Blockchain and crypto world is full of innovations, assumptions and sometimes wildly wrong predictions. If you’ve missed the crypto news of this week, this post provides a comprehensive look at the stories that made headlines. A lot has happened in the cryptocurrency and blockchain world. Here is a quick round-up of crypto news you may have missed:
Tether’s Noble Bank In Trouble?
Tether’s Noble Bank In Trouble?
Noble Bank International, a full-reserve bank providing real-time post-trade services to OTC markets including FX and cryptocurrencies is on the verge of insolvency. The Puerto Rico-based bank is said to be struggling to survive because of the backlash in the cryptocurrency markets. The cryptocurrency Tether (USDT) utilizes Noble Bank for its dollar backing. It has been reported that the bank is running dry and it may wind up its operations. It is still unclear that what will be the impact of this on Tether and its customers.
The bank, with a large chunk of assets coming from Tether’s U.S. dollars, is said to have reached out to at least one large holder of the “stablecoin” for getting funds, but its proposal was rejected.
Ripple xRapid Goes Live
Ripple xRapid Goes Live
Ripple xRapid, a cross border payments product that minimizes liquidity costs have been released by Ripple and it is now commercially available. The announcement was made on Monday at Ripple’s annual two-day conference, Swell by CEO Brad Garlinghouse.
After months of development, xRapid is one of Ripple’s most rising products. Ripple xRapid will provide service and product that makes cross-border payments more efficient in terms of both cost and speed. It is commercially available and moving into production with various clients such as MercuryFX, Cuallix, and Catalyst Corporate Federal Credit Union. xRapid removes the demand for a pre-capitalized Nostro account when performing a cross-border payment. It creates liquidity from XRP on exchanges all over the world. Due to this, cross-border transactions happen in minutes and at a lower cost compared to traditional solutions.
Crypto Crime Wave: Multiple Arrests Rock the Crypto Industry
Crypto Crime Wave: Multiple Arrests Rock the Crypto Industry
Criminals value privacy, anonymity, and money, not necessarily in that order, and (un)fortunately cryptocurrencies can offer all of those to varying degrees. The anonymity of these transactions has made the pioneering industry a very tempting opportunity for many criminal organizations, utilizing these little nuggets of digital gold as an opportunity for kidnapping, money laundering, and other illegal activity.
Russian security agents managed to nab a group of nuclear engineers at a top-secret nuclear warhead facility who tried to use one of the country’s most powerful supercomputers to mine Bitcoin (BTC) in February. The engineers tried to use one of the superpower’s most powerful supercomputer — a 1 petaflop giant with raw computational capacity for 1,000 trillion calculations per second — to mine Bitcoin. But things didn’t go as planned; as soon as the engineers tried to bring the system online, the security department was alerted and engineers were apprehended.
IBM Wins Patent For Blockchain Network Security System
IBM Wins Patent
IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk has won a patent for blockchain based network security system. The patent was awarded on Tuesday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). It was first filed in September 2017. According to the secured event monitoring leveraging blockchain patent, a computer program product for a monitor security process is given. It includes monitors in a chain configuration by configuring a network address of a primary monitor to a backup monitor.
The patent highlights that by using a network of monitors connected to a blockchain platform can log events on the network. Due to this, the potential intrusions can also be monitored and detected. Hackers may try to hide signs of their activity on one monitor but multiple backups of that data will help ensure that such events are still logged.
Prysmatic Labs Released Ethereum 2.0 Prysm Demo v0.0.0
Prysmatic Labs Released Ethereum 2.0 Prysm Demo v0.0.0
Prysmatic Labs, a team of blockchain engineers have released Ethereum 2.0 Prysm demo v0.0.0. The team announced the release of the first demo version of their Ethereum 2.0 Shasper [Sharding plus Casper] project, Prysm. This version 0.0.0 has a basic beacon-chain+validator demo which can perform various tasks.
The team is currently focusing on various other things alongside the rest of the client implementation teams. The developers also want to work more on randomness generation and signature aggregation on the beacon chain as well as validator rotation. According to them, this is phase 0–1 of the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap because sharding state execution will not come until phase 1 and 2.
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