French crypto startup Keplerk has relaunched its service to accept Bitcoin (BTC) payments in over 5,200 tobacco shops in France starting from Oct. 10.

Service first launched in January
After suspending the service in less than two months after launch in January, Keplerk says that its customers will be able to buy Bitcoin from tobacconists in coupons of 50, 100 or 250 euros, France’s top news channel BFM TV reports Oct. 10.

According to the report, Bitcoin payments in all 5,200 locations will be feasible through Keplerk’s partner Bimedia, which will provide payment terminals.

As previously reported, Keplerk’s initial launch in January 2019 of the service reportedly involved just six tobacco shops, while other publications reported there were as many as 24 shops participating in the program. At the time, Keplerk co-founder Adil Zakhar stated that the firm was planning to expand the project to 6,500 tobacco shops by February despite the reports that France’s central bank did not endorse the initiative.

Bitcoin adoption surges in France
Meanwhile, France is apparently seeing a surge in cryptocurrency adoption. In late September, Cointelegraph reported that over 25,000 points-of-sale of 30 French retailers including sportswear giant Decathlon and cosmetics store Sephora will start accepting BTC payments by early 2020. As reported earlier in September, the French unit of Domino's Pizza launched an ordering competition with a prize of $110,000 in Bitcoin or cash.

On Sept. 12, French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire claimed that French authorities do not plan to tax crypto-to-crypto trades, but rather will consider taxation when crypto is sold for fiat money.


source:  https://cointelegraph.com/news/5-200-tobacco-shops-in-france-now-selling-bitcoin

Ethereum (ETH) venture production studio ConsenSys has announced that it had fully acquired Infura, a blockchain infrastructure provider that the firm previously backed.

According to the blog post published on Oct. 4, Infura will continue its operations as a wholly owned business unit within the studio. Infura also noted that ConsenSys’s founder Joseph Lubin was one of the startup’s early investors.

Centralization criticism
Infura is providing Ethereum infrastructure for building decentralized applications, allowing developers to deploy their solutions without hosting their own full node. In July 2019, the firm launched Infura+ and introduced three new subscription tiers.

In March 2019, digital asset research company Delphi Digital published a report pointing to the alleged centralization of the startup. The report argued that by using Infura, developers rely on the infrastructure entirely operated by ConsenSys and hosted by Amazon Web Services, which creates a single point of failure that decentralization is designed to avoid.

In late September, ConsenSys launched the Impactio platform to bring transparency into philanthropy in partnership with the World Wildlife Fund.


source:  https://cointelegraph.com/news/consensys-fully-acquires-ethereum-infrastructure-provider-infura

After more than a year spent ensuring full compliance with the United States authorities, Bakkt, the first federally regulated platform for Bitcoin (BTC) futures trading, launched on September 23.

Conceived by the global trading giant Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) and counting a solid portfolio of investors from Microsoft’s venture fund M12 to Starbucks as its backers, Bakkt offers institutional traders something brand new. The platform’s value proposition is physically-settled BTC futures contracts, combined with a sound custodial service approved by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

Assuming that it is digital assets’ volatility and lack of regulatory safeguards that deters otherwise highly interested institutional investors from going big on BTC, Bakkt’s debut is a major milestone on the timeline of crypto adoption – and many in the space anticipated its debut with great excitement. However, as the first week of operation is coming to a close, the trading volumes on the platform remain meager.

Worse luck, Bakkt’s launch coincided with an immense slump in Bitcoin’s market price, leading some analysts to suspect a causal connection between the two. Does the underwhelming kickoff signify an early end to Bakkt’s aspirations of becoming a gateway for widespread, institutional adoption of crypto?

Bitcoin meets regulation in Bakkt futures
The Intercontinental Exchange is a U.S. enterprise headquartered in Atlanta that operates a dozen major regulated exchanges and marketplaces around the world, including the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and ICE Futures Europe. In August 2018, ICE announced its plans to create a Bitcoin futures marketplace fully compliant with CFTC regulations, looking to launch it at the end of that year.

Unlike the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Bitcoin futures contracts that have been on the market since December 2017, the idea behind Bakkt is to create an instrument that would settle in actual Bitcoin upon liquidation. Whereas the value of a CME contract is delivered in cash equivalent and matched to the spot-market-based BTC price index at the time of expiration, owners of Bakkt futures get “physical” Bitcoin sent to their custodial account.

