Blockchain firm links Hamas’ Fundraising Efforts to a Coinbase Account

Andres Chavez
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Blockchain firm links Hamas’ Fundraising Efforts to a Coinbase Account

The world is a strange place in which unthinkable scenarios often take place. The fight against terrorism is taken very seriously in the planet and, more specifically, in the United States, so it seems far-fetched that a terrorist organization may be using an American-based digital currency exchange as a mean to raise funds.

However, the latest reports coming from the United States seem to link Hamas, a Palestinian organization known for its roots with military and political affairs, to the Coinbase crypto exchange in order to raise funds for its related activities. The US government has deemed Hamas as a terrorist group.

A blockchain analytics company based in Israel, which goes by the name of Whitestream, was the primary agent behind an investigation that resulted in various Bitcoin wallet addresses referred to on the terrorist group’s social media outlets and networks in public attempts to raise money via donations online.

Donating to Fund the “Resistance”

Hamas has made no secret about its endeavors, as it asks people to contribute to supporting what they call the “resistance.” In fact, a recent petition for BTC donations was issued last week, precisely on January 31st, via a Telegram channel administrated by one of Hamas’ spokesmen, Abu Obeida.

Israeli publication Globes informed that the wallets included an account in Coinbase, perhaps America’s most famous cryptocurrency exchange. The brokerage company declined to provide comments on the matter, but Whitestream is quoted by a famous specialized crypto news site as saying that the account in question kept receiving transactions two days after the issue was identified and leaked to the media.

Itsik Levy, the CEO of Whitestream, is quoted as saying that “based on shared inputs, we can tell that Hamas blockchain transactions were signed by addresses that are operating on Coinbase company wallets.”

Whitestream had previously spotted two other Bitcoin addresses that received donations for Hamas. If the most recent account is added to those two, the Palestinian organization has raised less than $4,000 worth of Bitcoin, a very modest sum.

An “Active” Campaign

“Hamas is struggling with getting funds from the Israeli government and Qatar. We’ve heard of other Islamic extremist organizations doing the same thing over the past few years…now Hamas tries the same thing. It’s still an active campaign. It just started,” according to Levy.

Whether or not we are talking about financing for Hamas’ terrorist activities through the Coinbase Bitcoin addresses remains to be seen, the American exchange doesn’t seem to be the only one of its kind related with the week’s activity.

According to Whitestream, the identified Coinbase account that is purportedly linked to Hamas could be sending BTC to Binance and CoinPayments accounts. The two platforms have not commented on the matter, either.

A report published last year by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Center on Sanctions and Illicit Finance stated that jihadists’ use of crypto assets is a “fringe” activity, and according to Levy, “only 2%” of the bitcoin transactions analyzed by Whitestream were actually linked to “terrorist or criminal activity.”

By Andres Chavez

Ripple Announces 10 More Partnerships with Universities for Its Blockchain Research Program

Andres Chavez
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Ripple Announces 10 More Partnerships with Universities for Its Blockchain Research Program

Ripple is a very famous name in the crypto world, being both a successful platform and the second ranked cryptocurrency by market cap. The Ripple protocol is an open source initiative that allows people to perform quick and cheap transactions, and the XRP token is known as the joker of the cryptocurrency world because each XRP represents the transfer of value within the Ripple ecosystem and is a mediator for other exchanges.

One of the things that has made Ripple so successful in the last few months despite a cruel market is its interest to keep investigating and contributing to the search of knowledge about the blockchain technology and its potential applications. On Thursday, February 7th, the company announced 10 new partnerships with universities for its blockchain research program.

The University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI)

Ripple, one of the planet’s most efficient and widely known payments infrastructure companies, stated that the University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI) has the intention of promoting the growth of the blockchain technology ecosystem on a global scale.

The 10 educational institutions that will enter Ripple’s blockchain research initiative are Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Morgan State, Kansas, Michigan and Northeastern universities in America, as well as the National University of Singapore and Brazil’s University of Sao Paulo.

The search for more partners at an international scale is nothing new for Ripple, as it formed a strategic alliance with the Institute for Fintech Research (THUIFR) at Tsinghua University in Beijing as recently as last month. According to Ripple, the project aims to provide students with opportunities in blockchain research.

