Enterprise blockchain startup Symbiont has closed a $20 million
Series-B funding round led by Nasdaq Ventures with participation
from Galaxy Digital, Citi, Raptor Group and others.

The firm, which has kept a fairly low profile the last two years as
the cryptocurrency market’s gyrations overshadowed the
enterprise sector, previously raised a combined $15.4 million from
a seed round in 2014 and Series A in 2017.
Symbiont CEO Mark Smith told CoinDesk that the firm doubled its
staff last year, and now has more than 60 employees.

“We have been very good stewards of capital for the six years we
have been in business. I think we have done more with less than
anybody out there,” Smith said. “So it was time for us to do a
bigger round and adding the Nasdaq as an investor and partner,
and Citi as an investor and partner, really solidifies our strategy.”

As part of the investment, Nasdaq Financial Framework, a software
company owned by the exchange, will integrate Symbiont’s
Assembly smart contracts platform to explore new avenues
involving tokenization.
Smith, a veteran of the early days of financial market matching
engines, explained there has been a big movement towards
combining blockchain with traditional exchange technology.
“Symbiont will give Nasdaq the ability to originate a financial
instrument and the smart contract to custody it on a blockchain, to
allow trading to occur with their matching engine, to allow
surveillance to occur across the network using Nasdaq technology
and then to perform settlement on a blockchain,” he said.
To be clear, Symbiont is not working with the Nasdaq proper, just
the software arm, which sells tech to other exchanges, clearing
houses and central securities depositories in about 50 countries.

As Smith put it:
“We are infrastructure people: dirt under the fingernails, digging
the ditches, laying the roads.”

Win Some, Lose Some
Indeed, Symbiont has kept a firm focus on building capital markets
infrastructure using a proprietary blockchain and smart contracts
architecture.
The startup has lasered in on a handful of carefully selected use
cases and partners, such as index data management with
investment giant Vanguard; making the mortgage market
transparent and more efficient with Wall Street legend Lewis
Ranieri ; and optimizing the syndicated loans market with Ipreo’s
Synaps platform.

However, not all its partnerships panned out. For instance,
Symbiont dedicated a lot of time and effort between 2015 and 2017
helping create a blockchain technology-enabled regulatory
environment in the state of Delaware, creating rules for share
registry and the ability to create a whole new class of securities.
All that work, done free of charge, came to naught for Symbiont
when Governor Jack Markell’s term ended, according to Smith.

“The new administration came in with less fanfare about the use of
the technology and a very conservative approach,” he said.

“Instead of moving forward, they took a big step back and decided
to defend the incumbents against what they considered disruptive
tech, then reached out to IBM and spent over $1 million replicating
the exact road map we gave the state.” (The precise amount of the
single-bid contract was $738,000 , according to the Delaware
News Journal.)
Another wrench was thrown into the works last August, when
Symbiont’s partner on syndicated loans, Ipreo, was acquired by
IHS Markit, which has worked with ethereum-based Quorum
(developed by JPMorgan) on this use case.

Smith could not say too much about this but hinted that
Symbiont’s new big-bank investor would go to bat for it on the
syndicated loan front. “Certainly with Citi now in our cap table we
can see how this is going to move forward,” he said.
Competitive landscape
It’s common these days to view the enterprise blockchain world as
consisting of Hyperedger, R3, Digital Asset and enterprise
ethereum variants. Symbiont has been around for as long as any of
these forks, consortiums or other proprietary solutions, and Smith
is never shy about sharing his opinion of them.

“I would argue that we are the only enterprise blockchain
solution,” he said. The others, he contended, either aren’t really
blockchains or have privacy and security shortcomings or haven’t
produced anything beyond ideas.

On the subject of corralling together large consortiums, Smith
believes innovation always comes from individuals and small
teams that are able to iterate quickly and nimbly.
“I think what you get in consortiums is just compromise. You end
up with average tech, nothing revolutionary – sometimes barely
evolutionary. Creating a back office as a service with a shared
ledger is not revolutionary. That’s what a consortium will get
you,” Smith said.

