Alibaba Is NOT Launching Its Own Cryptocurrency or Mining Platform

In the last couple of days, online news platforms have been rife with updates of Alibaba, the Chinese trading giant, having launched a P2P Node platform that allegedly was to be used for cryptocurrency mining operations.

The story quickly picked up and started trending in various parts of the world, most likely because Alibaba is one of the top e-commerce sites in the world.

One more thing that contributed to this story being so prominent was the fact that China has been practicing very strict behavior towards any entity that associates with cryptocurrency, and Alibaba, being one of the biggest companies to operate from China, was essentially going against the government in such a bold manner.

However, the rumors fell flat when Alibaba officials, no doubt after having seen the global news stories, issued an official statement through Weibo, which described that the company would not launch a cryptocurrency or cryptocurrency mining operations.

That quickly dispelled the rumors and the excitement that had run through the world at seeing that a conglomerate like Alibaba was taking a stance to work for – and not against – cryptocurrency within China.

The rumor

It is true that the rumor was more exciting because it had been so conflicting in nature as compared to Alibaba’s previous approach to cryptocurrency.

Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder and executive chairman, had previously stated regarding cryptocurrencies that he knows very little about them.  He had further mentioned that he was confused on cryptocurrency operations.

He continued to elaborate that he had his reservations on the cryptocurrency model, explaining that even if the concept of cryptocurrencies somehow works in the future, the international rules and regulations which apply to regular trade and financing transactions will have to be changed entirely.

Add china’s stance to cryptocurrencies to this mix, and you have a “no.”

The aforementioned statement from Jack Ma is as clear as it goes, but if you add China’s recent reactions to it, then it is evident that a corporate entity such as Alibaba would rather not have bad blood between itself and the government only because it wants to start operations with something that the company’s highest official does not believe in.

While the cryptocurrency industry initially flourished from China, the country started taking stern measures against the industry since last year. It began with the banning of initial coin offerings (ICOs) within the country and followed up with strict actions against cryptocurrency exchanges, eventually banning them as well.

The steps above not just throttled but stopped the cryptocurrency trading operations within the country, leaving the local community with minor alternate options to trade and remain connected with cryptocurrencies.

Then, very recently, it was reported that the government is now planning to block access to cryptocurrency trading websites and mobile apps to eradicate cryptocurrency operations. It was also mentioned that the government would clamp down on any cryptocurrency payment platforms, in addition to making efforts to curb the remaining cryptocurrency mining operations within the territory further.

Alibaba will not join the cryptocurrency world anytime soon

Judging from the situation, it does not seem that Alibaba will be going with any cryptocurrency operations anytime shortly. While the rumor had been thrilling, maybe it is time for everyone to start focusing on corporations that actually do value cryptocurrencies – and with that, GMO from Japan comes to mind, that actually did launch its mining operations last year.

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Bitcoin’s Value Will Increase Again, Says BitPay Official

Bitcoin has recently seen a dip in its value of such a magnitude that has not been seen since the hack of Mt. Gox, but one Bitpay official believes it can recover.

The cryptocurrency that had been on a bullish run the past few months has dropped by half the value as compared to last month, where it had been trading at more than $19,000 for a few days; whereas, it recorded a value of $9,000 only a day ago.

This downward journey of Bitcoin has caused most people related to the cryptocurrency industry to be agitated, but some people from the community still believe in Bitcoin’s power to bounce back and resume its pace of improvement once more.

Once such name is Sonny Singh, the chief commercial officer at BitPay.

Singh believes that the current panic is an overreaction

Speaking to Bloomberg, Singh stated that the cryptocurrency world is prone to see overreaction from everyone whenever there is any significant movement in the market, regardless of whether it is positive or not.

“Every time there’s good news or bad news, the market tends to overreact.” Singh said while speaking to Bloomberg. “And now we are seeing an overreaction of the downward side.”

He further mentioned the recent news about South Korean officials discussing a ban on cryptocurrencies, but was quick to point out that these authorities, including China, might not want to stop cryptocurrency trading altogether and instead only regulate it. He explained that it would be good for the industry.