Thanks to Ripple’s UBRI and its resources and infrastructure, the universities included in the program will promote research and development of the blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies, and digital payments; launching course materials, performing conferences, and handing away scholarships to students that want to build a career in those areas.

The University of Sao Paulo will receive money as a funding initiative to develop a blockchain innovation macro program. In the case of Georgetown and Duke, located in America, they will support “expanding curriculum and teaching, research and technical projects and collaboration across disciplines.”

29 Fruitful Alliances

With the ten new agreements announced this week, Ripple is now up to 29 partnerships with universities, colleges, and educational institutes worldwide, in an effort to develop the next group of blockchain and cryptocurrencies experts.

The project has been in Ripple’s agenda since mid 2018, and the firm has already provided a sizable investment of more than $50 million. The initial alliances were reached with 17 universities across the globe, with other two added months later.

 “In less than a year, our initial UBRI partners hit the ground running with the launch of new research projects, events, course offerings and more,” said Eric van Miltenburg, currently Ripple’s SVP of global operations, on Thursday, adding that “expanding the ecosystem to a more global, diversified network of UBRI partners will only continue to enrich these projects.”

By: Andres Chavez

Samsung and Opera Hold Enormous Potential for Promoting BTC Adoption through Wallets

Andres Chavez
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Samsung and Opera Hold Enormous Potential for Promoting BTC Adoption through Wallets

At the end of last year, it was reported that Opera would be releasing a “blockchain-ready” web browser that would have a built-in Ethereum wallet on Android, with the upgrade being present on the Google Play Store. The update was announced with Web 3 support included.

Now, this week, the widely known web browser has included the feature with which users will be able to acquire crypto assets in their Android devices. Opera had been announcing its intentions of experimenting with blockchain technology for the past three months.

And now, thanks to a strategic alliance with a Europe-based crypto exchange named Safello, people will be able to buy crypto form their Opera browser. Frank Schuil, currently serving as the CEO of the former praised the partnership.

“With Safello brokerage on the Opera mobile browser for Android, both new and experienced users can now easily transact cryptocurrencies in the most secure and fastest way possible. The functionality to purchase crypto is right at their fingertips.”

A Necessary Chain of Events

Opera announcements have the potential to encourage other tech companies to experiment with blockchain-related solutions, which would lead to more interest in crypto assets and higher levels of global adoption for Bitcoin and altcoins. Samsung, the Asian leading technology developer and equipment manufacturer, is said to be working on integrating native support for crypto assets and services.

South Korea’s biggest and most prominent company reportedly wants to integrate a crypto wallet, which could be led by Samsung Pay. The company, along with Opera, can fuel global Bitcoin adoption if the news turns out to be true.

The two firms represent large markets that can provide broad exposure to crypto-related products and services to mobile phone and browsers users. According to Charles Hamel, who currently works as Opera’s Product Lead for Crypto, “we think that the next important phase for crypto will come from usage and that for it to reach wider adoption, it has to be easy to buy and easy to use. We believe that the browser will be the entry point for these use cases.”

Bitcoin Investors Need Institutions to Get Involved

For investors and mainstream Bitcoin users, it is absolutely necessary that the society in general is familiarized with cryptocurrencies and everything they mean to the world’s financial landscape. They need recognized institutions, organizations, and even individuals to show a high level of involvement.

Regarding the attraction of institutional investors to the market, Dan Morehead (CEO of Pantera Capital) stated that ICE’s Bakkt, Fidelity, and ErisX could represent important developments on that front.

“Now we have firms like ICE’s Bakkt, Fidelity, or ErisX doing varying institutional custody and over the months, I think that will help bring institutions in. The one thing that is true though is institutions are like the rest of us. They’re pretty pro-cyclical and the big wave of institutional money will probably not start until the prices themselves start going up,” he observed.

