Author: Annette Weber

The token economy just gained an organized structure for collaborating with world leaders.  The World Economic Forum revealed its Presidio Principles on Friday, a “blockchain bill of rights,” according to the nonprofit focused on fostering diplomacy and international business partnerships. The document includes signatories from the Government of Colombia, Deloitte Consulting LLP, ConsenSys, Electric Coin Company, CoinShares and the United Nations’ World Food Program, just to name a few.  “We supported the creation of the Presidio Principles – as well as guidelines and design principles for public institutions – because we wanted to ensure that progress can continue rapidly and responsibly, ensuring that basic characteristics like security and data privacy are secured for our citizens,” Vic...

China-based bitcoin miner manufacturer Canaan has reported a net loss of $5.6 million for Q1 2020, even though it had cut down the prices for its hardware by more than half in an effort to sell more machines. In an earnings report released on Friday, the firm said it made $9.4 million in revenue for the first three months this year with a growth of 44.6% compared to the same period last year. But it also incurred $9.3 million and $5.9 million expenses in cost of goods sold and R&D, respectively. For that revenue, Canaan sold 0.9 million terahashes per second (TH/s) of Bitcoin computing power, which accounts for less than 1% of the network’s current total. That means Canaan had cut down the prices for its mining hardware sold in the first three months by more than 50% to just $10 per ...

The latest implementation of bitcoin (BTC) on the Ethereum blockchain quietly went live this week. There are 1.24 renBTC live on the Ethereum mainnet now, according to Etherscan. Three sources with knowledge of the project have confirmed this is the Ren smart contract, live ahead of its launch announcement. Kain Warwick of Synthetix tweeted Wednesday that he was the first person to hold a full bitcoin in renBTC. However, there’s no way yet for members of the public to mint additional renBTC, the CEO of the company behind the project told CoinDesk in an email. “While the smart contracts have been deployed on Ethereum, RenVM itself is not actually on mainnet. This is because RenVM is a distinct network separate to Ethereum. The final mainnet subzero version of RenVM won’t be deployed until ...

The kin cryptocurrency is exploring a move from its own fork of Stellar to the Solana blockchain.  To recap, the mobile app company Kik ran a $98 million initial coin offering (ICO) for kin in 2017, which was made on the Ethereum blockchain. Then the company said that it would use Ethereum for security and Stellar for transactions. Then it forked Stellar and ran its own chain. Now that’s proving to be inadequate so the cryptocurrency will port over to Solana in a matter of months, pending adequate support from app developers in the Kin ecosystem. “The fork of Stellar enabled Kin to reach millions of consumers, but we knew it would not be a long-term solution,” a Kin Improvement Proposal shared with CoinDesk reads. “Stellar has five-second block times, so irrespective of network load, a con...

If you owned a share of an experimental technology, how much of it would you give up to help that technology grow? Startup founders do this calculus whenever they raise capital. Ten years ago today, a developer named Laszlo Hanyecz did it with bitcoin. Hanyecz is known as the first person to use bitcoin in a commercial transaction. On May 22, 2010, when bitcoin was a little over a year old, he bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC. The day is now known as “Bitcoin Pizza Day.” With one bitcoin now worth $9,500, this is apparently a joke and Hanyecz’s $45 million pizzas are the punchline. The joke is also a parable, illustrating the competition and interplay between three potential uses of bitcoin. The first is speculation. Bitcoin’s nosebleed-inducing decade of upward price movement is what driv...

Binance is trying its hand at decentralized stablecoin governance. The exchange joined the distributed oversight team that approves contracts and code changes on Equilibrium, a DeFi outfit behind the EOSDT stablecoin. EOSDT contracts hold nearly $10 million in collateral according to the Equilibrium website. Announced Friday, Binance now has oversight power over new EOSDT smart contracts. As a party to Equilibrium’s multisignature hierarchy, Binance will grant – or conceivably withhold – its approval to all contracts prior to release. That authority had been exclusive to block producers EOS Nation and EOS Cannon. Now, it also includes Binance and fellow newcomer eosfinex, the decentralized exchange developed by Bitfinex. “You can also consider it as establishing a four-eyes principle for E...

The Louisiana State Senate is about to consider a bill to regulate and license virtual currency businesses. Sponsored by state Rep. Mark Wright (R-77), HB701 sailed through the state House of Representatives with unanimous approval, and is being referred to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Consumer Protection and International Affairs. If passed, the legislation would establish Louisiana’s first crypto licensing regime. Crypto businesses would have to apply with the state’s Office of Financial Institutions (OFI), fork over executives’ fingerprints, subject their “experience, character and general fitness” to investigation – and perhaps the business premises as well – and pay a nonrefundable registration fee, among other requirements. Registrants licensed by states with comparable regimes ...

How the myth-making around Satoshi reinforces what makes bitcoin unique in the landscape of global monies. On Wednesday, a batch of coins mined just a month after bitcoin’s birth were moved. It was the first time since August 2017 that any bitcoin from early 2009 had been transferred, and the action set Bitcoin Twitter on fire. While a number of bitcoin archaeologists quickly and persuasively argued the tokens were almost assuredly not mined by bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, it was a moment that reinforced the living history in the bitcoin ecosystem.  In this episode, NLW looks at what makes the Satoshi mythology powerful:  And while the battles within the bitcoin community around interpretation may look more like the early history of religions than like a business ecosystem, NLW argues...

News 'Diet'Laszlo Hanyecz has the honor of conducting the first commercial Bitcoin transaction: trading 10,000 bitcoin for about $30 worth of pizza. Ten years later, those bitcoin would be worth $91 million. He apparently has no regrets. “It was a really interesting system but nobody’s using it,” Hanyecz said. “If nobody’s using it, it doesn’t matter if I have it all.”  You’re reading Blockchain Bites, the daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news, and why they’re significant. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here. Blockchain Bites will publish next on Tuesday, May 26. Happy Memorial Day to our U.S. readers. This one transaction, conducted about a year after Bitcoin’s inception, was the proof-of-concept necessary for a whole emergent...

A headline in MIT Technology Review caught my attention this week: “The pandemic is emptying call centers. AI chatbots are swooping in.” COVID-19’s perfect storm – a global public health crisis, an economic meltdown and a surge in online connectivity – could accelerate what World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In creating imperatives for both cost-cutting and software-dependent innovation, the pandemic is bringing us closer to an economy dominated by integrated networks of digital devices. This raises all sorts of vital questions. But here we’ll just drill down into one: what kind of money will this new society need?  It’s likely that long-term unemployment will be a defining condition of this emerging machine-dominant economy. We’re not just ta...