Newsflash: Bakkt officially announces its launch date while Bitmain caught disabling features of their S9 miners
As we leave a rather interesting Monday behind, we decided to take a look at what exactly made it so notable. From mining shenanigans, over massive crypto demand news, to actual cryptocurrency related movies, it’s been a fun one indeed. These are the daily news we singled out for you:
- Bakkt officially announces its launch date
Bakkt, a platform created to enable customers and institutions to seamlessly buy, sell, store and spend their digital assets, officially confirmed that they plan on opening their services to the public on December 12th.
This exchange is seen as a massive event in the world of crypto as it opens up the space to institutional investment in a way we’ve never seen before.
Bakkt will bring more futures, but the important catch here is that these futures will be physically backed by Bitcoin purchased from the market by the exchange.
Thanks to this, Bitcoin demand is expected to grow significantly during the upcoming period.
The platform is already being considered by major Tier 1 investment banks, as well as investment groups like Fortress Investment Group, Eagle Seven, Galaxy Digital, Horizons Ventures, Alan Howard, Pantera Capital, Protocol Ventures, and Susquehanna International Group, LLP.
- Screen Australia to produce a cryptocurrency related motion picture
Screen Australia’s Documentary Fund will be financing a documentary film titled “Cryptopia – Bitcoin, Blockchain and the Future of the Internet”.
The film is being made by an experienced crew which already has the title “Bitcoin: The End of Money as We know It (2015)” behind it.
It will focus on learning more about the blockchain technology in general and how it can become a key part of our Internet’s future.
The film will interview several key blockchain influencers and personalities, as well as some of the staunchest cryptocurrency opponents, to determine if said technology can really provide a robust alternative to current systems, prevent financial meltdowns and keep our private information safe.
- Visa partners with IBM on the B2B Connect platform
Visa has recently signed up a new partner to work together with on their distributed ledger platform for business payments called B2B Connect.
B2B Connect lets businesses and banks conduct cross-border payments and fund transfers with the help of the underlying blockchain infrastructure called Chain Core which was originally developed by Chain.com.
Chain.com has recently been purchased by Interstellar, a for-profit business set up to promote Stellar. Stellar is a well-known IBM partner and the link between this latest partnership with Visa.
Working with IBM means that B2B Connect will likely switch from the Chain Core technology and will be implementing Hyperledger Fabric as a key element of its underlying infrastructure.
- Bitmain caught disabling features of their S9 miners
Software development & consulting operator at Slush Pool, going by the handle @braiins_systems on twitter, released some damning information regarding the infamous ASIC miner producer Bitmain.
Judging by a Medium post made by the team behind the braiins account, Bitmain’s Antminer S9 is capable of supporting overt ASICBoost, potentially allowing miners to save about 13 % of energy costs.
The team took a deep dive into the current bmminer code and discovered that some of the mining devices features were intentionally blocked within the factory; their research revealed that once these blocks were removed, the S9 miner was capable of saving a significant amount of power while doing the same work as before.
Bitmain responded to these allegations by releasing new firmware which activated the mentioned overt ASICBoost on their S9 devices.
https://twitter.com/BITMAINtech/status/1054329450018435074
It is very likely that these features were fully enabled on Bitmain-owned devices. With the rest of the mining network running the “tampered” S9 devices, it’s clear that Bitmain had some morally questionable advantage over the mentioned network.
- Trezor Wallet now lets you exchange cryptocurrency inside of it
Trezor Wallet has implemented a new feature for its users as they are now able to seamlessly exchange between different cryptocurrencies without ever needing to leave the wallet website.
The entire process can be initiated and observed directly in the Wallet interface.
The community didn’t take too kindly to this new feature though, as it’s being made possible by Trezor partnering up with exchanges ShapeShift and Changelly. Both of these exchanges require KYC registration to let users exchange their funds, and this rubbed many community members the wrong way.
