New York Blockchain Week: 2019

May 18

Vitalik Buterin discusses bribery, collusion and plutocrats

It’s actually kind of wonderful that one of the smartest people in the entire world—and certainly in crypto—has been thinking a lot lately about how to solve the problems that beset the downtrodden content creation business. And that probably makes a lot of sense: Vitaly Dmitriyevich Buterin, better known to the faithful as Vitalik, is the co-founder of both Ethereum and Bitcoin Magazine. Tonight, he gave a keynote address at Eth 2.0, in New York, where he outlined his preliminary thinking on ho...

May 17

Curry with The Block’s Mike Dudas

Updated with comments from Joe Lubin. NEW YORK—Mike Dudas keeps offering me a job at his website, The Block, at a rate far higher than what I could possibly dream of at Decrypt. But I keep declining, because I’d sooner go and join ISIS than toil in his trigger-happy tweet abattoir. But I could use the money, to be honest, so I’m keeping him dangling at arm’s length just in case the Decrypt piggy bank runs dry. But having a hungry Dudas on one’s back is hard work. He’s relentless—like a pedophi...

Justin Sun: We should have fired former-CTO Lucien Chen earlier

Tron’s former-CTO Lucien Chen has been causing grief for Tron founder Justin Sun. Chen published a Medium post May 10 (which has since been removed) alleging that Tron is—apostasy!—centralized, and that it is failing to “decentralized the web.” Chen was hired in October 2017 to oversee technical development of the Tron project. He said he left the project in May, to build a new blockchain platform, the Volume Network. According to its whitepaper, it is applying the new consensus model called “pr...

Ethereum’s Danny Ryan: it’s time to get excited about testnets

Danny Ryan is not ashamed to say he had an emotional response when the first testnets for Ethereum 2.0. were launched this month. He was recently elected an unofficial project leader for the gargantuan journey the blockchain has embarked upon. “This has been incredibly exciting for me because it’s something I’ve been working on for a long time and finally it’s happening,” he told Decrypt. Over the next two years, Ethereum, the world’s second largest decentralized network, is migrating its thousa...

May 16

How Ripple is building out the XRP ecosystem through Xpring

XRP is a cryptocurrency primarily known for its use in cross-border payments, an initiative largely led by Ripple. Yet, a larger ecosystem is now being built around the coin to provide other use-cases and increase liquidity. Leading this drive, is Ripple’s incubator initiative, Xpring. Xpring was set up a year ago and has since invested in 10-15 small to medium-sized businesses. It’s focused on payments using XRP, interoperability between blockchain platforms and the decentralized finance (DeFi)...

May 15

U.S. Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang says words about blockchain at Consensus

Because he speaks eloquently and with the authority of a presidential candidate, Andrew Yang managed to swindle a very large crowd at Consensus into thinking he actually said anything. Yang, a Democrat, is actually running for President, and will actually be debating other actual candidates, such as actual former Vice President Joe Biden, later in the year. And he actually has some thought-provoking policies, such as “set up a division of the army to support public infrastructure” (cool!) and “...

Justin Sun interview: Teslas, Twitter bots and his man crush on Vitalik Buterin

NEW YORK—Early yesterday morning, Tron’s head of communications, Cliff Edwards, hustled into the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. He was profusely apologetic, and kept trying to call, text and email his CEO, Justin Sun, who was—very obviously—running late. After an hour, Sun finally appeared, tired and jet lagged. He was wrapped in five layers, including a khaki-colored trench coat. “Sorry! Sorry,” he said, smiling, and reached out a hand. Sun, 29, is, as everyone in crypto knows, one of the mor...

How Coinbase goes all out on security

Knock on wood: Coinbase is the only exchange yet to suffer a breach. CEO Brian Armstrong revealed a secret to its success to Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Vigna at Consensus this morning: it hires spies, unbeknownst to most of the staff, who attempt to infiltrate the exchange’s offices and compromise the network. “We hire third-party firms to try and break into it,” he explained. “They pose as candidates applying to work at Coinbase. Typically, only the head of security and me know that it...

Opera to support Tron's TRX in browser wallet

Norway-based Opera announced today that it’s planning to support to Tron’s TRX and other TRC-standard tokens within its browser. Opera, whose first browser launched in 1996, has been at the cutting edge of Web3. It released a beta version of its Android browser wallet in February, giving users in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden the option to buy Ether and ERC tokens. An iOS version is currently in beta and is expected to be released later this year. Among other things, Web3 adds a digital money lay...

ShapeShift is having a butterfly moment

QuadrigaCX, Bitfinex, Binance… the list of exchanges that have seen customer funds stolen is increasing on a weekly basis. But there’s one exchange—ShapeShift—that’s determined to buck the trend, and it believes that its model is one all exchanges should be emulating. Founded in 2014, ShapeShift is a “non-custodial exchange,” meaning it holds no customer funds. Instead, it functions as a marketplace, ensuing that it has sufficient liquidity to cover the trade. Now the company is undergoing a...

