Yale University Ventures in the Crypto Universe; Invests in a-$400-Million ‘Paradigm’ Fund

Andres Chavez
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Yale University Ventures in the Crypto Universe; Invests in a-$400-Million ‘Paradigm’ Fund

The crypto fever is trespassing all kinds of borders and people are using blockchain-based solutions for numerous applications, including educational institutions. The latest reports indicate that the world-famous Yale University invested in a new $400 Million crypto-focused fund.

The Ivy League American University is presumed to be one of the primary investors that contributed to raising over $400 million for a macro project related to the cryptocurrency world, according to Bloomberg.

The ‘Paradigm’ Fund

Fred Ehrsam, who happens to be the co-founder of specialized site Coinbase, created the “Paradigm” fund. Among the collaborators are Charles Noyes, which also participated in the Pantera Capital crypto fund, and Matt Huang, an ex Sequoia Capital partner. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reported, at an earlier date, that Huang abandoned Sequoia in June to focus on establishing the Paradigm fund with Ehrsam.

According to the anonymous source cited by Bloomberg, the amount of money that Yale contributed to the Paradigm project is not yet public. Yale’s $30 billion endowment is among the largest in the country.

An astounding 60 percent of Yale’s assets for the 2019’s fiscal year is reserved for “alternative investments.” Among those are hedge funds, leveraged buyouts, and venture capital, Bloomberg reports.

The Paradigm fund intends to invest on early stages of several crypto-oriented projects, as well as coin exchanges and innovative blockchain platforms, according to the Bloomberg article. Historically, Yale has not shied away from investments: it has contributed to everything from Puerto Rican bonds to timber in New Hampshire. Now, the University founded in 1701 is taking an interest in cryptocurrencies.

Yale and its Growing Relationship with Cryptocurrencies

Yale is also known for its academic contributions in several fields. For example, this year, a group of economists from the institution produced a “comprehensive” analysis of the “risk-return tradeoff” of Bitcoin (BTC) and top altcoins, such as Ethereum (ETH) and Ripple (XRP), using historical performance data.

David Swensen, who acts as Yale’s Chief Investments Officer, has also invested for the university in Andreessen Horowitz’s $300 million crypto fund. That one closed in June, and the sources, once again, preferred to provide information under anonymity.

Yale’s endowment, which is the second largest among American higher education institutions (trailing only Harvard’s) has grown towards the $30 billion marks from an initial fund of £562 donated by its founder Elihu Yale in 1718

Yale has recently earned a reputation for browsing and performing unconventional investments – although, at this point, nothing seems out of the ordinary when it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrencies – with great success: the institution’s endowment has generated yearly returns of around 12.6 percent since the mid-’80s.

A Little Bit More About Yale

The Yale University is one of America’s most widely known private Ivy League research universities. It is located in the town of New Haven, Connecticut, and it has been functioning since 1701, is one of the older institutions of higher education in the US.

By Andrés Chávez

IBM Proposes Model to Improve the Efficiency in the Proof-of-Work System of Bitcoin

Andres Chavez
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0
IBM Proposes Model to Improve the Efficiency in the Proof-of-Work System of Bitcoin

Being the most prominent and widely spread cryptocurrency, Bitcoin does not have many issues dominating the market. It is the most valuable digital assets and, despite being far from the $20,000 it reached last December, Bitcoin remains as the most desirable investment in the industry. Each passing day, more and more sites and commercial establishments accept Bitcoin as a payment method.

However, it is also evident that Bitcoin has a scalability problem. Its network, that implements the Proof-of-Work (PoW) system, has a minimal amount of processed transactions per second. The average block creation time is 10 minutes, which limits the final throughput to nearly eight transactions per second.

The Bitcoin blockchain’s scalability pales in comparison with lots of other networks. For example, Ethereum can process an approximate of 15 transactions per second with recent announcements that the system will be scaled up to 500 transactions per second thanks to the implementation of the mass-transaction validator ZK-SNARK. Recently, an Australian blockchain performed 30,000 transactions per second in its latest test.

However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. This week, Bitcoin’s proof of work consensus system received great news from one of the most influential firms in the world. IBM Research, which is the tech company’s R&D branch, stated that it was found a way to reshape blockchain settings and architectures to see the so-called “sweet spot” to achieve energy efficiency, security, and scalability.

