Category: Blockchain

Bitcoin Hits $19,200, But will Momentum Continue? – Blockchain News, Opinion, TV and Jobs

Marcus Sotiriou, Market Analyst at the publicly listed digital asset broker GlobalBlock (TSXV:BLOK). Bitcoin is currently facing resistance at $19,200, and yesterday’s CPI news could provide some hope for the outlook of global markets and crypto in 2023. Bitcoin is rallying after the release, as CPI was expected to decrease by 0.1% month-over-month, and headline year-over-year CPI is expected to decrease from 7.1% to 6.55%, which it did. The latest inflation data, which were released on Thursday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed prices were 6.5 percent higher in December than they…

Blockchain.com Slashes Workforce Crypto Industry Downturn

The crypto ecosystem is facing significant headwinds as its course corrects from the challenges of the last year. To better balance product offerings with demand, we’ve made the difficult decision to reduce operating costs and headcount to rightsize the company. Blockchain.com currently has about 280 employees left, after starting off with 160 members at the beginning of 2021. The company added that all affected employees will be receiving severance packages. However, the packages will differ depending on the country an employee resides. Crypto Companies That Have Cut Their Workforce The…

‘Wall of worry’ led to digital wallets, blockchain tech ignored: Cathie Wood

ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood believes that digital wallets and blockchain tech were among “game-changing innovations” that the equity markets largely ignored in 2022.  In a Jan. 12 blog post on the ARK Invest website, Wood suggested that the equity market faced a “wall of worry” in 2022, caused by fears of entrenched inflation and higher interest rates, and largely ignored a number of innovative technologies. Wood highlighted that digital wallets are “replacing cash and credit cards,” noting that they overtook cash as the top transaction method for offline commerce…

90% of businesses adopting blockchain technology, data

The crypto and blockchain space has had a turbulent past year, but that is not stopping users and enterprises from looking into the industry. A new survey from CasperLabs and Zogby Analytics revealed that the sentiment around blockchain adoption is especially positive among enterprises. The poll was conducted via 603 business enterprise “decision makers” in the United States, the United Kingdom and China. Nearly 90% of the businesses surveyed reported deploying blockchain technology in some capacity, with 87% saying they plan to invest in blockchain in the next year. This is particularly…

Abu Dhabi-based Venom Foundation creates $1B Web3 and blockchain fund.

Venom Foundation, which operates as a blockchain platform and is based in Abu Dhabi, and Iceberg Capital, which operates as an investment management firm and is based in New York, recently made the announcement that they would work together to provide Web3 and blockchain companies with funding in the amount of one billion dollars. The Venom Ventures Fund plans to make investments in protocols and decentralized applications (DApps) for the Web3 platform that focus on payment processing, asset management, decentralized finance (DeFi), and gaming finance (GameFi) products and services. Iceberg…

Abu Dhabi-based Venom Foundation launches $1B fund for Web3 and blockchain

Abu Dhabi-based blockchain platform Venom Foundation and investment manager Iceberg Capital announced they will allocate $1 billion of funding to Web3 and blockchain firms through a new partnership. The Venom Ventures Fund is set to invest in protocols and Web3 decentralized applications (DApps) focused on payments, asset management, decentralized finance (DeFi) and GameFi products and services. The fund is a partnership between layer-1 blockchain solution, Venom Foundation and Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) investment management firm, Iceberg Capital. The latter will look to leverage its existing network to offer incubation…

Argo Blockchain mines 25% less Bitcoin due to winter storm at Helios

Publicly-listed Bitcoin (BTC) mining company Argo Blockchain saw a significant drop in mining activity in December due to a winter storm in Texas. On Jan. 11, Argo released its first operational update since selling its flagship mining facility Helios to Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital. The company said it mined 147 Bitcoin or BTC equivalents in December, compared to 198 BTC in November 2022. As of Dec. 31, Argo held 141 BTC, with its December mining revenue amounting to $2.49 million, the firm said. Argo’s total debt was approximately $79 million,…

Blockchain privacy groups urge new US Congresspeople to protect privacy rights

Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group, has posted an open letter on its website encouraging the new class of United States congresspeople to protect privacy. The letter has attracted dozens of companies and organizations as cosigners. “Increasingly, the incredible creative power of US software developers is being chilled by clumsy, misguided legislative and regulatory actions,” the authors of the letter wrote. This is in spite of the fact that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects code as speech, the letter added, and that was why…

Using blockchain technology to combat retail theft

The retail industry is one of the most important sectors of the United States economy. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has left the trillion-dollar retail sector vulnerable to in-store theft.  Findings from the National Retail Federation’s 2022 Retail Security Survey show that retail losses from stolen goods increased to $94.5 billion in 2021, up from $90.8 billion in 2020. Some retailers also have to lock away certain products to prevent theft, which may lead to decreased sales due to consumers’ inability to access goods. Retailers look toward blockchain to solve retail…

Quantum computers may soon breach blockchain cryptography: Report

According to a recent paper, Chinese researchers claimed to have discovered a novel method to break the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman 2048 bit (RSA-2048) signing algorithm present in blockchains and other security protocols. RSA is a cryptographic technique that utilizes a public key to encrypt information and a private key to decrypt them.  Breaching the RSA-2048 algorithm requires, similar to other algorithms in the RSA numbers family, finding the prime factors of a number with 617 decimal digits and 2048 binary digits. Experts estimate that it would take ordinary computers 300 trillion years…