This modification could be seen as a step toward enhancing investors’ confidence in the new asset class. Presumably, as traders come to feel more serious about Bitcoin and its potential, they would prefer exposure to the actual coin rather than engaging with an instrument whose connection to the underlying asset is purely nominal.

Winning this edge over the competition, though, invoked the need for an additional operational layer: reliable custody. It would be too long of a shot to expect that conservative institutional investors would line up to buy a nebulous asset that they didn’t know how to handle safely.

This approach was bound to create additional red tape for its proponents, as it required going the extra mile to clear regulators’ rigorous requirements for entities that seek to operate as crypto custodians. Negotiations with the CFTC centered on the custodial issue stalled and dragged for several more months than ICE had initially planned.

It wasn’t until June 2019 that Bakkt secured the CFTC’s approval. Finally, on August 13, Bakkt Trust Co., the platform’s clearinghouse, obtained a charter from the New York State Department of Financial Services to operate as a custodian, marking the end of the platform’s regulatory quest.

On the day of its launch, Bakkt offered traders two types of derivatives: daily contracts, whose buyers receive their Bitcoin at the end of the same day — almost as if trading on a spot exchange — and monthly contracts, which ICE management hopes to be instrumental in longer-term BTC price discovery.

Unimpressive debut
Amid overall high expectations further fueled by crypto Twitter and media hype, Bakkt failed to impress on the first day of trading, with a paltry 71 contracts sold and the volume picking up slowly in the following days. To make matters worse, the day after launch, Bitcoin price took its largest intraday hit since January, losing some 13% within Tuesday.


                                   Bitcoin price declines by 13% in one day. Source: Coin360.com

Some observers were quick to suggest that Bakkt’s slow showing was to blame. Mati Greenspan, senior market analyst at digital asset trading platform eToro, told Barron’s: “The catalyst for today’s plunge, in my mind, seems to be the underwhelming launch of Bakkt. This is a prime example of “buy the rumor, sell the news.”

Others pointed out the glaring difference between Bakkt’s 71 first-day deals and CME’s 5298 trades in the first 24 hours. There was also something ominously similar between the two premieres: the day after CME futures became available, Bitcoin price took a tumble from around $19,000 to below $17,000.

In the big picture, skeptics may be tempted to conclude that such a lackluster performance of a much-anticipated regulated platform indicates the real level of interest that institutional investors have for crypto assets, and that the drop was induced after market participants suddenly realized the big money is not coming all at once.

Bigger picture
It is quite possible that the situation is less unequivocal, however. For one, the comparison between Bakkt’s debut and that of CME’s futures is not really appropriate. Derivatives offered by the Chicago exchange hit the markets at the very peak of the December 2017 crypto craze, following a months-long race of price inflation.

Bakkt opened business within a much more sober and stable market. Furthermore, it is not just the overall crypto market, but the crypto futures market that has dramatically transformed, having become much tighter. Alex Lam, CEO and co-founder of digital asset services platform RockX, shared his observation with Cointelegraph:
   “While its launch was a highly anticipated milestone for both Bakkt and the wider crypto community, its lacklustre reception attests to
   the highly competitive market and the current barriers to mass entry.”

A popular demand for BTC derivatives trading is well-served by a number of unregulated platforms, which still host the bulk of the volume. Marketplaces such as BitMEX and OKEx enjoy high liquidity and offer traders leverage of up to 100:1. Christophe de Courson, CEO of blockchain asset management fund Olymp Capital, told Cointelegraph:
   “Since the launch of Bakkt Bitcoin futures, the intraday volume has stayed between 70 to 100 BTC which, indeed, is small when
   compared to BitMEX, an unregulated exchange, with more than 270,000 BTC intraday volume on September 23rd 2019. However, it
   is noteworthy that regulated platforms generally have a smoother launch in comparison with crypto native platforms.”

Most of the experts who have spoken to Cointelegraph on this matter agree that, given this retail-driven character of crypto trading, it is unlikely that institution-oriented ventures like Bakkt will be exerting significant influence on the overall BTC market in the near future. Fran Strajnar, Founder and CEO of cryptocurrency research firm Brave New Coin, said:
   “Bitcoin and crypto trading remains a retail-led phenomenon. Accessible products available on platforms like Bitmex, and spot
   exchanges like Binance, are likely to continue to drive volume in the near term.”

The recent price drop could be partly driven by the reaction to Bakkt’s initial performance, but the effect should not persist for too long if it is indeed the key driver behind the observed movement.