The Breakthrough, Explained

Basically, IBM is saying that Bitcoin has the potential to process significantly more than its current throughput. The investigation announced on Wednesday explained that applying the PoW system to the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain nodes would run inside the connected gadgets or devices.

The primary issue was that IoT devices could vary significantly in computational power and energy resources, unlike most of the utilized Proof-of-Work mining hardware for digital assets, like GPUs and ASICs, among others. That scenario complicated things since IoT can range from miniature-sized gadgets to Internet-powered vehicles.

Since some devices in an IoT network may not be capable of solving the complex PoW calculus, IBM found incentives to make the PoW system a more efficient one when it comes to energy resources.

IBM stated that if the model is going to work, IoT devices on the blockchain need to use resources optimally, as well as energy.

IBM investigators used a simulated environment, splitting nodes into groups of 250 to 1,000 and letting an algorithm choose which proportion of each “population” needs to engage into mining, which would depend on the power that each node implements and the security required. The explained approach gets results while maintaining satisfactory levels of energy consumption.

Dr. Emanuele Ragnoli told specialized site Coindesk that, up until now, we had seen blockchains as environments in which “flat” peer to peer systems have nodes that perform similar tasks. However, he highlights that it is not an ideal scenario if everybody does the same “type of job,” instead of proposing a layered ecosystem that promotes different tasks for peers according to their respective capabilities.

By: Andrés Chávez

ETH and XRP Are the Big Surgers of the Day; BTC Experiences Negligible Change

Andres Chavez
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0
ETH and XRP Are the Big Surgers of the Day; BTC Experiences Negligible Change

     The crypto market continues to behave in unpredictable ways driving investors and traders crazy amid all the news, value changes, peaks, and drops. However, one thing is clear, the total market capitalization is beginning to climb following weeks of downward trends, surging from around $192 billion to more than $200 billion at the time of this article.

The market outlook has Ethereum and Ripple as the biggest climbers. Both enjoyed significant price boosts, while the rest of the cryptocurrencies remain shaky, to say the least. Meanwhile, the world’s most prominent digital asset, Bitcoin, was trading at around $6,356 at the time of writing the present piece, which was a 0.65% increase of yesterday’s value. That change is negligible, but the real news was yesterday’s revival collapsed all the way to the $6,300 range on Monday, so it is yet to be seen if today’s variation is the beginning of a comeback by the crypto giant. Bitcoin lost 3.5% in September, so there is still ground to cover.

ETH and XRP Showed Substantial Gains

Among the market volatility and general instability, two major cryptocurrencies reported significant value gains over the last 24 hours. They are Ethereum (ETH) and Ripple (XRP). In fact, Ethereum has experienced quite the roller coaster in the last 24 hours. Yesterday, its price was below the $200 mark, precisely at $194. Today, it managed to climb all the way up to $212 in a matter of two hours. Right now, at press time, it was trading at $213, and holding steady on its gains. However, ETH is still reporting 33.4% monthly loses in spite of the 7% gain experienced today.

The top ascending altcoin on Tuesday’s crypto landscape was Ripple. While the $0.32 value may not seem significant, the daily improvements are sizable: XRP grew in cost by 18%. The weekly gains are at precisely 21.75% at the time of writing this article, but the monthly losses are still lurking around, at 10.7%.

If you are looking for possible reasons to justify Ripple’s rapid ascension, consider the recent news reported by its head of regulatory relations for Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, Sagar Sarbhai: the platform plans to launch a commercial application of its xRapid liquidity solution for banks, and they are expected to do it within the next month.

Other Performances Within the Market

The Stellar platform (XLM), which made news last week with its merger with Chain to create the Interstellar platform, reported significant gains in the last 24 hours, with an increase of 4.6 percent. It is now trading at $0.21.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) surged 1.7% to close the day at $440.60, while Cardano (ADA) went up 1.46% to trade at around $0.068. The rest of the top-20 digital tokens reported losses, with Tezos (XTZ) being among the most affected at -10.14%, trading at $1.47. IOTA (MIOTA) lost 3.6% percentage points in value, and the rest of the top altcoins went down by a maximum of 2%.

