Weekly news roundup: Monday February 11
Here’s a selection of interesting recent news from the crypto-space.
MIT Technology Review has published a story on Grin, “a strange new coin that runs on a technology called MimbleWimble, [and] has captured the blockchain world’s imagination.”
“MimbleWimble uses cryptographic techniques both to keep transactions private and to dramatically shrink the size of the blockchain… Grin actually wasn’t the first MimbleWimble coin to go live: another one, called Beam, launched January 3.”
See also our story “New MW-powered cryptocurrencies BEAM and GRIN could fly high.”
Stablehouse.io, a new venture created by XBTO International, XBTO Ventures and Phil Potter, formerly of Bitfinex and Tether, is announcing its intention to launch a clearinghouse for stablecoins that seeks to promote the next phase of the market’s development. Interim CEO Philippe Bekhaz said:
“The stablecoin market at the moment is inefficient and has various disparate stablecoins, with users needing to transact several times with different parties to exchange one stablecoin for another. Stablehouse will address this by serving as a centralized platform that gives issuers, holders and exchanges certainty over access and liquidity, creating enhanced confidence for investors, developers and merchants.”
Nature, probably the world’s most prestigious science journal, has published a story titled “Bitcoin for the biological literature,” emphasizing that scientific publishing is increasingly adopting the technology underlying cryptocurrencies. For example, ScienceMatters, an open-access publishing platform that posts peer-reviewed short papers, is developing a peer-review process based on blockchain technology.
In December, Opera announced that its Android mobile browser would come with an integrated cryptocurrency wallet, Now, Opera users in Denmark, Norway and Sweden are able to top up the balance of that wallet almost instantly, through a partnership between the browser maker and Swedish crypto exchange Safello, Breaker reports. Safello provides more information:
“This partnership is an important step in our strategy to drive wider adoption of cryptocurrencies… Opera, with its first blockchain-enabled browser for Android, is the ideal partner with whom we share the same vision. Our solution will secure all transactions on the Opera browser through the same rigorous regulatory requirements that built trust with our customers. Users’ identities will be verified securely and seamlessly with BankID and NemID in the Nordics.”
In related news, Opera is testing a new built-in VPN for its Android mobile browser.
Coin Center, a non-profit research and advocacy center focused public policy issues related to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, has published a new paper titled “The Case for Electronic Cash: Why Private Peer-to-Peer Payments are Essential to an Open Society.”
The paper emphasizes that anonymity can be put to both good uses and bad: “It’s how one uses that power that can be said to be good or bad, however, not the technology that lets one retain one’s privacy.”
“Indeed, not only is privacy-preserving technology like encryption and cryptocurrency neutral in character, in an increasingly surveilled and intermediated world, a case can be made that their use is overwhelmingly socially beneficial.”
Picture from Pixabay.
