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Weekly bitcoin news roundup

Weekly News Roundup – 28 October 2016

October 29, 2016 / / 1 Comment

Today is Bitmain’s third anniversary and celebrations are underway at the Bitmain headquarters in Beijing while I start to round up some noteworthy bitcoin news of the past two weeks.

Bitcoin price crosses $700

Bitcoin price continued to flaunt its mojo since our previous bitcoin news’ roundup  and crossed the $700 mark by the time of publishing this (29 October). This is the highest it has risen since 21 June 2016.
The strongest factor in this rise seems to be the devaluation of the Chinese Yuan. The graph below from a Bloomberg article shows an inverse relationship between the price of Chinese Yuan and that of Bitcoin.

bitcoin news roundup - Yuan Bitcoin Inverse relationship

Chinese currency’s weakness is boosting bitcoin demand.                                                Image courtesy: Bloomberg

MGT Capital Investments partners with Bitmain

On Wednesday, news that MGT Capital Investments, Inc. (OTC: MGTI) has signed a Letter of Intent (LOI) to form a joint venture with Bitmain became public with MGTI’s press release.
The proposed joint venture is expected to result in the development of a Bitcoin mining pool that will include advanced user interface as well as superior network protection and security maintained by MGT’s proprietary cybersecurity technologies. In addition, the companies plan to form a partnership to offer businesses and consumers affordably priced cloud mining contracts.

Bitmain’s BTC.com organizes the biggest conference for owners and operators of “mining farms” 

On 22 October, Bitmain’s BTC.com held the first-ever conference for “mining farm” owners and operators in Chengdu, China. Kevin Pan of BTC.com introduced some unique aspects of its BTC.com mining pool while Chris Zhu of BTC.com explained how miners protect the bitcoin network. Further description of the event is on BTC.com’s blog post.

bitcoin news roundup - BTC.com's Kevin Pan at the miners' conference in Chengdu, China

Kevin Pan of BTC.com at the miners’ conference in Chengdu

Hillary’s campaign team calls Bitcoin a “libertarian Ayn Rand schtick”

An email exchange published by WikiLeaks in which the Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta commented on bitcoin saw the media’s spotlight on 18 October. The email thread was started by Stan Stalnaker, founding director and chief strategy officer of the digital currency “Ven”, to propose Ven for use by Hillary’s campaign after meeting with Podesta at a Hillary fundraiser in London.
Podesta forwarded the email to campaign tech aide Teddy Goff with an explanation: “I don’t send all the crazy ideas I hear about at fundraisers your way, but this seems interesting and legit. Essentially digital currency with a green angle as opposed to bitcoin’s libertarian Ayn Rand schtick. Would you get some members of your team to meet with Stan when he’s in NYC later this month to see if it’s worth a real conversation?”

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Weekly bitcoin news roundup

Weekly News Roundup – 14 October 2016

October 15, 2016 / / 0 Comments

The past seven days have been officially and nationally working days, with Saturday the 8th and Sunday the 9th labelled as “Special Working Days” by the Chinese government. Today marks the end of this marathon work week. We have more reasons to celebrate because the bitcoin price seems to have got its mojo back. And this brings us to the first news of our weekly bitcoin news roundup.

Bitcoin price gets its mojo back

After long showing resistance around $610, the bitcoin price started pushing higher on Monday. On Monday (UTC time), it leaped from $616 to $632 and has been hovering around $636 since then. It touched $639.86 on Wednesday (UTC) and $636.62 within the past 24 hours of writing this.
Speculations about the cause of this price rally abound, as usual. The most notable causes I believe are the depreciation of the Chinese Yuan to its lowest in six years and the fact that Monday is also the most common pay-day in China, a country where bitcoin has maximum appeal as an investment.

