Islamic finance and Sharia advisory firm Amanie Advisors have established Ether’s (ETH) compliance with Islamic religious law. Ether receives Sharia endorsement In a blog post published on their website, Amanie Advisors announced that the firm has collaborated with the Ethereum Foundation to establish the platform’s compliance with Sharia religious law. As a result of the collaboration, the company released a paper with the main purpose of illustrating Ethereum’s compliance with Islamic morals, which concedes a Sharia endorsement of the project and the coin. In the white paper, the advisory firm says that — as with other cryptocurrencies — there are …

Earlier this month, Amazon announced plans to hire blockchain experts for its advertising division. But how can the use of blockchain technology possibly resolve the pain points in the advertising industry? For the digital advertising industry, with its revenues reaching over $28.4 billion in the first quarter of 2019 in the United States alone, you’d think standard business tools like a shared database would be required — but you’d be wrong. In reality, the advertising industry uses very outdated, manual, time-consuming processes when it comes to selling, payment, verification and other critical functions. New tools for digital advertisers It is …

Binance Research, the research arm of the major crypto platform Binance, has reported that no bank account will be necessary to use China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC). Loose coupling and anonymity Binance Research shared its findings on Aug 28. According to the report, China’s CBDC will be transferable without a bank due to its loosely coupled design. As explained by the researchers, a loosely coupled design refers to a system of components that do not all depend on each other. The upshot is that users will reportedly be able to transfer the CBDC to one another without needing a …

San Francisco-based crypto lending and borrowing firm Dharma has announced the start of a closed beta for a new version of its platform. Upcoming changes and short-term timeline Dharma announced its new platform iteration in an official blog post on Aug. 29. According to the announcement, Dharma has partnered with the Ethereum-based money market Compound and will reportedly use its protocol as infrastructure for the new platform. Additionally, Dharma will now make its smart contracts open source prior to production, per the announcement. Dharma V2 is currently in closed beta, which means that it is only accessible to existing Dharma …

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a primary governmental regulator, has settled charges with digital assets company Bitqyck Inc. and its founders. Smart contracts and crypto mining? The SEC announced the development in a press release on Aug. 29. According to the announcement, Bruce Bise and Sam Mendez­ are the founders of Bitqyck — a company that provided security offerings for digital assets Bitqy and BitqyM in Dallas, Texas. The company claimed that Bitqy tokens gave investors fractional shares of company stock via a smart contract. Additionally, Bitqyck said that BitqyM tokens would give holders interest in a …

A blockchain platform and an oracle service provider have unveiled plans to leverage each other’s products — improving their respective offerings. High Performance Blockchain (HPB) says it is the world’s first blockchain company to blend dedicated hardware with software. Meanwhile, the Chainlink network specializes in middleware solutions that ensure on-chain smart contracts have access to in-demand, off-chain resources. Presently, HPB claims everyday organizations struggle to ensure that data between on-chain and off-chain environments is exchanged securely and reliably. The platform says this can be addressed through the use of oracles — third-party digital agents that retrieve, format and exchange data …

Bitcoin Core developer Pieter Wuille has introduced a new Bitcoin (BTC) smart contract programming language called Miniscript. Wuille, a creator of major Bitcoin network upgrade SegWit, announced the Miniscript project website on the mailing list message for Bitcoin developers on Aug. 19. Miniscript was developed and implemented by Wuille, Andrew Poelstra and Sanket Kanjalkar at Canadian blockchain tech firm Blockstream Research. Wuille claimed that the project took the developers about a year, and it has now reached the stage where it needs to get more attention. Mini-Bitcoin script Miniscript is a language for writing a subset of Bitcoin scripts in …

United States-based investment banking company Bank of America (BofA) has filed a patent for a digital currency wallet with multiple layers of asset access. The proposed wallet would accept different passwords for different amounts of funds requested. The United States Patent and Trademark Office published BofA’s application on Aug. 15. Per the filing, this technology would comprise a computing platform with a digital wallet interface. The platform would be configured to operate within a peer-to-peer network for blockchain management — which could potentially be public or private. The application points to Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) as examples of digital …

Austin-based Antelope Water Management has announced that it is going to start using a blockchain platform developed by Data Gumbo. The announcement appeared in a press release on Aug. 15. Antelope Water Management is a company that develops sustainability-focused water services for oil and gas extractions, while Data Gumbo provides blockchain services for the oil and gas industry. According to the release, Data Gumbo’s blockchain network, GumboNet, will provide Antelope’s customers and vendors with data transparency, automatic contract executions and payments. Antelope CEO Dustin Brownlow remarked: “Data Gumbo is a game changer enabling us to provide customers, vendors and regulators …

Ubiquitous tech behemoth Google cloud wing is entering into another partnership with a blockchain platform, Cypherium. Cypherium announced the new partnership in a press release shared with Cointelegraph on Aug. 13. Cypherium describes its product, Cypherium Enterprise, as an enterprise-focused blockchain platform with a focus on scalability and decentralization. As a result of this partnership, Google Cloud customers will have access to Cypherium’s blockchain solutions, the announcement explains. As per the press release, Cypherium purports to offer an enterprise blockchain that supports thousands of transactions per second, in addition to confidentiality and blockchain interoperability. Cypherium CEO Sky Guo remarked: “We’re …

A decentralized public network that aims to ensure the internet belongs to its users is taking Facebook to task — and alleges “it’s been their internet for too long” in reference to the social media giant. Hedera, “the only public decentralized network that utilizes the hashgraph consensus algorithm,” has recently paid for a full-page ad in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal that said: “Thank you Facebook Libra. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” Mance Harmon, the company’s CEO and co-founder, said he shared his vision for Hedera with Facebook’s David Marcus in February 2018 — setting …

The growing popularity of cryptocurrency has led to a revolution in the digital currency industry. Enterprises that were of noncrypto origin now have or plan to have their own crypto product. The 10 years of cryptocurrency’s existence has led to an unprecedented ease of transactions. It has also brought transparency into the e-commerce world. This article discusses 10 of the biggest enterprises in the world, without a cryptocurrency background, that have already created or are in the process of investing resources to develop a digital currency they can call their own. 1. Facebook Facebook is reportedly completing efforts to release …