“So there’s talks about Asian regulators trying to ban some crypto exchanges in [South] Korea, China’s already been stopped for Bitcoin trading for a while, and now [South] Korea’s in focus,” Singh said. “But again, I think the regulators don’t want to ban it. They just want to regulate it more and make sure it’s all being done in a legal way which is actually good for the industry.”

In response to a question about BitPay’s performance in the past month, Singh explained that they have not noticed any drop in volume for their business as compared to December 2016, which was the best month for their company.

Sharing his point of view on Bitcoin’s future, Singh explained that this was the first time in a year that the value has seen a drop of such magnitude. He agreed that the recent decline is noticeable but responded by elaborating on how “next week it might be back up again.”

He was not one to shy away from Bitcoin’s volatile behavior and presented that to back his claim. “Bitcoin predominantly goes up and down, it’s quite volatile, right?” He said.

He also mentioned that while this would be the first instance of such a nature for new buyers, for veterans of Bitcoin trading, this is quite normal to witness.

Cory Johnson from Bloomberg also pointed out how this value is around the same figure from just a month ago where everyone was saying that Bitcoin is in a good place. He stated that it is still the same Bitcoin with the same value as of last month.

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Bitplay Club: An Online Blockchain-Based Lottery

The blockchain industry has come a long way from only being associated with cryptocurrencies. It has evolved to a point where it is being used by businesses, non-profit organizations, medical institutions, and even in otherwise unconventional settings such as online gambling.

One such name that has been making the rounds with the unconventional side of blockchain is Bitplay Club.

The online lottery that ensures fair play!

An online blockchain based lottery, Bitplay Club aims to utilize blockchain technology to hold transparent, honest and fair lotteries for its players. By the usage of distributed ledger technology (DLT), the data management for entries and the process of drawing winning numbers gets to be tamper-proof, and the Bitplay Club team aims to use this fact to have more and more people join in the games.

While being technologically advanced regarding transparency and fair play, the lottery itself is very much similar to the classic method where players are required to guess the winning numbers. If their guess is correct and if their numbers match with the numbers drawn at the end of the lottery, then the jackpot they receive is no less than 4 Bitcoins (as of now).

Bitplay Club was launched on December 8, 2017, and at press time, has so far drawn 43 lotteries.

Describing the drawing process

The lottery by Bitplay Club is provably fair, which means that the process which it uses has been verified for fair play to all users.

Describing the lottery further, it uses an open source algorithm so that anyone who wants to take a look at the drawing numbers can do so to ensure transparency. The algorithm uses specific data, hashes, from random Bitcoin blocks and processes it to draw the numbers. This randomization of the process ensures that no one can influence it for an uncalled for advantage.

Anyone can play

To ensure that more and more users could participate, Bitplay Club has a very nominal fee for each entry, which is 0.0001 BTC that converts to around $1. Players are allowed to purchase and submit additional entries and set of numbers upon their discretion.

The process to start playing is simple as well. Once players have chosen their ticket numbers, they can move forward with the checkout process to process their payment by depositing Bitcoin to their Bitplay Club wallet.

The company also offers a “System Game” to its users, where they can select a few base numbers and then have the system generate possible combinations of those numbers. This particular play usually generates multiple tickets, which the users can then pay through Bitcoin as per the normal purchase process.

The company is developing further lotteries

In addition to its daily lottery which is garnering significant response so far, Bitplay Club is reportedly developing more games in order to facilitate every type of player.

The company aims to establish itself as one of the industry leaders through its innovative approach with blockchain technology. Since it has only been a month, it has a long way to go, but seeing such platforms flourish and be met with success is something that the cryptocurrency and blockchain community hopes to see so that there are more chances of innovative projects getting the exposure that they deserve.

Bitplay Club is not available to the residents of U. S. and Canada.

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BrainBlocks For RaiBlocks – A Checkout Solution

In the midst of the current scalability and transaction fee issues that are faced by Bitcoin – which might also loom over Ethereum in the long run – what if there was a solution proposed of a blockchain that has no scalability issues, no mining requirements, and offers transactions without a fee?