Japan to drop sales tax on Bitcoin purchase

Earlier this year, Coindesk reported that Japanese Liberal Democratic Party member Tsukasa Akimoto put the question “Can’t you consider not imposing consumption tax on bitcoins in line with the international trend?” to Finance Minister Tarō Asō.
On Wednesday the news emerged that Japan is set to drop the 8% sales tax levied on bitcoin purchases. This will lower the price for buyers and reduce the tax-related administrative work for bitcoin exchanges in Japan.

Blockchain.info hit by a DNS attack

The bitcoin explorer Blockchain.info was unavailable for several hours on Wednesday because of what later turned out to be a DNS attack according to a post on the company’s blog.
According to the company’s report, the attacker changed their DNS servers and blockchain.info itself was not directly attacked.

Scaling bitcoin

The last weekend saw the third conference of Scaling Bitcoin in Milan, Italy. The previous two were in Hong Kong and Montreal last year.
The conference saw a very high number and caliber of attendees from the bitcoin industry worldwide. This number was most likely more than any other bitcoin conference. The main points of discussion were Segwit, lightning network, block size and sidechains. Recordings of the talks and even the transcripts can be downloaded from the conference’s official website.

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Weekly bitcoin news roundup

Weekly News Roundup – 7 October 2016

October 8, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Our second weekly bitcoin news roundup comes as the 7-day China National Day holidays come to an end here at the Bitmain headquarters in Beijing. Some notable news from the past two weeks:

Indian bitcoin start-up gets record funding

Bangalore-based startup Unocoin raised $1.5 million in a Pre Series-A round, setting a national record for any digital currency venture in India. The funding round was lead by Mumbai-based Blume Ventures. Other investors included Mumbai Angels, ah! Ventures as well as prominent international investors such as Digital Currency Group, Boost VC, Bnk to the Future, Bitcoin Capital and FundersClub.

According to Unocoin the funds will be used for product development, team expansion and geographical expansion.  Read more…

French company tests Lightning Network routing

French company ACINQ released a press release on 26 September announcing that they had successfully tested a modified version of the ‘Flare’ routing solution that was described in a white paper in July by BitFury Group in collaboration with the Lightning Network.

ACINQ tested their modified version of the Flare routing algorithm on 2,500 Amazon Web Services (AWS) nodes.  After their tests, ACINQ discovered that the proposed Flare algorithm was able to find a payment route in about .5 seconds with a probability of 80 percent.

Blockchain startup Factom raises $4.2m in funding

Austin-based Factom raised $4.2 million in funding from a slew of global investors, led by billionaire investor Tim Draper, to build a series of new blockchain products.  Other investors in the funding round included BnkToTheFuture and Chinese conglomerate Wangxiang Group’s new blockchain investment fund Fenbushi Capital.

Factom’s blockchain and related products have previously attracted partnerships with the government of Honduras as well as the government of China.

US Congress forms a blockchain caucus

On 26 September, Democrat congressman Jared Polis, a longtime bitcoin supporter, and Republican congressman Mick Mulvaney formed the Congressional Blockchain Caucus to educate other legislators about the blockchain technology.

This is certainly a good development for bitcoin but I  recommend you read this article in The Atlantic to learn more on the role of Caucuses – there seems to be a Caucus (officially congressional member organizations) for various hobbies or general interests.

Interestingly, the Atlantic article ended with “One never knows what group will form next — but hey, Rep. Jared Polis, there’s still no Congressional Bitcoin Caucus.”  That has just changed now.

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Weekly News Roundup – 23 September 2016

September 23, 2016 / / 0 Comments

On Fridays, beginning today, we will be rounding up some breaking news of the past week from the bitcoin/cryptocurrency space. This past week we saw:

the Devcon2 in Shanghai

Several heavyweights from the global cryptocurrency space descended on Shanghai for the Devcon2.  Here are some informative news articles intended to give you some of the experience.