Other developments of the week could have also contributed to plummeting prices, most notably, the inexplicable drop in BTC network’s hash rate soon after the start of futures trading. The incident still leaves many questions unanswered, as the popular explanation — that Kyrgyzstan suddenly cut off electricity to dozens of crypto mining entities at once — doesn’t seem to be compelling.

Curbing expectations
Even if Bakkt’s “physical” delivery is indeed a major competitive advantage that should entice investors at higher rates compared to cash settlement, it is barely enough to override institutional inertia that underlies traditional asset managers and funds’ reluctance to rush to the gate immediately. Tom Maxon, Head of U.S. Operations at the blockchain security company CoolBitX, said:
   “When it comes to institutional investors, Bakkt’s move will probably not make much of an impact to the price of Bitcoin at first. This
   is because Bakkt’s product faces two major obstacles: one, Bitcoin is still too unpredictable for institutional investors, and two,
   institutional funds’ board of directors will continue to perceive Bitcoin as a risky asset and fund managers will face an uphill battle to
   include this asset within their portfolio due to fiduciary duty. […] If conservative institutions have taken this long to invest in legal
   cannabis, they’re certainly going to take a long time to tolerate Bitcoin.”

Attracting big money to Bakkt’s new playground will likely be an incremental process, as many of the experts who have spoken to Cointelegraph on the matter admit. Jonathan Speigner, Founder and CEO of the crypto wallet company Coin.Space, noted to Cointelegraph:
   “The main reason the volume is low is they just do not have the customer base yet, it will more than likely take several more months
   before they see broader institutional customers using the platform. Remember institutional money has always been skeptical of
   Bitcoin.”

Brave New Coin’s Fran Strajnar was also willing to give Bakkt more time to prove its worth as Bakkt is likely to evolve into a gateway that will capture today’s suppressed demand for crypto trading vehicles within the institutional investment space. Strajnar added that, “This demand will take time to materialize. It’s too early to conclude that Bakkt is a failed product based on tepid demand in its first few days of trading.”

Most industry experts were also willing to commend Bakkt for bringing a unique product to the market, which, in Tom Maxon’s words, is a “bold step towards the future of Bitcoin products.” Bill Shihara, CEO of cryptocurrency trading platform Bittrex, said in a statement for Cointelegraph:
   “Bakkt’s regulated futures market is an exciting moment that marks how far the blockchain industry has come. These types of
   markets take time to build and reach to institutional traders, so a few days of trading isn’t representative of long term potential or
   performance. As an industry, this is a step in the right direction.”

Meanwhile, the busy market that Bakkt has just entered is poised to get even busier: CME has recently announced plans to supplement its futures contracts with options in early 2020, while up-and-coming competitors LedgerX and ErisX are getting closer to securing regulatory approval for launching their own physically delivered futures products. Along with the overall dynamics of investor interest for regulated crypto derivatives, we will soon have a chance to learn how different players in this field stack up against one another.


source:  https://cointelegraph.com/news/first-week-of-bakkt-slow-start-unlikely-to-dampen-long-term-prospects

Keith Mali Chung — the co-founder and president of African blockchain firm Loopblock Network — has returned almost $80,000 worth of Bitcoin (BTC) mistakenly sent to his wallet.

Chung — who goes by the Twitter handle of “Bitcoin Keith (The African Bitcoin Bull)” — tweeted about the incident on Sept. 12:
     “I received huge sum of BTC from an unknown sender and it’s definitely a mistake from someone I must have had transaction with
     before, Kindly DM me time of transaction, your adress and exact digits sent..

     thank you. Kindly retweet”

The good samaritan
In a further update on Sept. 13, Chung revealed that the exact sum of apparently accidentally transferred Bitcoin was 7.8 BTC — worth $79,482 to press time. He also indicated that the sender who remains anonymous had responded to his request, meaning he was able to return the funds. He explained:
     “In Africa, which is where I am situated, 80% we transact Cryptos through WhatsApp escrows and someone who himself and I had
     business in the past made this huge mistake of sending 7.8BTC into my blockchain wallet. I spread the words round & he reached
     out.”

Chung’s actions earned him significant social media acclaim and even the moniker of “African/Nigerian good samaritan” on crypto Twitter. Had he failed to identify the sender, he had pledged to donate the accidentally-gotten proceeds to Binance, which organizes a series of philanthropic projects via its charity arm, Binance Charity. 

Blockchain adoption on the continent
A Cointelegraph analysis piece earlier this week covered recent developments in Nigeria's blockchain sector, where lawmakers are increasingly recognizing the benefits of trustless and decentralized protocols for improving transparency in local institutions and governance.

