JPMorgan Chase continues to develop Ethereum-based Blockchain Quorum with London-based startup Aztec. Privacy should be improved. A second generation of zero-knowledge proofs in the AZTEC protocol should make this possible.

The largest investment bank in the world, JPMorgan, and its CEO Jamie Dimon have been in the headlines of the crypto-space over the years. The statements of Jamie Dimon swing like a pendulum from one extreme to the other: Sometimes Bitcoin is fraud, sometimes he shows himself repentant in his judgment. Only in January, the bank announced that it wants to launch its own crypto-Coin. Now it has become known that the in-house Blockchain team is working on another solution to the privacy problem.

The number of suspicious crypto payments in Japan has increased tenfold in the past year. This is the latest money laundering report by the Japanese police. However, despite the rapid increase, crypto transactions are only a fraction of the money laundering suspicions. The majority of unregistered funds continues to change hands in cash.

Fraud, theft, drug trafficking – the anonymity of cryptocurrencies has always attracted criminals who want to disguise their financial activities. This potential of Bitcoin & Co. seems to have been recognized by Japanese money launderers these days: As reported by the local newspaper Japan Times this Thursday, February 28, the number of suspicious crypto transactions in the East Asian islands over the past twelve years has been negative Months increased tenfold.

After Japan’s plague of hacking and digital bank robberies in recent years, the relevant authorities had obliged the Japanese exchanges in April 2017 to list all transactions and report suspicious payments.

The continuing bear market for cryptocurrencies has already driven many companies to ruin in recent months. Now it has caught the next provider: The well-known crypto-mining service Coinhive closes in early March forever its doors. Reason: The service was not economically viable. A tragic loss or rather a reason to breathe again? The Coinhive team announced the decision on February 26 on the official company blog. Accordingly, the mining service will be discontinued on March 8, 2019. Registered users will still be able to use the dashboard until April 30, claiming unpaid payouts.

Coinhive closes its doors: Mining software is not worth it anymore after Monero crashes

The main reason for the closure is the massive crash of Monero hash rate by more than 50 percent after the last Hard Fork. Added to this is the general slowdown in the crypto market: The market value of XMR fell in the course of last year by almost 85 percent. For March 9, another hard fork and an update of the algorithm are planned. All of this would have led to a conclusion: Coinhive just is not worth it anymore. The attitude was therefore the only logical step. Coinhive has been making headlines over the past few months, but not always with good news. The service provides a JavaScript-based code that can be incorporated into web pages to mine Monero in the background – without the knowledge or consent of the visitors. Coinhive was therefore repeatedly referred to as malware and was especially widespread for the so-called cryptojacking.

A problem of most tokens: they are not used. At best, only for short-term speculation. That this is not a model for the crypto-adaptation and long-term price increases of individual tokens, should be clear to everyone. So the big question is: how do you get broad sections of the population excited about token applications? Why smartphones play a key role here and even TV devices can help with the crypto adaptation.

Most crypto start-ups have a problem: Hardly anyone knows them and their range is very limited. At the same time, there is a lack of customer confidence. The situation is quite different with established brands such as Samsung, whose smartphones and TV terminals use hundreds of millions of people. Accordingly positive one can therefore rate the idea of ​​the new Samsung Galaxy S10, which comes along with several crypto features.

News from Cryptopia: As announced by the Bitcoin exchange via Twitter, the website will be launched next Monday, 4 March. In a series of updates, the social media team also announced the damage height of the hack. Thus, the attackers could steal up to 9.4 percent of total assets.

On January 15, it was announced that the New Zealand Bitcoin Exchange Cryptopia had fallen victim to an attack. Since then, BTC-ECHO is constantly reporting on the latest developments in the matter. Also today, Thursday, February 28, there are updates.

After the analysis company Elementus brought light into the darkness about the possible amount of damage, even Cryptopia itself seems to make no secret of the scope of the attack. As the New Zealand Exchange said on February 27 on the short message service Twitter, “in the worst case, up to 9.4 percent of total assets have been stolen.” You should now keep an eye on the website for further updates.

 update:
”  We are continuing to assess the impact of the hack in January. Currently, we have calculated that worst case 9.4% of our total holdings was stolen. Please keep an eye on our page for further updates today.

– Cryptopia Exchange (@Cryptopia_NZ) February 27, 2019

Coinbase announced on February 19 that it had bought Neutrino. Neutrino specializes in analyzing blockchains and tracking digital assets. But the acquisition has an unpleasant aftertaste.

For Bitcoin to establish itself in the mainstream, in the eyes of Coinbase, one thing is vital: legitimacy. This means that the reputation of “anonymous hacker money” has to give way and give way to a reputable image. After all, Bitcoin is actually not anonymous. This provides the opportunity to track the transactions on the blockchain, leaving little doubt about the legitimacy of cryptocurrencies.

Comparative Review of Scalability Solutions

Contributed by Dennis_Z

This article highlights major Layer 2 Solutions for Scalability. It is a bit long and feel free to use Table of Contents to jump to specific sections.

Table of Contents:

1. Why Do We Need Layer 2 Solution?
2. Bitcoin — Lightning Network
3. ETH Scaling Solutions — Caspar vs. Plasma vs. Sharding
4. Layer 2 Solution Review
5. Layer 2 Token Economics
6. Reference

Read the full report here:

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The U.S. Federal Reserve could soon include a cryptocurrency market crash as one of the risks to take into account when conducting supervisory stress tests.

The Fed’s board of governors on Thursday announced amendments to a policy statement on the scenario design framework for stress testing, saying that “the collapse of the bitcoin market” may be considered as one of the “salient” market risks.