At Ethereum Mega-Event, the ‘Church of Vitalik’ Sobers Up , How Zcash ‘Project Alchemy’ connects with Ethereum , Ethereum Mist and how to build apps that are truly unstoppable , Ethereum Devs Applaud the Audience at Devcon’s Closing

a US federal judge rule that Bitcoin is a currency

Anthony Murgio, of Coin.mx, who was indicted on alleged money laundering charges in July of last year, had sought to dismiss two of the charges against him in part by arguing that bitcoins don’t count as “funds” in the context of US law. This was rejected by the judge Alison Nathan, who wrote in her ruling that: “Bitcoins are funds within the plain meaning of that term. Bitcoins can be accepted as a payment for goods and services or bought directly from an exchange with a bank account. They therefore function as pecuniary resources and are used as a medium of exchange and a means of payment.”  Read more…

Bitcoin.com’s new mining pool mine its first block

Bitcoin.com’s new mining pool, which uses the Bitcoin Unlimited protocol, mined its first block. Bitcoin Unlimited is an alternative protocol that removes transaction block size limits from the protocol level and adds it to the transport level. This means those running the software can choose the size they like. Read more…

BTC.COM’s new mining pool make it to the list of global top ten poolsBitcoin Mining Pool Distribution 23 September 2016 BTC.com

The new open-source pool by BTC.com a place on the list of the top ten mining pools. According to pool distribution statistics from BTC.COM’s free block explorer and statistics website, BTC.COM’s new pool, at time of writing, accounted for 2.9% of the bitcoin network’s hashrate. Read more…

Gemini conduct Bitcoin’s first-ever daily auction on an exchange

The Winklevoss twins’  bitcoin exchange held the first-ever daily auction for Bitcoin on their digital currency exchange Gemini Trust Co. Read more… 

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btccom launches new mining pool

I accessed this website from within China so it was automatically redirected to the China server cluster. For users accessing the new pool website from outside China, the hashrate displayed may be significantly lower than it actually is. This is a bug the BTC.COM team is currently working on fixing.

BTC.com Launches New Open-source Mining Pool with Zero Mining Fee!

September 13, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Bitmain’s BTC.com, the free bitcoin block explorer, analytics tool and bitcoin wallet, has launched an open-source bitcoin mining pool and is charging no mining fee until 2017.

With the launch of this open-source mining pool, the BTC.com team hopes to set new technical standards for mining pools and remove barriers that limit the efficiency or ease of mining pools.

To ensure stability and efficiency, the BTC.com mining pool has been tested for upto 180,000 miners (or workers) by using software simulators that replicate the load of real workers. If each worker is assumed to have the hashrate of an Antminer S9, that would make the total hashrate of this simulation more than that of the entire bitcoin network.

The BTC.com pool has many firsts for any mining pool:

  1. A “PoolWatcher” function to “listen” to other mining pools for newfound blocks and starts mining at the next height after a block has been found on any pool. This reduces the number of orphaned blocks and increases the productivity of the pool.
  2. A “BtcAgent” software that allows mining farm owners or miners with multiple workers to view every worker in their LAN on the mining pool. This software can be downloaded from GitHub, like the rest of the BTC.com mining pool source code.
  3. Users can see the real-time stats on the pool immediately after connecting their worker. This eliminates the long wait to see the stats of your new worker on the mining pool.
  4. Payouts are calculated almost instantly.

To reduce latency of newly mined blocks and increase robustness, the BTC.com mining pool has independent server clusters in China and USA with more clusters planned for Europe and North America.

btccom launches new mining pool

I accessed this website from within China so it was automatically redirected to the China server cluster. For users accessing the new pool website from outside China, the hashrate shown will be significantly lower.

The BTC.com mining pool has a full-feature mobile app available for download from App Store as well as Google Play store. This app also allows users to manage their miners by creating groups, deleting inactive miners and sorting their miners.

Besides zero mining fee until 2017, BTC.com is also offering a 1% subsidy to every new user within first 3 months of its launch, provided the user maintains his/her hashrate for at least one month.

The BTC.com pool will offer rewards based on pay-per-share (PPS) and, after 31 December 2016, charge a fee of 1.5%, among the lowest in the industry.