You would not call it impossible. You would call it RaiBlocks.

A truly innovative cryptocurrency

Built from scratch, RaiBlocks started gaining traction last year. The blockchain based platform goes one step further than developing upon its older counterparts. Instead of having one blockchain, it gives each account its own blockchain, an architecture termed as “block-lattice.”  This way,  it works ensures that transactions are performed almost instantaneously.

Learning from the high power consumption and dependability issues that are faced by the likes of Bitcoin, RaiBlocks also eradicated mining by performing manual mining through captcha during its distribution cycle. Once all the available supply was mined, two-thirds of it was burnt to prevent future speculation in its value.

The platform also offers transaction processing with no fees. The platform cites the protocol’s lightweight mechanism as the reason behind this achievement.

RaiBlocks also uses a delegated proof of stake (dPoS) mechanism. This does not only contribute towards timely transaction processing but also prevents any potential attacks since no attacker would spoil that much capital to gain over 50 percent of the available supply only to harm it in the end.

The project was created by Colin LeMahieu, with the aim of developing a cryptocurrency that could truly be used for everyday transactions and does not repeat the issues faced by the current digital coins.

While it seemed idealistic at first, the project has been very well received by its users, some of which are taking initiatives of their own to enhance this platform’s outreach by developing plugins for the everyday user.

 The latest to join them is BrainBlocks

Daniel Brain, a lead engineer for PayPal checkout, was incredibly impressed by RaiBlocks once he got the chance to learn more about it. He was so impressed that he went ahead in his own time and created a user-friendly plugin with Jill Robinson so people could integrate RaiBlocks payments to their sites’ Checkout page.

The plugin is mainly focused on WooCommerce for now, but Brain has since shared its code on a BrainBlocks website that he created specifically for this purpose. With simple API integration, site owners can integrate the code into their own platforms easily.

As per Brain, what caught his attention for RaiBlocks was the fact that it was not just built on top of an existing blockchain code and added its own elements to it, but that it was built from scratch and was truly a one of a kind solution.

Brain is not the only one that thinks this way, as several members of the RaiBlocks community are extremely confident of its success. So far, the project has been attracting an increasing amount of users while being listed on exchanges such as Kucoin and MERCATOX.

RaiBlocks is a very promising project and so far has been able to deliver on what it promised. However, it remains to be seen if it maintains the same level of efficacy once it starts attracting more users and sees a higher number of transactions on a daily basis.

For the sake of innovation, we do hope that RaiBlocks gets to be a successful venture and inspire others to think out of the box as well.

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Ledger Will Now Provide Support for Wallet-To-Wallet Transfers

Ledger, the famous hardware wallet, will now provide support for wallet-to-wallet transfers.

The feature is being facilitated by Radar Relay, a decentralized exchange platform.

Ledger is known for creating state-of-the-art hardware wallets that provide its customers with the highest level of security functionalities so users can store their cryptocurrency on it without having to worry about its safekeeping.

The company’s wallets have been so popular that they recorded sales of over 1 million units last year.

Radar Relay, on the other hand, is built upon the 0x protocol. It is a relayer service, which means that while it provides exchange technology, it does not actually perform the trade of cryptocurrencies itself.

What it does is do, is,  host an off-chain order book to facilitate cryptocurrency exchanges. When the orders are completed and executed through the exchange, they are settled on the blockchain through smart contracts.

Rader Relay is also a member of the Modular Trade Network. It assures its users that since the Radar Relay network never holds any funds and all transaction orders are executed through smart contracts on the 0x protocol, there is no risk of loss of funds through the platform.

Together, Ledger and Radar Relay aim to make cryptocurrency storage and management a smoother process, and that brings them to this new functionality in the Ledger hardware wallets.

How it works

By using the new feature, owners of Ledger wallets can transfer their Ethereum or any other ERC-20 based token to another Ledger wallet through a simple set of steps, cutting the processing time and making the procedure easy for its users.

Before this, users had to withdraw their cryptocurrency from the wallet to transfer it to an exchange platform first, from where they could then utilize their tokens.

However, this feature now eliminates the need for those additional measures.

