NYSE Operator’s Crypto Platform Bakkt Finalizes Its First Acquisition

Bakkt, the much-anticipated digital assets platform operated by the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), has closed its first acquisition, a tweet from the company revealed Feb. 8. The move marks the finalization of an acquisition of assets in futures commission merchant Rosenthal Collins Group (RCG). “With today’s closing of our transaction with Rosenthal Collins Group, we welcome great new team members to Bakkt,” the statement reads. By acquiring certain assets in the company, Bakkt said it hopes: “RCG’s remarkable heritage, culture and expertise will help us build out a trusted institutional infrastructure…

New Players, Veterans and Startups Which Didn’t Make the Cut

Recently, Forbes published the fresh edition of its “Fintech 50” list, counting the world’s top financial technology firms. Notably, there are just six crypto and blockchain companies featured this year, while the 2018 list contained 11 players from the field. Given that the notorious crypto boom of 2017 has been followed by the relentless bear market, it is hardly surprising. Nevertheless, while there is considerably fewer crypto companies featured this year, less than half of them — Ripple, BitFury, Coinbase — have made the list before, which means that new…

A Scrum, The Lightning Network, and the Return of the Maximalist

A Scrum, The Lightning Network, and the Return of the Maximalist February 9, 2019 by Paul de Havilland Coinscrum, the long-running London-based conference, had always been a bitcoin maximalist event. While altcoins were introduced into discussions for an interim period, the talk is now primarily about bitcoin again. Also read: March of the Smart Contracts: Bits of Open Possibility in Open Finance We love hearing from our readers. Sound off on our Twitter or Facebook pagesCheck out our insights & interviews with influential insiders on the Bitsonline YouTube channelAnd for the…

Argentina’s State Public Transport Card SUBE Accepts Bitcoin

Argentinian state public transport card SUBE (Sistema Único de Boleto Electrónico) can now be topped up using Bitcoin (BTC), Cointelegraph in Spanish reported Friday, Feb. 8. Alto Viaje, a platform for adding money to SUBE cards, has partnered with Bitex, which provides blockchain-driven financial services to businesses. As a result of the partnership, the SUBE card can now be funded using BTC, via Alto Viaje’s website. Cointelegraph spoke to Manuel Beaudroit, CMO at Bitex, who said that SUBE — that can be used to travel by train, bus and subway…

A Group of Mt. Gox Creditors Want to Revive the Exchange and Repay All Bitcoin (BTC)

The Mt. Gox exchange went under after a series of hacks and lawsuits in 2013 and 2014. These events led to the loss of approximately 850,000 Bitcoin (BTC). Since then, users who had their investments locked up at the exchange have been trying to get their funds back. GoxRising and its Aim of Accelerating a Resolution A group of Mt. Gox creditors has thus banded together to create a knew movement known as ‘GoxRising’. The movement is registered in the British Virgin Islands under Gox Rising Limited and aims to support…

High School Team Places Third in Barclays Blockchain Challenge Event

If understanding how distributed ledger tech works inside banks is complex, finding ways to make different varieties of enterprise blockchains talk to each other is a doozy of a challenge. And yet, that’s exactly what a team of high school students – soon to sit their A-Level exams in computer science – has done. The team, from Bedford School in the U.K., won third place in a blockchain interoperability hackathon hosted by London-based blockchain startup Clearmatics at the Barclays Rise fintech hub in London. The challenge set by Clearmatics, which is…

Bitfinex Resumes Trading After Unexpected 2-Hour Outage as Crypto Markets Surge

Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex notified users in a tweet Saturday, Feb. 9, that it had temporarily gone offline for all users, as crypto markets saw major gains. Initially, the company wrote that the platform was unavailable only “to some users” and apologized for the inconvenience, without specifying a cause for the outage. However, about thirty minutes later, Bitfinex clarified that it had gone offline for all of its users, citing a “poor […] choice of wording” as the reason for the misinformation. The full statement reads: “We apologise for…

Why Bitcoin’s Forecast is Finally Turning Bullish, Expect a Bitcoin Price Rise

The price of bitcoin is still hovering below the $3,500 mark and volatility seems to be dying fast. Is it strange, then, that SFOX‘ report (a cryptocurrency prime dealer for large-scale investors) places the Crypto market at ‘mildly bullish’ entering February? This is a couple of notches up from its ‘mildly bearish’ tag last month. Why? SFOX Crypto Volatility Report January 2019 The institutional broker-dealer SFOX report collects key metrics, including volume, price, and volatility data from eight major exchanges on four leading crypto assets–Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Cash. It…

Why Bitcoin’s Forecast is Finally Turning Bullish, Expect a Bitcoin Price Rise

The price of bitcoin is still hovering below the $3,500 mark and volatility seems to be dying fast. Is it strange, then, that SFOX‘ report (a cryptocurrency prime dealer for large-scale investors) places the Crypto market at ‘mildly bullish’ entering February? This is a couple of notches up from its ‘mildly bearish’ tag last month. Why? SFOX Crypto Volatility Report January 2019 The institutional broker-dealer SFOX report collects key metrics, including volume, price, and volatility data from eight major exchanges on four leading crypto assets–Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Cash. It…

Quadriga mystery deepens with little evidence of cold wallets containing user funds

A cryptocurrency analyst says there is little evidence that tens of millions of dollars of assets allegedly trapped on hard drives belonging to the deceased founder of a Canadian cryptocurrency exchange are being stored in so-called cold wallets. QuadrigaCX’s 30-year-old founder, Gerald Cotten, died unexpectedly in India on Dec. 9. It took more than a month for Cotten’s widow, Jennifer Robertson, to post the news on the exchange’s website on Jan.14. On Jan. 31, Quadriga announced it had filed an application in Nova Scotia Supreme Court for creditor protection. In a sworn…