Weekly Overview: Crypto And Blockchain News
PwC Switzerland Partners With Chain Security
Smart contract auditing team ChainSecurity partnered with the Swiss branch of Big Four auditing firm PwC to enhance the services the global auditor provides.
In an email sent to Cointelegraph, a PwC spokesperson explained that no acquisition took place and multiple ChainSecurity teams joined the firm.
According to a press release published by the firm on Jan. 5, PwC hopes that, with ChainSecurity’s team, the firm will become “the world’s leader in smart contract auditing.”
FTX Launched Bitcoin Option Trading
Cryptocurrency derivatives exchange FTX has launched Bitcoin (BTC) options trading on Jan. 11.
FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried announced in a tweet on 11th January, that options were listed on the trading platform. Furthermore, later the same day he also claimed that options trading volume on the exchange reached $1 million in about 2 hours.
Student Wins Satoshi Nakamoto Scholarship
Bitcoin SV (BSV)-promoting Bitcoin Association has awarded a Ph.D. student at Cambridge University with its Satoshi Nakamoto Scholarship, designed to support the development of blockchain applications.
Per a Jan. 9 press release, Robin Kohze, a second-year human genomics Ph.D. student at Cambridge University, became the first to receive the scholarship following a series of blockchain competitions within the Bitcoin SV Hackathon last fall. With his project dubbed, Hive, Kohze took second place. The scholarship is set to allow further development of Hive into a fully operational platform.
Block.One Released Major EOS.io Blockchain Software Update
Blockchain software development firm Block.One released EOS.io 2.0, the software underlying the EOS blockchain.
In the release announcement published on Twitter on Jan. 10, Block.One claimed that the update makes the blockchain “faster, simpler, and even more secure.”
The official blog post on new software explains that it includes a purpose-built WebAssembly (WASM) engine on which the EOS smart contracts run. According to its official website, WASM is an instruction format designed for deployment on the web and servers.
This change is expected to improve the performance of smart contract execution, given that it is supposedly up to 16 times faster than the engine used in the previous version.