By Andrés Chávez

Tech Bureau’s Zaif Reports Devastating Hacking Attack; Almost $60 Million in Losses

Andres Chavez
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Tech Bureau’s Zaif Reports Devastating Hacking Attack; Almost $60 Million in Losses

     The Asian crypto-world was shocked this Wednesday when it was revealed that the exchange platform Zaif suffered a hacking attack that reported losses of 6.7 billion yen, or the equivalent of $59.67 million, according to Reuters. Zaif belongs to a Japanese startup, Tech Bureau Corp, and the company itself broke the news as soon as it happened. The hackers focused on Bitcoin assets, as well as 2 other cryptocurrencies.

After the attack, it was revealed that the Japanese startup in question had reached an agreement with JASDAQ-listed Fisco Ltd to get a 5 billion yen investment for the majority of ownership. The cybercrime lasted, according to the Tech Bureau Corp, two full hours on September 14. However, the process extended for the next few days, as the site noted servers issues on September 17 and confirmed the event on the 18th, the same day it let the authorities know.

After reviewing the damages done by the hackers, the Tech Bureau Corp announced that among the assets stolen were 2.2 billion yen belonging to the firm, and the rest of the funds, a sum nearing 4.5 billion yen, belonged to users of the platform. This is not the first time that Zaif has made global news because of system imperfections and issues. In February, the exchange conceded that a glitch let users trade yen for digital assets at a rate of 0 yen per coin. 16 users took advantage of the temporary site problem and acquired trillions of dollars worth of Bitcoin.

The Frightening Details

Tech Bureau operates Zaif, which is a cryptocurrency exchange site based in Japan. After detecting the server problems on September 17, Zaif decided to suspend deposits and withdrawals until further notice. The day after that, Zaif realized that the “server error” it had experienced for a couple of hours on September 17 was indeed a hack, reporting the crime to the Japanese financial regulator, the Financial Services Agency (FSA).

The damage done was substantial: the report read that the hackers had stolen a total of 5,966 bitcoins (BTC) in addition to some Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and MonaCoin (MONA,) which were the other two digital coins involved in the robbery. As part of Zaif’s agreements with Fisco, the latter will help the former cover the lost customer tokens by giving up to 5 billion yen, or the equivalent amount to $44.5 million. In exchange, Tech Bureau will dismiss the majority of its directors and auditors on top of Fisco becoming the majority owners.

While Zaif was nowhere near the top 10 or even top 20 of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the planet, it was prominent nonetheless, occupying the 101st spot in daily trading volume according to the site CoinMarketCap.

The Zaif disaster hasn’t been the only hacking attack related to cryptocurrency exchanges in 2018. Some of the most notable events have been the Bancor exchange hack (July,) the Bithumb exchange hack (June,) the Coinsecure theft (April,) and the Coinrail exchange hack (June.)

By Andrés Chávez

An American Company Will Build a 36 Megawatt Mining Farm in Morocco

Andres Chavez
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0
An American Company Will Build a 36 Megawatt Mining Farm in Morocco

     Morocco will be the host country of the next macro project designed to build a Bitcoin mining farm. The plan dictates that construction will start in January 2019, according to a Tuesday report from news site Ars Technica. Who is behind this giant project? Soluna, which is a product of the Brookstone Partners. the comapny plans to leverage Moroccan law to fulfill their dream of building a 36-megawatt farm in the nation-state.

The New York-based Bitcoin mining company intends to convince the Moroccan authorities, which have outlawed cryptocurrency payments from every platform, to let them start with the construction by offering to sell them a minimum of 20 percent of the produced electricity output.

A Power Purchasing Agreement

What the firm plans to do is called a Power Purchasing Agreement, and it will let the enterprise set the foundations in Morocco for a broader project that will transcend borders in the region in the form of expected future sales, according to the CEO John Belizaire. The executive told Ars Technica that the Moroccan government, by one of its laws, effectively allows PPA contracts for energy providers. He announced that the company would start with that (the construction of the farm in the African country) “and grow from there,” suggesting that Soluna wants to entertain agreements with other countries in the Saharan region.