Bitmain hopes that the open-source BTC.COM mining pool will set new benchmarks in terms of stability, efficiency and service for all mining pools and, by helping other developers around the world to develop mining pools using BTC.COM’s source code, further promote decentralization of the bitcoin mining network.

The pool website is pool.btc.com and the source code is available on GitHub at: https://github.com/btccom/btcpool

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Blockchain Education Network to Host Global Bitcoin Airdrop

September 2, 2016 / / 0 Comments

BTC.com organize bitcoin airdrop

This September, blockchain hubs across North America will be giving out bitcoin to begin the next school year. Over a dozen regions including New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston in the United States and Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa, in Canada, are preparing their events. The giveaway, known as a Bitcoin Airdrop, has become a yearly tradition on university campuses.

The bits are to be given to students who come out to their local blockchain club’s first meeting. Students will also be introduced to concepts about bitcoin and the blockchain through their peers and a demonstration of a wallet creation and transfer.

History of the Airdrop

The first airdrop was hosted in 2014 by the MIT Bitcoin Club, after the club raised $500,000 worth of bitcoin to give to each incoming freshman. The event was then replicated in 2015 in Montreal by the McGill Cryptocurrency Club during their school’s frosh week, with donations given to the club. The Blockchain Education Network is now expanding the initiative throughout their network of regional hubs.

Why an Airdrop?

An airdrop allows people who would otherwise never have heard about bitcoin to try out using their first bits with their friends in a setting where their questions can be answered. Even if a student downloads a wallet and sells the bitcoin, they discover how easily it can be exchanged for fiat currency and would be more open to receiving bitcoin as payment at a future time.

Focus on Education

The Blockchain Education Network (BEN) believes that the blockchain revolution must happen through education. Most people are still unfamiliar with what digital currencies and the blockchain are, though almost everyone is curious when they first hear about it and want to learn more.

Bitcoin and blockchains are technologies with broad socio-economic impacts, which means that different parts of the world will have a different perspectives on it. BEN organizes as a swarm, a decentralized organizational model, to ensure that the education presented at each meeting is relatable to the region.

A Crucial Grassroots Movement for Students

BEN is comprised primarily of students aged 18-25 and the group believes that it is especially important for this demographic to be able to experiment with these technologies. The world is quickly moving into a sharing economy where people can operate remotely and companies have access to a global talent pool. Students will all enter the workforce after graduating and must be familiar with new technology.

Each year, the leadership from a university club graduates and must be replaced by the incoming class of students. Doing an airdrop at the beginning of each school year ensures a strong interest in blockchain technology and many new students joining the blockchain community in every region that participates.

In addition to the airdrop, BEN has an entire Fall 2016 initiative to bring new students into the blockchain ecosystem including a Blockchain Olympics event in October and a Blockchain Startup Gauntlet in November. BEN also hosts and promotes hackathons for students with a variety of skill sets, and assists students who are interested in attending bitcoin and blockchain conferences.

Future Implications

This initiative has become a tradition that can scale as wide as its reach. 500 students receiving bitcoin this September may not change the world; however, each year showing a new group of motivated university students how this technology works may cause a ripple effect of education that reaches farther than our expectations.

In our view, the “blockchain revolution” isn’t so far fetched. This is a technology which better maps to our worldviews after having grown up with the internet. It has taken 25 years for the internet to move from creation to our pockets. Through this historical lens, we see any current shortcomings of blockchain as an opportunity for our generation to solve.

Written by Michael Gord for the Bitcoin Magazine | Original article: https://bitcoinmag….

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antminer r4 silent bitcoin miner

Bitmain Launches Antminer R4, the Most Silent Multi-terahash Bitcoin Miner, for Home Use

August 26, 2016 / / 2 Comments

Some people hang photos of their family on their office walls. Others, might place trophies, diplomas or that huge fish they caught during their last fishing trip. Us, we’re Bitcoin miners. We finally have a miner that belongs on our office desk.

