IOTA Foundation partners with Crypto Storage AG on an institutional-grade IOTA token storage infrastructure solution
- IOTA Foundation partners with Crypto Storage AG on an institutional-grade IOTA token storage infrastructure solution
IOTA Foundation, a non-profit designed to support the development and standardization of new distributed ledger technologies (including the IOTA Tangle), has been working quite hard since the turn of the year. The latest feat they achieved is the partnership with Crypto Storage AG, one that is expected to further the project’s goal of creating the future IOT-compatible economy.
Crypto Storage AG is a subsidiary of Crypto Finance AG and will be looking to create the first multi-signature solution available for the storage of high volumes of IOTA tokens worldwide. The solution will aim to satisfy the needs of financial intermediaries storing IOTA tokens, as well as various partners looking to create IOTA-based concepts across a plethora of industries.
Private, public investors as well as institutional investors and beneficiaries will be able to use this solution to securely manage and store their IOTA tokens. By leveraging Tangle’s “permissionless, no-fee, non-blockchain distributed ledger,” Crypto Storage AG expects to deliver a solution offering “professional level of security for IOTA’s industry partners and users.” Crypto Storage AG clients now may enable their business model with IOTA investments, and leading companies in industry working with IOTA can meet their institutional and compliance requirements, claims the project’s blog post about this partnership.
“Crypto Storage AG is proud to support the IOTA platform with our top-tier infrastructure, as we see rising demand with our clients and IOTA’s industry partners to enable the IOTA token without compromising on security,” says Stijn Vander Straeten, CEO of Crypto Storage AG.
“Keeping data secure with infrastructure from Crypto Storage AG will contribute to the development of these concepts and the IOTA Foundation’s vision of supporting a machine-to-machine economy,” says David Sønstebø, co-founder and co-chair of IOTA Foundation.
- ICON to participate in “Seoul Immersive Blockchain” study trip
ICON team published information that they will act as a featured host during the upcoming “Seoul Immersive Blockchain”, an event that will take place at the Ibis Style Ambassador Gangnam from January 8th to 11th.
The event is a private blockchain study trip led by official educational institutions of the Singaporean government. Among the government institutions present will be the SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG), a statutory board under the Ministry of Education. Overall, a number of state run institutions and industrial leaders in the field of finance, medicine, e-commerce, and retail are expected to visit the event and “share business models utilizing blockchain technology and the potential for technological innovations.”
ICON will represent the Korean blockchain industry during the event with the project’s director of public affairs, Josh Choi, introducing the guests to a speech titled “Path to Adoption”. The speech will detail ICON’s recent achievements and their vision for the future, with special attention placed on project’s Singaporean accelerator called “TRIBE”.
“As ‘TRIBE’, ICON’s Singaporean accelerator program, has been recognized as the first blockchain accelerator supported by Enterprise Singapore, a significant Singaporean government agency, we expect this event to further expand our presence in Singapore,” explains ICON.
- Julian Hosp abandons the TenX project after allegedly dumping 2.22 million PAY tokens on investors
Now already former founder/CEO of TenX, Julian Hosp, yesterday published a “short and emotional” video detailing his intention to step down from all of his roles at the mentioned project.
The video – titled “I am stepping down as TenX president” – sees a somewhat nervous and fidgety Hosp inform the community that he and other project members came to a mutual conclusion that it’s best for all parties involved if he was to leave the project effective immediately. After thanking the team for their efforts and reiterating his certainty that they’ll do well in the future, Hosp said that he will be taking a few weeks off to “recapture”. Finally, he ended the video by thanking the community for the support that was given to him and the project during the previous period. Needless to say, the community reaction wasn’t exactly a positive one. Hosp pre-emptively disabled the comments and the like/dislike ratio on the video, as he likely expected the heavy backlash which came after these news were broken.
For those out of the loop with the TenX fiasco, the project was supposed to deliver a crypto-backed debit card which would allow people to use their cryptocurrency for real-life payments. It was one of the earliest crypto debit card projects on the market; the levels of excitement that the community expressed towards TenX can be summed up by the fact that it managed to collect $80 million during its ICO.
However, the project came across various big hurdles in its development. Hosp, as its main promoter and public personality, has naturally been taking most of the blame for TenX’s failures to overcome these hurdles. To make matters worse, it was recently revealed that Hosp used to be a part of Lyoness, a start-up that has been banned from several countries on the grounds of being a MLM scheme.
A cherry on top of the entire story has been the revelation made by a Reddit user gmgh, who published a thread titled “Did TenX Ex-CoFounder Julian Hosp dump 2.22M of PAY tokens on Bittrex?” on r/CryptoCurrency today. The user noticed that a person he alleges is either Hosp or someone tied to him sent 2,222,035 PAY tokens to a Bittrex address, tokens which were later dumped on the open market. He summarizes his thoughts in a rather strong-worded manner:
“It seems highly likely to me that Julian has dumped all his PAY tokens trying to sell the intermediate top into the hype surrounding the token snapshot. The price has fallen dramatically over the past 2 weeks, since the deposits came in. The snapshot period is also the perfect smokescreen to cover him exiting his position, since volume before and after would be higher than usual.”
As of now, TenX sits in limbo without its most popular representative (for better or for worse) and without any semblance of a functional debit card.
- Vertcoin development update for December of 2018 released
Vertcoin is currently heavily embroiled in preparations for their upcoming hard fork, according to their development update for December of 2018.
The update reveals that this will be the project’s third fork since this ASIC mining resistance-chasing cryptocurrency went live. All of the previous forks were made in an effort to kick off ASICs from the network and make it GPU mining-friendly. The newly-coded resistances wouldn’t last long, and recent revelations have shown that there are several ASICs on the market capable of mining on the Vertcoin network. Vertcoin also suffered a 51% attack in late 2018 as a direct result of most of the mining community using GPU hardware.
To solve this problem, the project announced the upcoming hard fork back in autumn of 2018. The fork will look to upgrade the hashing algorithm from Lyra2REv2 to Lyra2REv3, an algorithm that is expected to deliver several improvements:
- Render ASICs useless
- Reduce inherent advantages of ASICs/FPGAs over GPUs
- Enable hard forking in a fast, yet safe and secure way
The hard fork is planned to take place at block 1080000. With the Vertcoin block time being 2.5 minutes, that places the fork date somewhere around February 2nd. The project set up a website which shows the countdown towards the hard fork which can be found here.
The project informed the Vertcoin community (exchanges, wallet providers, miners, regular owners, system integrators and payment providers) that they’ll need to update their wallets to the latest release in order to prepare for the hard fork. Ledger and Trezor, two hardware wallet providers, have confirmed that they’ll update their software to support the fork. Check out the complete Vertcoin December Development update here.