A Wind Farm

The project itself is a wind park that, according to Soluna officials, could generate energy as cheap as China’s, which would make the whole Bitcoin mining process cleaner and greener than ever before. The farm’s area will be 150 square kilometers, and the expected power generation capacity over the next five years is 900 MW. The wind power will supply cheap electricity to a high-density computing center for Bitcoin mining and other cryptocurrencies. According to recent estimates, the Bitcoin network uses at least 2.55 GW.

Greener Solutions

Bitcoin mining allows people to amass fortunes with a major initial investment, and then maintenance of computing machines. The act has been criticized by many, saying that it consumes a whole lot of electricity in a world that badly needs a greener approach. By mining, the industry refers to the algorithmic process in which network participants agree that new Bitcoin transactions are valid. It generates a very high energy consumption. Miners compete to add sets of new transactions, called blocks, to the ledger. The process involves performing a complex calculation repeatedly until you guess a unique number that cryptographically links the new block to the previous one. It stores the data in such a way that it becomes tough and expensive to manipulate it since changing the data in a block also requires changing all the previous ones.

That is why electricity is the most significant expense for miners, which is the main reason why so many mining operations are based in China. In that country, it is possible to buy extremely cheap coal energy, as cheap as 0.02 € / kWh approximately.

Keeping all that in mind, Soluna is awaiting a positive response from local authorities that will let them sell more than 20% of the generated power. Belizaire hopes that regulations can adapt to newer, more modern times, and thus allowing the company to engage in conversations with other interested parties, always depending on the future generation capacity.

Since November of last year, Morocco has outlawed cryptocurrency payments. The move has been mimicked by other nations such as India and Iran, but the latter is said to be reconsidering the measure.

By Andrés Chávez

Bancor Will Launch its “Liquidity Protocol” on EOS for Faster and Fee-Free Transactions

Andres Chavez
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0
Bancor Will Launch its “Liquidity Protocol” on EOS for Faster and Fee-Free Transactions

     The crypto-world welcomed a crucial piece of news at the start of the present week: Bancor, a popular project as a decentralized application on Ethereum, is joining forces with the EOS blockchain. The resulting product will be BancorX, and with it, users will be allowed to trade between EOS-based tokens and Ethereum-based coins. As of now, the exact tokens in question haven’t been specified by Bancor or EOS. The former will provide the latter with the capability to trade Ethereum based tokens without depositing funds in an exchange.

The Reasons behind Bancor’s Decision

Bancor is expanding capabilities to quietly become one of the most promising cross-chain liquidity protocols. The project has already published its code for open-source smart contracts on the EOS blockchain to let people experiment. However, the exact date of BancorX’s launch on the live platform is not public yet.

Bancor officials stated that the decision to launch the protocol on EOS had to do with its speed, which is better and faster than that of the Ethereum blockchain, as a primary reason. Additionally, the no-fee setting had a role in the choice as well, as there will be no “gas” expenses to pay for Smart Contracts. The Bancor staffers that announced the deal also claimed that they loved EOS’ approach of diminishing front-running risk because the operations are not prioritized in exchange for offering to pay substantial fees.

Bancor: What is it?

The Bancor protocol is making noise for months now. It is full of promise, and it provides a platform that will let users determine the price of equal or different assets or currencies exchanged at a determinate moment.

The Bancor protocol is a useful dApp equipped to receive, send and administrate funds from several tokens, now further enhanced with the recent partnership with EOS. Bancor is known for charging no fees or commissions for cryptocurrency conversions. Also, there is no spread, and it has a predictable and manageable price slippage, helping people solve liquidity problems associated with our times.

All in all, Bancor is one of the simplest platforms to use, as it offers a more appropriate atmosphere for trading and exchanging digital assets, with a straightforward approach and design, and with the ability to support most ERC20 tokens.

EOS: a Leading Blockchain Protocol

One of the most famous and widely used platforms in the cryptocurrency exchange world is EOS’. It can be defined as a blockchain protocol, which is powered by its native digital token of the same name. It administrates a smart contract network and decentralized operating system that has the intention of deploying industrial-scale dApps by using a decentralized autonomous corporation model.

The platform is also known for eliminating transaction fees and for performing and allowing hundreds of thousands, or even millions of transactions per second, a significantly higher rate than other “competing” blockchain structures.

By Andrés Chávez

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