By Andres Chavez

Bitcoin Transactions per Day Return to January 2018 Levels

Andres Chavez
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Bitcoin Transactions per Day Return to January 2018 Levels

When discussing the future of Bitcoin (BTC) and its price, there are several aspects to consider. Two of the most important indicators are its global adoption and a high number of transactions, which would be a clear sign that the cryptocurrency remains high among people’s priorities.

And despite Bitcoin’s inability to regain significant value in the last few months – at the moment of writing this piece, its price was $3,404.56, down 0.42% in the last 24 hours – the transaction volume of the world’s leading cryptocurrency by market cap has been increasing.

In fact, the daily Bitcoin transaction volume has reached its highest levels in over a year. The last time BTC was trading at this rate it was January 2018, a famous moment in the cryptocurrency’s history because it was when it reached its high of nearly $20,000, before everything went south.

Fundamental Improvements

The data was provided by transactionfee.info. The development represents an unequivocal indication of Bitcoin’s evolution in its fundamentals and ecosystem. Jameson Lopp, which is currently the chief technology officer at Casa (a Bitcoin personal key security system company) offered his thoughts about BTC’s fundamental performance, noting its continued and sustained improvement.

The specialist included several sources and statistical measures in his report, published in Medium, and said that Bitcoin grew in 2018. “A variety of improvements in block propagation have been implemented by Bitcoin Core over the past couple years and as nodes are upgrading, they appear to be having an effect. There’s also a new highly performant miner relay network.”

Lopp observed that “lower transaction demand, improved fee estimation algorithms, adoption of segregated witness (SegWit), and transaction batching have resulted in more efficient use of block space and less contention for this scarce resource.” SegWit, by design, reduces processing times and transaction fees.

2018 saw an increase from 10% to 40% in the percentage of Bitcoin transactions spending SegWit inputs. And, as a direct consequence of the enhanced SegWit adoption (at least according to Loop,) the average BTC transaction size peaked at 750 bytes in February 2018, while falling to the 450 neighborhood in the last quarter.

Back to Market Dominance

Another visible trend that took place in 2018 was Bitcoin’s return to dominance when it comes to the market. It went back to more than 50% after falling as low as 32.5%. “The number of reachable nodes didn’t fall much in comparison to the exchange rate —  my suspicion is that people who run these nodes are highly dedicated to Bitcoin and/or using them for economic purposes, thus they are unlikely to turn off the node due to exchange rate volatility,” Lopp analyzed.

Crypto expert Anthony Pompliano was among the first to observe, back in November 2018, that Bitcoin experienced improvement regarding its fundamentals, such as the number of transactions and the cost per transaction. The specialist focused on seven BTC’s fundamentals, and named the boost in the number of Bitcoin wallets and the increased amount of confirmed transactions per day as well.

By Andres Chavez

Mexican Town Hall Will Use Blockchain for Land Registration

Maria Rodríguez
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Mexican Town Hall Will Use Blockchain for Land Registration

The government is going to take advantage of this tourist region located in Quintana Roo, on te Mayan Riviera

The Tulum Town Hall, in Mexico, joined a subsidiary of the electronic commerce company Overstock. Both institutions signed a “memorandum of understanding” and their objective is to design a digital registry of local lands based on cryptoactives technology.

The Mayor of Tulum, Víctor Mas Tah, and the CEO of Medici Land Governance (MLG), Ali El Husseini, were the ones who signed the agreement. This company, which will work together with the municipality, is a subsidiary of the Overstock venture capital administrator, Medici Ventures. It will be in charge of developing the new registration system. This was announced by the U.S. corporation in a press release published this Monday, February 4th.

On this issue, Ali El Husseini said that “the adoption by Mexico of advanced technology in its land registry will increase the opportunities for people to strengthen their connections with the global economy”.

Part of the agreement is that Medici Land Governance and the Municipality of Tulum, in Quintana Roo, will develop a digital platform to collect property data about real estate in a defined area of ​​Tulum, land title certificates and related procedures.

After complying with these steps, the parties plan to create together a method to secure and automatically store the transactions and updates of the land administration, in order to safeguard the information, which would be always safe and available.

The collection of real estate property data will be done by the municipality’s staff and Medici Land. This information will be incorporated into a register based on blockchain, which will allow structuring any land administration system and issuing ownership certificates efficiently and massively.