We are launching at 23:00 (GMT+8) on Monday (29 August) the world’s most silent multi-terahash bitcoin miner and a silent 2600W PSU specially designed for high-performance mining.

The Antminer R4 uses the world’s most power-efficient 16nm BM1387 ASIC chip for bitcoin mining. It can deliver a hashrate of 8.6TH/s with a power efficiency of 0.1J/GH and a noise level less than 50dB. At an ambient temperature of 35°C, the R4’s noise level is 52dB.

The Antminer R4 has been designed with great care to ensure the least possible sound with the maximum hashrate. It replaces the traditional miner fan with a centrifugal fan inspired by the fan of a silent split air conditioner. The speed of this unique fan is automatically controlled to ensure that it never produces more sound than is absolutely necessary. The slim design of the Antminer R4 allows it to be conveniently placed in a book rack or computer table at home.

APW5 power supply unit (PSU) for bitcoin miners

The APW5 power supply

The APW5 power supply is compatible with the 220V as well as the 110V mains power supply in North America. On full load, it has a power factor greater than 0.95. With a 220V supply it can deliver an output of 2600W. It comes with seven pairs of 6-pin PCI-e connectors but can easily be fitted with upto 20 PCI-e connectors. It is built for high-power performance and low noise. Like that of the R4, the APW5’s fan is automatically controlled so it only produces as much sound as is absolutely necessary.

For home users who wish to utilize R4’s exceptional noise level with the optimum performance, we highly recommends that they use it with Bitmain’s APW5 power supply.

With the release of these products, Bitmain hopes to bring bitcoin mining back to homes and continue decentralizing the bitcoin mining network.

 

Learn more about the Antminer R4 here.

You can download the e-brochure of the APW5 power supply from here.

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Department of Homeland Security Awards Blockchain Tech Development Grants for Identity Management and Privacy Protection

August 22, 2016 / / 0 Comments

In May, Bitcoin Magazine reported that both the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and NATO have requested proposals for the development of military-related apps built on blockchain technology. In particular, DARPA wants to leverage blockchain technology to create a secure messaging service and NATO is interested in applications of blockchain technology to military logistics, procurement and finance, with a catch-all described as “other applications of interest to the military.” Previously, the U.S. Air Force worked with contractors to develop a Bitcoin payment gateway.

Now, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) has awarded $1.3 million in funding to 13 small businesses for the development of new cyber security technology. Four projects will use distributed ledger technology to develop new solutions for identity management and privacy protection.

“A technology such as the blockchain, if it can be validated to be able to support the appropriate level of security and privacy, has potential applicability to multiple information sharing use cases within the homeland security enterprise,” said DHS S&T Program Manager Anil John, as reported by FCW.

The program is managed by the Cyber Security Division (CSD), established in 2011 within S&T’s Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA). The CSD develops and delivers new technologies, tools and techniques to enable the DHS to defend the U.S. against cyberattacks. Its mission includes technology transfer as well as coordination among domestic and international research partners.

The four firms below were awarded about $100,000 each in preliminary funding through the DHS S&T Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program and will be eligible for further funding depending on the results produced. The DHS seems especially interested in research results that, besides enhancing homeland security, show potential for commercial exploitation.

Digital Bazaar, a developer of technology and services for internet payments, is developing a Linked Data ledger format and architecture to demonstrate how to publish identity credentials.

Respect Network Corporation, a data network provider that enables customers and companies to safely share sensitive private data over trusted private connections, is developing a decentralized registry and discovery service to integrate with the public blockchain.

Narf Industries, an information security company focused on reverse engineering, vulnerability research and tool development, is developing an identity management solution built on a permission-less blockchain, with a focus on confidentiality (with selective information disclosure), integrity, availability, non- DHS repudiation, provenance and pseudo-anonymity.

