QLDB to harness smart contracts on the platform, according to a Feb. 25 statement provided to Cointelegraph. Amazon’s QLDB is not the first to incorporate Sextant for DAML Prior to its Amazon QLDB launch, BTP’s Sextant for DAML boasted compatibility on Hyperledger Sawtooth, and AWS’ relational database service, Amazon Aurora. Amazon QLDB caters to …