According to the press release, when the project with the city of Tulum materializes, municipal officials will be able to benefit from a method to capture and record in an automated way the transactions made later and related to land ownership.

The startup, founded in 2018, has worked in partnerships with local governments in Zambia (Africa) and Rwanda (central Africa) to develop distributed land administration systems. Last December, this company signed an agreement with the authority of a town in Wyoming, United States, to develop a similar project. MLG has experience in the storage information sector, about land registration.

Tulum is a municipality in the Mexican State of Quintana Roo, located on the Caribbean coast of Yucatan, in the famous Mayan Riviera, and which has potential not only for tourists, but also for the land registration since it is in the middle of the hotel zone and national and international tourism.

Mayor Víctor Mas Tah declared that with the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding, “a new stage of territorial ordering for the digitalization of land ownership and related processes begins”.

In November 2018, it became known that Overstock, an online retail store with more than twenty years of operation, would focus its business on the cryptoactive sector. On January 24th, 2019, one of its subsidiaries, the crypto company that works with tZERO tokens, launched its security token through the secondary trading platform, PRO Securities.

This is how this American company took its steps towards the world of cryptocurrencies and the blockchain, to which the town of Tulum has just joined, as do other countries in the world.

By María Rodríguez

Zcash’s “Secret”: The Team Revealed How It Fixed a Potentially Catastrophic Bug

Andres Chavez
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Zcash’s “Secret”: The Team Revealed How It Fixed a Potentially Catastrophic Bug

Imagine a successful, widely known digital asset having a vulnerability in its system that would allow a hypothetical hacker to “produce” as many coins or tokens as he/she wants. Such a scenario has the potential to severely affect several sectors of the market, and that is what almost happened to Zcash last year.

The enterprise that manages the reigns of Zcash, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency, revealed this week that it had to fix a potentially catastrophic code bug in 2018 that could have been taken advantage of in order to “print” infinite tokens.

The company issued a report on Tuesday, February 5th in which it detailed the situation. As it turns out, Zcash’s cryptographer Ariel Gabizon found out about the “subtle” bug several months ago, in zk-SNARKS.

Zcash and zkSNARKS

zk-SNARKS is the cryptography implemented by Zcash with the objective of protecting balances and the identity of its user community. Thanks to zk-SNARKS, people cannot have access to the financial data of users.

Before announcing the threat to the masses, Zcash staffers and developing team decided to keep it to themselves and work tirelessly to find a solution. Thankfully, the group found a fix, which was added to the cryptocurrency’s large Sapling upgrade, executed five months ago in October 2018. In fact, Tuesday announcement marked the first time that Zcash has talked about the bug in public.

In the case the team had not been able to encounter a solution, the vulnerability carried significant risk. If exploited, a cybercriminal would have been able to print the Zcash coins he/she wanted.

The company, through its Marketing Director Josh Swihart, its Director of Product security Benjamin Winston, and its engineer Sean Bowe, said that “prior to its remediation, an attacker could have created fake Zcash without being detected. The counterfeiting vulnerability has been fully remediated in Zcash and no action is required by Zcash users.”

Minimal Risk

Because of zk-SNARKs’ nature as a privacy technology, it is not easy to determine with 100% accuracy whether the coins were actually counterfeited. The staff, however, does not think that Zcash was actually at risk because of several reasons, including “discovery of the vulnerability would have required a high level of technical and cryptographic sophistication that very few people possess.”

Even Edward Snowden praised Zcash about its approach to manage the potential bug: “a lot of people wonder why I like #Zcash despite the Founder’s Reward. Here’s a reason: that tax funds a quality team that catches and kills serious bugs in-house, before they get exploited,” he said via Twitter. “Some other projects learn about bugs like this only AFTER people have lost money.”

Zcash is, currently, the 21st criptocurrency by market cap. At the moment of this writing, Zcash is trading at $46.24, down 4.38% in the last 24 hours. It has a $269,707,838 market cap, and the trading volume in the last day was $141,477,309. There are 5, 833,131 ZEC in circulation right now.

By Andres Chavez

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