Technology

Get ready to spend some bitcoin – and not just because of the great Black Friday deals.  This year, shoppers can spend or earn bitcoin on discounted deals from all over the world: the Bitcoin Black Friday event is back with over 300 merchants and nonprofits, more than 330 deals, and a chance to win

Newly discovered emails between Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, and the late Hal Finney deepen the mystery around the cryptocurrency’s origins.  The three emails come from Bitcoin’s earliest days, when its future was uncertain. They show how closely Satoshi collaborated with early supporters at the time of Bitcoin’s launch.  While anything written or coded by

Veteran open source Bitcoin developer John Newbery just launched Brink, an independent organization for funding Bitcoin’s open source developer community, a key component driving the global currency and making it work. Tuesday, Newbery and fellow Bitcoin Optech associate Mike Schmidt unveiled Brink, with prolific Bitcoin technical writer Dave Harding joining the board as independent director.

The Australian Border Force (ABF), the country’s customs and border protection agency, wants to simplify cross-border trade with Singapore using blockchain technology. In collaboration with Singapore Customs and the Singapore Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), the blockchain trial aims to reduce administration costs and increase trade efficiency. Specifically, it will test digital verification platforms across

The bitcoin-only hardware wallet Coldcard has released a beta firmware patch for a vulnerability that also affected a competitor hardware wallet earlier this year. Ben Ma, a security researcher who works for hardware wallet manufacturer Shift Crypto, discovered that the Coldcard hardware wallet has a flaw: An attacker could trick a Coldcard user into sending

Regulatory responses to private, “global” stablecoins like Libra need to take into account the potential of the technology in payments, according to economists working at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) In a new working paper published Tuesday, Raphael Auer and Jon Frost, as well as Melbourne Law School finance lawyer Douglas Arner, drew a

IDEX is betting three chains are better than one. The non-custodial cryptocurrency exchange, whose operations run on the Ethereum blockchain, announced Tuesday it plans to expand to the Binance Smart Chain and Polkadot networks. Hence, every holder of IDEX’s Ethereum tokens will get an equivalent number of IDEX tokens for each of the new chains. 

The biggest update in Ethereum’s history will begin its first phase on Dec. 1. Per a tweet by ETH 2.0 Researcher Justin Drake, Ethereum 2.0’s Beacon Chain’s launch has been set for Dec. 1 at 12:00 UTC. The backbone of Ethereum 2.0, the Beacon chain is an interim blockchain that will operate alongside the current

The smart contract required for triggering the first phase of Ethereum 2.0 has enough funds to begin activation of Ethereum’s most ambitious upgrade yet, which will radically shift Ethereum’s economic model, resource usage and governance. The Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract, which was released in early November, has accrued more than 540,000 ETH ($300 million) late

The smart contract that will trigger the first phase of Ethereum’s most ambitious upgrade yet has nearly accrued enough funds to activate. The Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract currently holds 385,440 ($231 million) of the requisite 524,288 ETH required to activate Ethereum 2.0’s beacon chain, the central nervous system of the completely rebooted network. This represents

Gnosis, one of Ethereum’s earliest ICOs, is spinning up a DAO that uses a novel mode of governance you’ve probably never heard of. The newly launched GnosisDAO will allow Gnosis users to vote on platform governance and development. Gnosis CEO Martin Köppelmann told CoinDesk the DAO’s voting proposals “can be really wide-reaching: product roadmap decisions,

Satoshi Nakamoto intended Bitcoin to be used for online payments. But it never caught on as a mainstream payments option. The main hurdle to widespread adoption of bitcoin-as-cash is its wild, and potentially lucrative, price changes. This roller coaster problem isn’t going to disappear. Which means the only way for bitcoin payments to ever go

Cryptocurrency investigation firm Chainalysis expects to raise $100 million venture capital at a $1 billion valuation as early as next week, the company told Forbes. The Series C is being led by VC newcomer Addition with participation expected from Accel, Benchmark and Ribbit, Forbes said. Those three firms have all invested in earlier Chainalysis rounds.

Nine months ago, in a Denver convention center, a booth sat empty. Littered with token stickers, the table was supposed to hold the physical representatives of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol bZx. It remained empty, however, as the team struggled to make sense of the digital forces twisting their young project.  bZx, as they would come

Helium is hard-capping production of the tokenized fuel that powers its decentralized wireless network. Under a newly passed improvement proposal, Helium miners will stop adding to the circulating supply of HNT tokens at 223 million, a figure they will reach sometime in 2070 once bi-annual “halvenings,” also new to the network, have reduced new HNT

Lightning Labs’ new liquidity marketplace, Lightning Pool, has seen more early-stage growth than its creators expected. And what’s more, a fair share of its volume is coming from individual Lightning users – not businesses. “It’s a big surprise! Very exciting,” Lightning Labs Business Development head Ryan Gentry told CoinDesk. “The primary users thus far have