Celerity Government Solutions (doing business as Xcelerate Solutions), a provider of security, IT and management consulting services, is researching blockchain solutions to enable users to establish and maintain trusted identity transactions with public and private organizations.

In June, the S&T awarded a $199,000 contract to Factom to study possible blockchain-based advancements for the security of digital identities for the Internet of Things (IoT) — the upcoming connection and convergence of mobile devices, information technology networks, connected sensors and devices.

The project, titled “Blockchain Software to Prove Integrity of Captured Data From Border Devices,” will create an identity log that captures the identification of a device, who manufactured it, lists of available updates, known security issues and granted authorities while adding the dimension of time for added security. The goal is to limit would-be hackers’ abilities to corrupt the past records for a device, making it more difficult to spoof. It’s interesting to note that the NATO request for proposal, mentioned above, also included an IoT section, which underlines the synergy between IoT and blockchain technologies for military applications.

“IoT devices are embedded within our daily lives — from the vehicle we drive to devices we wear — it’s critical to safeguard these devices from adversaries,” said DHS Under Secretary for Science and Technology, Dr. Reginald Brothers. “S&T is excited to engage our nation’s innovators, helping us to develop novel solutions for the Homeland Security Enterprise.”

Melissa Ho, managing director, S&T’s Silicon Valley Innovation Program, added that collaborating with the many companies that are already developing commercial solutions that can be reused to enhance homeland security is in the best interest of the DHS.

The growing interest of military agencies in distributed ledger technology and in particular, its potential for distributed, resilient and tamper-proof identity systems, is one more signal that blockchain technology is becoming mature and ready for real-world application and could bring more mainstream credibility and funding to the blockchain sector.

Written by Giulio Prisco for the Bitcoin Magazine | Original article: https://bitcoinmagazine…

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World Economic Forum Examines How Blockchain Can Reshape Financial Services

August 18, 2016 / / 0 Comments

On August 11, 2016, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released a 300-page report entitled “The future of financial infrastructure: An ambitious look at how blockchain can reshape financial services,” exploring how the financial sector “could overcome current-state pain points through distributed ledger technology (DLT).”

The WEF has been one of the most vociferous advocates for the potential of the blockchain technology. Bitcoin Magazine reported that in 2015 the WEF predicted that blockchain technology was one of the 21 changes in technological transformations and that the tipping point for its adoption would be in 2025.

A year later, World Economic Forum repeated that “virtual currencies and their underlying technologies can provide faster and cheaper financial services and can become a powerful tool for deepening financial inclusion in the developing world.”

In this latest report, the WEF concluded that blockchain technology could have impressive ramifications but would need the collaboration of government and technological experts to succeed.

It took a year for the World Economic Forum (WEF) to research how blockchain technology could help nine financial sectors, which included global payment and foreign trading. More than 200 innovators, subject matter experts and executives from prominent institutions, such as JPMorgan Chase, Visa and MasterCard, contributed their opinions. The results was assembled in this latest report. These are some ifs most significant conclusions:

Blockchain helps by being transparent and effective

“Distributed ledger technology (blockchain) has the potential to drive simplicity and efficiency by establishing new financial services infrastructure and processes” (p.19).

The blockchain ledger can be proven enormously useful to banks and financial institutions by providing them with an unprecedented layer of transparency and trust. The operational transparency of DLT will cut down, if not eliminate, the number of disputes, minimize frauds and ensure that obligations and settlements are met. The ledger could also give companies a more secure, effective way of moving money and tracking transactions. Regulators could employ real-time monitoring of transactions, while operations could better source liquidity of assets and move money between accounts.

Blockchain merges with other transformative technologies

“Distributed ledger technology will form the foundation of next generation financial services infrastructure in conjunction with other existing and emerging technologies” (p.20)

Over the last 50 years, a number of emerging technologies have merged to transform the financial services industry of the future. These include biometrics, cloud computing, cognitive computing, quantum analytics, predictive analytics and robotics. Distributed ledger technology is one of these but the WEF cautions that blockchain should be seen as “part of the toolbox” rather than a panacea. Each industry, too, would use DLT in its own ways and for its own means, so for instance, the trading sector will likely use the ledger for real-time tracking and efficacy while payers that deal with global payments will use DLT for, among other reasons, preventing friction.