According to a short tutorial shared by Radar Relay, all that Ledger users have to do to take advantage of this functionality is to plug their device to a computer, from where they can use the Ethereum Application and Radar Relay wallet to transfer their required amount of digital tokens to their desired Ledger user.

This is the first step of its kind and cements Ledger’s reputation as the leading hardware wallets provider. Therefore, it is no surprise that the cryptocurrency community is praising the announcement and the functionality itself due to how it opens doors to an array of possibilities for day to day management of cryptocurrencies.

A good year for Ledger

Apart from selling an impressive number of units last year, the company also recently ran a successful Series B round of funding, which raised around $75 million.

The company plans to utilize these funds towards expansion plans and for further research and development towards security and other subjects that are pertinent to the industry.

With these updates, Ledger will be one to watch this year. It could very well emerge as one of the tech giants of the cryptocurrency industry.

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Ledger Raises $75 Million In Another Funding Round

If you are a cryptocurrency user, then you must have, at the very least, heard of Ledger, the hardware cryptocurrency wallet that has been around for a while. The wallet is so revered among the cryptocurrency industry that the company is now renowned in the cryptocurrency world as the manufacturer of one of the securest hardware wallets.

The company has been growing and has shown that there is demand, and due to this, Ledger easily raised $75 million in its Series B funding round. The funding round was led by Draper Esprit, a UK based venture capital funding firm.

Additional funding came from FirstMark Capital, Cathay Innovation, and Korelya Capital.

 Background on Ledger

Since Ledger’s launch in 2014, the company has seen immense growth due to the way cryptocurrency was adopted by more and more people over the years. Started by a team of eight members, Ledger now has more than 80 employees in its locations in Paris, Vierzon and San Francisco.

While it continued to grow gradually, its most notable year was 2017, in which the company led the Series A round of funding and raised $7 million. It also saw a whopping increase in its sales, selling more than one million units of its hardware wallets.

To put these statistics in perspective, Ledger had sold only 30,000 units in 2016.

This brings us to Ledger’s plans for the future.

The company’s plans for the raised funds

Before 2017, no one could have seen the unprecedented rise of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies within the year. The cryptocurrency phenomenon and the excitement surrounding it had been so profound that it not only increased the value of these cryptocurrencies, but also of any assets and technologies associated with them.

In Ledger’s case, that demand increased the need for cryptocurrency wallets by cryptocurrency holders,  who, by no means wanted to lose their precious digital assets to a hacking attempt.

Phones and computers are prone to getting hacked, while Ledger’s specialized wallets boast the ultimate security hardware and software in order to ensure that the cryptocurrency held within it, stays safe. This is what set Ledger hardware wallets as a must have product for anyone who was concerned about the safety of their cryptocurrency during 2017, and it is the same case now.

That is why, while the profitable company was able to complete almost all of its orders by selling those one million hardware wallets last year, it struggled to keep up with the increasing demand due to the surprising amount of orders. At the moment, the latest delivery date that it provides for its most popular hardware wallet is March 2018.

Therefore, to resolve these issues and to ensure that it could fulfill orders in a timely manner, Ledger will be using these funds to clear the backlog of orders and deliver as many units as possible while also ensuring that they are of the same quality that the industry has come to expect from a company of its stature.

The funds will also be utilized towards further research and development of security solutions as well as executing the company’s plans for expansion, as per Ledger’s CEO Eric Larcheveque.

“These funds will be used to keep investing significantly in R&D while scaling our operations and deploying our teams globally.” Larcheveque conveyed in a statement. “I am delighted to bring on board Draper Esprit and a truly global group of investors who will support the company as it grows rapidly.”

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The App That Pays You for Exercising, Sweatcoin, Has Raised About Six Million

After topping the charts in the App Store and making rounds through international news publications, Sweatcoin, the app that pays people for exercising, announced that it has successfully raised over $5.7 million in funding.

The announcement came after the app started gaining significant traction and finally went viral, topping the App Store chat and remaining in the iTunes’ top 5 apps of all types afterward.

At press time, the app is listed at number 4 of the top 5 apps available from iTunes.