So what does Symbiont have to show for its work? Smith said
several of its projects will enter production in 2019, starting with
the Vanguard collaboration, which uses corporate action data to
manage the asset manager’s passive indices. Syndicated loans
and mortgages will follow.
As far as the sustained bear market for crypto assets is concerned,
Smith said from day one his firm had stayed away from those sorts
of “shenanigans.”

“We kept our head down and focused on what we always believed
would be the marketplace, which is a regulated marketplace,” he
said.

Of course, he is very sad to hear of people losing their jobs and
said it was unfortunate that many people lost a lot of money. But
overall, Smith said he is glad to be out of the hype cycle,
concluding,
“We are in the trough of disillusionment and I am extremely
excited.”

https://www.coindesk.com/

Anyone with stashes of Ether cryptocurrency might
want to watch out for increasingly cunning
scammers, who've found out how to make big
funds with simple swindles.

In 2018, tricksters made $36 million by duping
Ether owners into handing over their money for no
one's profit but the crooks'. That was double the
$17 million for 2017, according to a report from
Chainalysis , which tracks cryptocurrencies for all
manner of government agenices, private entities
and exchanges. (Chainalysis classes scammers as
different to hackers who exploit bugs and outright
steal cryptocurrency, such as those who stole $32
million in Ether in 2017 . Indeed, hackers are
making more than scammers, thanks to repeat
smash and grabs from 2016 through 2019.)

And whilst the number of scams actually started
decling through 2018, they "were bigger, more
sophisticated and vastly more lucrative," according
to the analysis, exclusively provided to Forbes.
Chainalysis found more than 2,000 scam addresses
on Ethereum, the blockchain-based platform on
which Ether (also known by its acronym ETH) is
distributed. Those accounts received funds from
nearly 40,000 unique users over last year. That's
four times more people scammed in 2018 than 2017.

Classic ponzi schemes are working
According to Philip Gradwell, chief economist at
Chainalysis, one of the most significant scams of
2018 was the classic ponzi scheme. This saw
scammers send out emails to Ether owners, asking
them to contribute money for which they'd see a
guaranteed return. Of course, the return was simply
derived from other people contributing to the pot,
not from any genuine investment.

One of the most significant pyramid schemes was
that of 333 ETH, said Gradwell, which made off with
$3.5 million worth of Ether. Running on the
Ethereum-based DApp decentralized application, it
promised a daily 3.33% payout from an initial buy-
in. Though it was called out as a scam , it still
attracted a significant number of Ether owners.
Forbes attempted to find contact details for 333
ETH, but its Russian-language website was down at
the time of publication and there were no contacts
listed in the site's registration details.

The other major scam, which was leading to more
significant losses in the first half of 2018, was the
fake initial coin offering (ICO). Gradwell said this
was down to an ICO "fever" in the early stages of
last year. In some cases, entirely fake ICOs were
created with legitimate-looking websites and
campaigns behind them, encouraging people to buy
up some fancy new currency. The coins then
mysteriously disappeared, as the ICO turned out to
be a fraud.

Finally, standard phishing, where unwitting victims
were duped out of their account passwords. Once
inside Ether wallets, the hackers ransacked the
cryptocurrency within.

An Emerging Android Threat
Whilst it'd be wise for Ether owners to use complex
passwords and be aware of scammers tricks, there's
an emerging threat out there in the form of fake
Android apps.

Lukas Stefanko, a cybersecurity researcher at ESET,
has found a number of fake Ether wallets going
around Google Play. Often they impersonate
MyEtherWallet or MetaMask, trying to rob users of
their login details for the real apps. Each time
Stefanko has warned Google, the apps have been
swiftly removed.

