Weekly news roundup: Monday January 28
Here’s a selection of interesting recent news from the crypto-space.
Phil Chen, managing director at venture firm Presence Capital and decentralized chief officer at HTC, said blockchain technology could take some power away from big tech firms, CNBC reports:
“That’s the hope, that’s the thesis. At the end of the day today, the big corporates, they have big central servers that hold everybody’s data. I think what bitcoin and blockchain really allows … is empowering people to own their own keys.”
Bitcoin services provider Xapo is winding down activities at its Hong Kong base and transferring key operations to Switzerland, swissinfo.ch — the international service of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation — reports. Xapo president Ted Rogers said the move has been driven by Switzerland’s friendlier regulatory environment:
“Swiss regulators are smart, interested and sophisticated in dealing with the financial markets.”
Swiss private bank Falcon is beginning to accept direct transfers of selected cryptocurrencies. Private and institutional clients can directly transfer cryptocurrencies to and from segregated Falcon wallets, as well as convert them into fiat money. A Falcon press release says underlines that this new offering from Falcon makes blockchain assets fully bankable.
MIT researchers have developed a new secure cryptocurrency that reduces data users need to join the network and verify transactions by up to 99 percent, compared to today’s popular cryptocurrencies, which could open the way to more scalable blockchain networks.
In a paper titled “Vault: Fast Bootstrapping for Cryptocurrencies,” the MIT researchers introduce Vault, a cryptocurrency that lets users join the network by downloading only a fraction of the total transaction data.
Vault incorporates techniques that delete empty accounts that take up space, and enables verifications using only the most recent transaction data that are divided and shared across the network, minimizing an individual user’s data storage and processing requirements. Co-author Derek Leung, a graduate student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), says:
“Currently there are a lot of cryptocurrencies, but they’re hitting bottlenecks related to joining the system as a new user and to storage. The broad goal here is to enable cryptocurrencies to scale well for more and more users.”
The price of Bitcoin is going down again. Meanwhile, the price of TRON has increased by more than 134 percent since December 15, CCN reports. According to CCN, the recent efforts from the TRON foundation and Justin Sun to allocate a large amount of capital in financing decentralized applications (DApps) and developers have had a positive impact on the short-term price trend of TRON.
According to rumors reported by Asia Times, Iran is getting ready to launch state cryptocurrency to evade international sanctions. The “crypto-Rial” would initially be reserved for banks and institutional transactions, and then be followed by a cryptocurrency for mainstream use.
Picture from Pixabay.