The company was founded by four partners, Oleg Fomenko, Anton Derlyatka, Danil Perushev and Egor Khmelev.

How does Sweatcoin work

The app pays its users in digital coins, dubbed as Sweatcoins, in return for daily steps that the users have taken.

The Sweatcoins can then be redeemed over the app’s website for various products and services such as sneakers, healthy snacks, and books.

However, various users just value the psychological reward that comes with receiving the Sweatcoin after they have put in physical effort to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

The app has been a success since it started gaining popularity by getting featured in numerous publications such as Forbes and Telegraph. It was also featured on news channels ranging from CNBC to Fox News.

Gaining momentum from these mentions that began from 2016, Sweatcoin has been trending as the top health and fitness app in the App Store since September 2017.

The app currently holds more than 2.2 million active users that utilized the app in this week itself.

So it uses a coin system, does it operate on a blockchain?

 It does not operate on a blockchain, and the Sweatcoin does not act as a cryptocurrency due to this reason. However, one of the co-founders for the app, Oleg Fomenko, expressed the company’s plans to develop these features for Sweatcoin so that it could have the potential to grow as a blockchain platform with its cryptocurrency.

For now, the company is focusing on meeting the rapidly increasing demand for the app and the work that it causes for Sweatcoin’s current 8-person team. The company aims to expand their operations so that Sweatcoin can continue on its path to be an app that is as successful as other innovative ventures such as Snapchat – which continued being a global phenomenon and is still known for its “filters” and “stories”, features that most of the other chat apps rolled out later after seeing their adaptability by the public.

It will not be a surprise if you start seeing “clones” of Sweatcoin which might be trying to capitalize on the original team’s hard work and immense efforts.

The clones may have improvements, or they may be exactly like Sweatcoin, for now, Sweatcoin seems to be a unique player in the field, and it would be interesting to see how it affects fitness routines in the lives of its users.

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Banco Santander Stops Then Restarts Bitcoin Transactions

Banks have slowly been coming around and changing their minds on the cryptocurrency market as of late, this is due to a variety of reasons, but one can point primarily to demand. One of these banks is a division of Santander based in Portugal, the bank had an issue as of late with Bitcoin transactions and was in the process of declining or actively preventing such transactions. This, of course, much to the confusion of many who were banking with the bank. They wondered why it was happening suddenly and seemingly, without any cause.

Change of Heart

El Banco Santander Totta was initially placing barriers to the processing of these transactions because they assessed that operators who facilitated the exchange of digital currency were in were possibly in violation of specific laws and thus, not operating in the realm of the regulated. The bank specifically assessed that these digital asset exchanges were engaging in providing a space for transactions in financial assets that were not yet regulated.

Retaliation

Many of their customers expressed concerns about these happenings and the bank paid attention and has given in to their customers, the bank has started to let these transactions pass.

The financial institution prevented transactions from passing that occurred form cryptocurrency exchanges like that of Coinbase, an exchange based in New York, and Bitstamp, an exchange that is based in the country of Luxembourg. Blocking transactions from widely known exchanges were certain to cause frustration among many, yet, the bank did so anyway.

The situation seemed out of the blue because Coinbase and Bitstamp have conducted all due diligence to meet the criteria set forth by the respective bodies of government to operate legally and without issue.

The exchanges are classified as virtual asset organizations and have passed through rigorous checks before being permitted to operate.

There were, of course, a slight decrease in accounts at the Portuguese bank because this event occurred, an event that would not only be a hassle for some but one that could have lost their client’s specific percentages of returns on their potential investments. A few clients have gone to other banks, and a few have requested that their local agencies for the protection of their rights as consumers, step in and look into the matter further.

The governmental institution that is in charge of protecting the rights of consumers did step in and commented that there was a legal foundation for the act of preventing these digital asset-based transactions.

Stepping back and Cleaning Up

The bank, for its part, has been in a clean up phase due to the backlash and has notified consumers via their local press publications that they are not in the process of preventing virtual currency based transactions and will not be having any stringent measures against consumers that are conducting transactions in the space.

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