May 14

Chainlink mainnet to go live on Ethereum at end of May

Chainlink CEO Sergey Nazarov announced today that the decentralized oracleprovider is to launch its service on the Ethereum mainnet on May 30. It’s the culmination of six years’ hard work for Nazarov and his team. Chainlink helps smart contracts respond to actual events, providing a secure and reliable method for a smart-contract to “know” what’s going on in the real world, enabling it to access verification of external factors—such as market prices, Internet of Things and shipping data. The an...

Crypto traders get access to FDIC-insured accounts through Safra Bank

The risky world of cryptocurrency trading may soon be getting appreciably less risky—at least when cash is involved. SFOX, a San Francisco-based cryptocurrency prime brokerage, announced today that it has partnered with the century-old, New York-based M.Y. Safra Bank to provide crypto traders who use their platform with access to bank accounts backed by FDIC insurance. It’s the first time a crypto prime dealer offers this type of protection for crypto traders’ cash assets, according to a stateme...

Amazon Coin? Amazon says anything is possible

Facebook Coin, meet Amazon Coin? That’s a big maybe according to Amazon Web Services. The tech giant is using its own blockchain technology internally. When asked whether the company would extend its reach beyond blockchain and veer into cryptocurrency—will there ever be an Amazon Coin, perhaps? Or bitcoin payments integrated with Amazon.com?—Amazon Web Services General Manager Rahul Pathak, speaking at Consensus, appeared open to it. “If it’s something that matters to customers, we'll find a wa...

Joe Lubin and Jimmy Song sort details of high stakes blockchain bet

Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin and Bitcoin booster Jimmy Song have finalized the details of their long standing bet: if 5 unique, decentralized applications achieve 10,000 daily active users—and 100,000 monthly active users—for a six-month period, before May 23, 2023, Song will cough up 810.8 ether ($166,741.02). And if not a single dapp sticks? Lubin will pay Song 69.74 ($561,000.) Why the weirdly specific sums? Originally, both equaled $700,000, but volatility and shifting exchange rates now...

May 13

Crypto Mom Hester Peirce: The time is still right for a Bitcoin ETF

The SEC has denied every Bitcoin ETF application that it has yet laid its eyes on, but there’s one voice within the Commission that hasn’t given up hope. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce once again voiced her support for a Bitcoin ETF on Monday during a fireside chat at Consensus, New York. “I thought the time was right a year ago—even longer than that,” said Peirce, affectionately known as “Crypto Mom” by the crypto community. “My first chance to comment on it was a year ago,” she said, adding: “...

Da Hongfei: NEO is deliberately more centralized than Bitcoin

NEO is a blockchain platform that claims to be much more scalable than Bitcoin and Ethereum. But there’s a catch—it uses a controversial, centralized blockchain to achieve it. And that’s all part of the plan, NEO founder Da Hongfei told Decrypt at Consensus, New York: “If you are comparing NEO to Bitcoin, it is more centralized. That’s intentional. We want to keep it more efficient,” he said. NEO has been widely criticized for being centralized. Countless news articles have highlighted the fact...

Man betrayed by Justin Sun now loves Justin Sun

Remember Uziel Garcia (Twitter handle @uzgaroth), the guy from Puebla, Mexico who was promised a shiny new Tesla by “Tron” CEO Justin Sun? When it seemed as though Sun had pre-selected the winner, costing Garcia his rightful prize, Garcia called Tron a scam. He was rug-chewing mad, he was! Then there was further outrage, when Sun assured Garcia that he would be receiving his prize, which instead of a shiny Tesla would be a slightly less glamorous, er, ticket to a Tron conference. In 2020. Need...

Zebpay CEO: Binance hack leaves us with unanswered questions

At Consensus, New York, CEO of crypto exchange Zebpay, Ajeet Khurana, says the more he knows, the more questions he has about last week’s Binance hack. When the hack occurred, observers could watch the theft of 7,000 unfold in real-time, via an address supplied by CEO Changpeng Zhao on Twitter. The coins moved from one address to another and disappeared. But it turns out that was only half the bitcoin in the wallet that Zhao identified. Another 6,900 bitcoins were left behind, where they remain...

Multicoin’s Tushar Jain: why blockchain “reorg’s” will work

The prospect of “reorganizing” the Bitcoin blockchain was rejected as a way to recover the $40 million lost when the Binance exchange was hacked last week. In fact, the idea was so controversial that Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao even publicly apologized for entertaining it. But, while it wasn’t the right course of action in this instance, a reorg shouldn’t be considered out of hand, Multicoin Capital cofounder and Binance coin investor, Tushar Jain said. And he believes that in the future—as bloc...

May 11

Rocket Lawyer plans to bring blockchain to millions of customers

How do you get millions of customers to use your blockchain-based product? Make the technology "invisible" and build something people actually need—like access to legal services. Rocket Lawyer is a digital platform that provides do-it-yourself legal services to nearly 25 million customers. It has partnerships with more than 300 companies, including Google, Dropbox, and Pinterest, who offer its services as part of their employee-benefit packages. And its latest product, Rocket Wallet, is gearing...

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