Solomon Adaelu, a member of Nigeria’s House of Representatives, argued this July that Nigeria should take the lead in driving adoption of the technology continent-wide, saying:
     “Blockchain is for Africa and Africa must take advantage of it to close the gap in the industrial and economic advancement between
     the African continent and the rest of the world. On the African continent, Nigeria must take the lead as the ‘Giant of Africa.’”


source:  https://cointelegraph.com/news/nigerian-crypto-educator-returns-80k-in-bitcoin-received-by-mistake

Catherine Raw, the North America COO of the largest gold mining firm in the world, Barrick Gold, said that she does not think cryptocurrencies are competitive with gold, Fortune reported on Sept. 18.

Raw made her remarks yesterday at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women International Summit, where she stated:

     “The very tangible nature of gold is what keeps a special place for it. So it will always have value, whatever the price is, I don’t
     know, but it will not be zero. Whereas cryptocurrency could be zero — that’s the difference.”

The report points out that — so long as gold is being used for jewelry and electronics — it is guaranteed to have some value. That said, Raw also admits that “the phenomenon of cryptocurrency is here to stay.”

Hopes to bring young investors back to gold
Raw hopes that the gold industry will be able to win back young investors between the ages of 20 and 40 that ended up preferring crypto assets to gold. Raw admitted that currently, parties buying gold are mostly the Indian and Chinese markets, institutions and central banks.

She added that among young investors, there is an impression that the only people buying gold are “old fogies who are buying it because they’re scared of the world.” She said:

     “What I would like is actually to see gold harness that. [...] I think the gold industry has got its head in the sand by not taking
     advantage of a changing demographic. [...] My ambition over time is actually to see how as a gold industry we can harness that
     younger demographic.”

Earlier this month, Turkey's Istanbul Clearing, Settlement and Custody Bank (Takasbank) announced a blockchain-based platform for trading gold. Takasbank’s new project aims to enable people to transfer physical gold stored at the Borsa Istanbul Stock Exchange.


source:  https://cointelegraph.com/news/crypto-not-competitive-with-gold-barrick-gold-exec

Bitcoin (BTC) price continued to fluctuate around $10,500 on Sept. 5 as the largest cryptocurrency stopped short of breaking $11,000.


                                   Market visualization. Source: Coin360

Bitcoin simmers after latest $11K moonshot
Data from Coin360 showed less volatile action for BTC/USD on Thursday, following the pair’s sudden rise of over $1,000 in the first half of the week.

At press time, Bitcoin traded at $10,620, compared with just $9,350 at the same point last week.


                                   Bitcoin 7-day price chart. Source: Coin360

The 12% seven-day gains excited analysts, who abandoned bearish sentiment to forecast a continuation of upward momentum. A subsequent slowdown in growth has tempered those aspirations, however, with markets now waiting for outside events to sway the mood.

For Filb Filb, a popular Bitcoin trader, the launch of institutional trading platform Bakkt later in September is the closest such deciding moment.

“Bitcoin continues to consolidate above $10k,” he summarized in private comments, adding:

     “A lot of people are hoping to get bids filled below $9k; the market rarely gets what it wants and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are
     forced to buy higher. But let’s see what happens with the launch of Bakkt.”

While opinions suggest demand for Bakkt’s physical Bitcoin futures will be high, activity has yet to kick off, with client deposits beginning on Friday this week.

Altcoins continue to bite the dust
Bitcoin’s latest consolidation meanwhile continues to pile pressure on altcoin markets. Most major tokens lost several percentage points in U.S. dollar terms on Thursday, having failed to rally in line with Bitcoin.

Ether (ETH), the largest altcoin by market cap, fared worse than any in the top twenty, dropping 3.4% to hit $171.

As trader Nick Cote warned on Thursday, a further dip below $160 could even have a knock-on effect for Bitcoin.

“A break below the $160 handle would spell disaster for the bulls. I'd assume most /USD pairs, including Bitcoin would dump as well,” he wrote.


                                   Ether 7-day price chart. Source: Coin360

Others lost between 1% and 3% on the day, while only Monero (XMR) noticeably bucked the trend, delivering 3.2% gains.

Bitcoin’s share of the $267 billion crypto market cap stood at 71% on Thursday, continuing to expand on highs not seen in over two years.


source:  https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-price-rejected-at-108k-as-crypto-market-braces-for-bakkt

Australian software programmer and Bitcoin’s (BTC) Lightning Network coder Rusty Russell warned users that “security issues have been found in various Lightning projects which could cause loss of funds.”