According to the document, the crypto amendment was recommended to the board by a commenter who proposed it should be seen as one of several “extraordinary shocks,” such as a war with North Korea and major losses caused by trader misconduct.

The IOTA Foundation has launched a competition on Smart City. The goal is to promote innovative solutions for the networked cities of tomorrow using distributed ledger technology from IOTA.

Smart City – the intelligent city – is a trend topic, with which industry, politics and crypto companies are increasingly engaged. By linking and sharing data quickly, life in cities should become safer, healthier and more energy efficient.

The British blockchain start-up Electroneum is about to turn the concept of mining on its head: Just in time for the Mobile World Congress, the company has introduced its new Android smartphone M1 – and provided for a bang. With a price of just under $ 80, the device is incredibly cheap and especially in developing countries a real competition for top dogs such as Samsung. But the real thing is: The M1 allows the mining of cryptocurrencies by app. A look into the future of mobile payment?

Electroneum introduced the smartphone to the public on Monday, February 25th. At first glance, the M1 is a standard Android entry-level model that comes with Google Mobile Services certification. Purely from the technical data moves M1 in similar terrain as the Samsung Galaxy J5: The smartphone has 4G, 8 to 32 GB of storage space and two SIM card slots. Inside sits a quad core 1.3 GHz processor. The two cameras have five megapixels (rear) and two megapixels (front) and thus trigger probably no major tempests.

On 25 and 26 February, the second Crypto Assets Conference took place at the Frankfurt School of Finance. Representatives of the classical finance world, the regulatory authorities and the crypto sector met here. Visitors could therefore look forward to an agenda that looks at the topics of blockchain and cryptocurrency from different angles.

No question: The Frankfurt School of Finance has established itself as one of the most important think tanks in the blockchain sector. Accordingly, the Crypto Assets Conference is an important annual event for those interested in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. Similar to last year, representatives from the banking world, regulators and the crypto-ecosystem met at the Frankfurt School of Finance.

Many a critical eye off the world of crypto currencies saw this sector as dead after the 2018 bear market. The courses of the crypto currencies fell into the cellar, some ICO turned out to be a scam and various companies had to slim down extremely. It was interesting to see if “Kryptoferne” still has any interest in the subject and how the mood among enthusiasts is.

Despite the bear market, many visitors came. Of course, the “no-coiner” were in the minority, but some still went to the event. In general, the mood among the participants was quite optimistic, despite the price losses last year. Especially the developments around Security Token Offerings (STOs) are for many a glimmer of hope. Technological innovations around the crypto market as well as the growing interest of institutional investors did the rest for a good mood at the conference.

Continental, Commerzbank and Siemens announce their first successful “Blockchain” transaction. Thanks to the Corda technology of the banking syndicate R3, the test transaction could be completed within a few minutes.

The number of companies discovering Distributed Ledger (DLT) technology for transaction processing continues to grow. The tire manufacturer Continental announces its first securities business, which ran completely through the DLT. In a test transaction, Siemens acquired as investor a money market security with a volume of € 100,000 from Continental. The process, which usually takes several days, was completed by Commerzbank in just a few minutes. The companies announced this on February 21 in a joint press release.

”    While markets and technologies are constantly changing, the partnership relationship with the customer remains an important asset. We are happy to be able to accompany our customers through transactions like these on the path of digital transformation.

the Board of Directors of Capital Markets of Commerzbank states.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg discussed the use of Blockchain on the Internet in an interview with Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain. One topic was the handling of the personal data of the users. It became clear that decentralized data storage has advantages and disadvantages.

Mark Zuckerberg regularly announces publicly at the beginning of the year which challenges or themes he will focus on. In 2019, he sees the future technologies, the Internet and their influence on society. On February 20, he met with Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of international law at Harvard. Zuckerberg spent more than two hours answering questions about data exchange and privacy, encryption, decentralized services and countering misinformation.

Spanish bank giant Banco Santander has signed a technology agreement with IBM. The deal, which is expected to cost $ 700 million, provides for the bank to use the technology company’s blockchain infrastructure.

It is an elephant wedding as it is in the book: The Spanish banking giant joins forces with the technology group IBM to make common cause. In order to broaden its sphere of influence, Banco Santander said in a press release available to BTC-ECHO, it intends to use IBM technology in the future. With the signing of the contract, Banco Santander is now under the technological hood of IBM for the next five years.

Craig Wright, self-proclaimed inventor of Bitcoin, is beating around. In some remarks to the US Securities Authority Commodity Futures Trading Commission, he finds little positive words for the Ethereum project of Vitalik Buterin.

Craig Wright can not resist. The man who pretends to be Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto knows how to make media attention. Now, Wright has told the US Securities and Exchange Commission. This had asked the population for information on the evaluation of crypto projects.

Then it was the – we just quote – “designated serial counterfeiters” not to take his opinion on the project of Vitalik Buterin leave. Accordingly, he first stated his identity in his answer:

The JPM Coin should make it possible to complete transactions of customers of the largest bank in the USA without delay. This brings the first token into the ecosystem, which is supported and published by a US bank. A use case is likely to cause trouble at Ripple.

Bitcoin is well known to revolutionize the international monetary system. Cryptocurrencies use a decentralized framework to redistribute the power of individual corporations to a centralized system. But the latter seem to recognize the potential of blockchain technology and digital tokens.

So it is no one less than bank giant JPMorgan Chase, which publishes its own cryptocurrency. The JPM Coin is to process the processing of payments for customers of JPMorgan Chase in the future without delay. The largest US bank moves $ 6 trillion daily and now wants to optimize this transfer with the JPM Coin.