Blockchain is revolutionary

“Similar to technological advances in the past, new financial services infrastructure will transform and question traditional orthodoxies in today’s business models” (p.24)

Blockchain upends all aspects of the traditional financial services sector from standard accounting habits to lending practices. Blockchain provides its own distributed, transparent record-keeping, leverages real-time trust among market participants and balances the information flow between lenders and borrowers. It also boosts dispute resolution since it provides regulators and regulated entities with a common transparent ledger. Finally, DLT reduces the need for intermediaries because of its shared and trusted environment.

Blockchain needs collaboration to succeed

“The most impactful distributed ledger technology applications will require deep collaboration between incumbents, innovators and regulators, adding complexity and delaying implementation” (p.23)

The World Economic Forum cautions that “updating financial infrastructure through DLT will require significant time and investment.” The three imperatives are: Resolving security issues, aligning competing interests and imposing a legal, regulatory and governance framework. This sounds easier than stated since divergent company interests are involved. If, and once achieved, this would provide DLT with a standardized system and superior efficacy that would boost the financial success of all nine sectors.

Looking ahead

To date, more than 24 countries and 90 corporations use blockchain technology with many more expressing interest. The WEF notes that large banks around the world, including more than 90 central banks, have developed blockchain groups that hail its potential impact and study how to harness its technology. In fact, the report predicted that a full 80% of these banks could launch their own blockchains by 2017. Blockchain technology has “captured the imagination and wallets of the financial services ecosystem” but the WEF concluded that DLT has to resolve critical issues moving forward. These include: How to develop a roadmap to achieve market collaboration and standardized regulation, how to structure a regulated tax framework and how to implement a cost-benefit analysis to determine the financial viability of distributed ledger technology.

Article written by Leah Zitter for the Bitcoin Magazine | Original article: https://bitcoinmagazine….

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Simplex Office-Bitmain, Israel

Bitmain Invests in Simplex

February 7, 2016 / / 0 Comments

The startup is hoping to bring bitcoin purchasing into the mainstream by adding credit card payment options.

Israeli bitcoin payment company Simplex has closed a $7 million Series A financing round with the participation of angel investors and companies in the bitcoin ecosystem, such as Bitmain and Cumberland.

Founded by serial entrepreneur CEO Nimrod Lehavi and two PayPal veterans, Erez Shapira and Netanel Kabala, the company has raised $8.4 million to date, including the most recent financing round. Simplex says it has already processed over $3.5 million in transactions since going live in beta a year ago and now plans a full launch.

The firm is hoping to bring bitcoin purchasing into the mainstream through an API that makes it easy and risk-free for exchanges, brokers and wallets to add a credit card payment option on their checkout pages and process consumer purchases.

Simplex offers an alternative to the most common method of payment for bitcoin purchases – wire transfers to exchanges, which can take up to three days and entail KYC requirements by banks, including providing explanations for purchases as well as copies of IDs.

Lehavi said, “Banks often place additional restrictions on which countries Bitcoin exchange customers can send wire transfers to. For example, it may be difficult for the average US resident to use a wire transfer to buy bitcoins from countries outside of the US like Slovenia, Hong Kong or China. This clearly creates very high friction and makes mainstream adoption of bitcoin far from easy.”

He added, “With Simplex, transactions are convenient, carry less restrictions, and occur almost instantaneously. Bitcoin buyers can use Simplex’s checkout page on Bitcoin exchanges, broker websites, and wallet applications, then proceed with their purchases, as they would on any e-commerce site.”

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news – www.globes-online.com – on February 7, 2016 | Original Article: http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-bitcoin-payment-co-simplex-raises-7m-1001101223

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