Urgent update recommended
On Aug. 30, Russell published a tweet urging LN nodes operators to update their software as soon as possible. According to the message, his warning concerns all versions of c-lightning prior to 0.7.1, lnd older than 0.7, and eclair up to version 0.3.

Notably, just earlier this month blockchain development company Blockstream announced the release of the version 0.7.2 of its BTC scalability software c-lightning.

Details to be released
In a PGP-signed message published on Linux Foundation’s domain Russell explicitly warns users of security issues and promises that more details will be released in the future:

   “Full details will be released in 4 weeks (2019-09-27), please upgrade well before then.”

Lightning Network is a second-layer off-chain Bitcoin scalability solution meant to enable instant and near-free BTC payments. Blockstream’s chief strategy officer Samson Mow recently said that Bitcoin is bad for payments, but Lightning Network could solve this.

As Cointelegraph reported earlier this month, Andreas Antonopoulos announced his new “Mastering Lightning Network” book, co-authored by René Pickhardt and Lightning Labs CTO Olaoluwa Osuntokun.


source:  https://cointelegraph.com/news/australian-coder-warns-users-of-lightning-networks-vulnerabilities

Crypto exchange Coinbase disclosed a potential vulnerability Friday, announcing that a tiny fraction of its customers’ passwords were stored in plain text on an internal server log. However, the information was not improperly accessed by outside parties, the exchange said.

In a post-mortem shared with CoinDesk, Coinbase outlined “a password storage issue,” impacting less than 3,500 customers (out of more than 30 million worldwide) that briefly resulted in personal information, including the passwords, being stored in clear text on internal logging systems.

“Under a very specific and rare error condition, the registration form on our signup page wouldn’t load correctly, which meant that any attempt to create a new Coinbase account under those conditions would fail,” the post explained. “Unfortunately, it also meant that the individual’s name, email address, and proposed password (and state of residence, if in the US) would be sent to our internal logs.”

In 3,420 instances, the potential customers used the same password on their second signup attempt, which would be successful but would result in their having a password that matches the hashed version on the company’s logs. Those customers were notified by Coinbase via email on Friday.

The bug occurred due to Coinbase’s use of React.js server-side rendering on the signup page. Essentially, when a user visits the page to sign up for an account, React helps display the form that needs to be filled out.

“Any user attempting to register needs to have JavaScript enabled, and needs to have that JavaScript load correctly,” the post explained, adding:

   “In virtually all circumstances, both of these things are true, and React handles form validation and submission to the server.
    However, if a user had JavaScript disabled or their browser received a React.js error when loading, there was enough pre-rendered
    HTML that a user could fill out and attempt to submit our registration form.”

Because the HTML form “was extremely basic,” no “action” or “method” attributes were set. Due to default behaviors, this resulted in some browsers defaulting to “GET,” which encoded form variables as part of the log data.

The exchange fixed the issue by switching the default form method to “POST,” to ensure data is no longer logged.

While Coinbase searched for other forms “with that problematic behavior,” the exchange did not identify any.

“We’re also in the process of implementing additional mechanisms to detect and prevent the inadvertent introduction of this sort of bug in the future,” the blog post said.

In response to the discovery, Coinbase said it tracked the various location where the logs might be stored, which included a system hosted on Amazon Web Services and some “log analysis service providers.”

“A thorough review of access to these logging systems did not reveal any unauthorized access to this data,” the post said, adding that access to each of the systems is “tightly restricted and audited.”

Coinbase said it has also triggered password resets for any individual whose account was impacted. (The blog post added that it requires two-factor authentication on top of a password in order for users to log into accounts.)

“While we are confident that we’ve fixed the root cause and that the logged information was not improperly accessed, misused, or compromised, we are requiring those customers to change their passwords as a best-practice precaution,” the post explained.

“As a reminder, Coinbase also maintains an active bug bounty program on HackerOne, which has paid out over a quarter of a million dollars to date. While this particular bug was discovered internally, we welcome security researchers to submit reports any time they believe they may have uncovered a flaw in one of our systems,” the exchange concluded.

Coinbase’s disclosure comes on the heels of Binance and Huobi suffering from actual data breaches. Unlike Coinbase, Binance and Huobi appear to have lost control of client know-your-customer data, including identity verification documents.


source:  https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-reveals-password-glitch-affecting-3500-customers