Just earlier this week, the researcher tried out a
mini social experiment, asking his Twitter followers
to pick one of two MyEtherWallet apps that were on
Google's market. A worrying 40% chose the fake.

https://www.forbes.com/

After more than a year since the crypto market’s massive
correction in early 2018, none of the various predictions about
an equally massive rally that might catapult prices back to its
late 2017 highs have materialized.

Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency based on market cap, is
currency trading at around $3,500 which is way below its
almost $18,000 all-time high in December 2017.

But what is surprising is that despite the depressed prices of
all cryptos, adoption of digital coins continues to spread
worldwide.
For instance, Saudi Arabia and UAE just launched a new joint
cryptocurrency to facilitate cross border payments.

Middle East’s New Joint Cryptocurrency Announced
The new joint cryptocurrency was announced during the first
meeting of the Saudi-Emirati Coordination Council held in Abu
Dhabi on January 19, 2019, according to WAM , UAE’s national
press agency.

The meeting was attended by all of the council’s 16 members
from both countries as they discussed various strategies on
possible areas of collaboration such as the financial markets,
aviation, customs, tourism, and security.
The launch of the Saudi-Emirati Pilot cryptocurrency is aimed
at facilitating cross-border payments at the moment.
Initially, it will only be used by banks during the experimental
stage as the council still wants to gauge the implications of
using cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology in such a
scenario.

The distributed database for the crypto will be shared and
maintained by all the participating banks as well as the central
banks of the two countries.

Saudi-Emirati Alliance
While initially limited only for cross-border payments between
Saudi and UAE, the success of this joint digital coin could have
a positive impact on the cryptocurrency market as a whole.
The financial might of the Saudi-Emirati alliance is among the
world’s strongest blocs as the combined sovereign wealth
funds of both countries is the second largest in the world.
The alliance’ clout also extends in the export, oil and corporate
sectors.

Combined, the two countries are ranked eighth worldwide in
terms of exports of services and goods, account for almost a
quarter of the world’s oil stock and is ranked 17th when it
comes to the market cap of their listed companies.
A cryptocurrency that can reliably handle the cross-border
bank transactions between the two countries is basically a
seal of approval on crypto’s use as a financial tool.

https://blokt.com/news/

Details have so far been murky regarding millions of
dollars worth of tokens stolen from New Zealand-based
cryptocurrency exchange Cryptopia on Jan. 14. But data
company Elementus has been investigating and now
says the hack was different from previous attacks of this
nature – and the amount stolen is much higher than
originally thought.

Details Becoming Clearer in ‘Weird’ Hack
Last week Cryptopia became the latest exchange to be
hit by an attack. The Christchurch-based platform had
initially announced that it had taken down its services for
“unscheduled maintenance” before revealing it had
“suffered a security breach which resulted in significant
losses.” Since then, details have been unclear and the
amount lost has not been made public. Police in New
Zealand announced that they were working with the
exchange to figure out precisely what happened.

But data firm Elementus has since started to provide
information , including figures revealing how much was
taken, which it claims to be around $16 million in
ethereum (ETH) an ERC20 tokens. The company told
news.Bitcoin.com that this hack was particularly unusual
as the theft was conducted in a number of small
operations using a number of wallets.

“Many different wallets were involved, which is weird.
With other hacks we have seen in the past, they just took
the money and tried to launder it in one shot. But this
guy has been very careful and has done many transfers
in small amounts,” Nuria Gutierrez, the co-founder
of Elementus said. “I guess it’s smart – and cheap.”
Gutierrez added that stealing tokens in small amounts
and with many wallets it a better way to avoid detection
and being traced.

Elementus revealed data showing that of the of the $16m
that was stolen, the vast majority remains in two wallets
controlled by the thieves. The hackers have been
shuffling the funds around in small pieces and gradually
moving them into exchanges to cash out. Over 76,000
different wallets, none of which were smart contract-
based, were used, meaning the thieves must have gained
access to not one private key, but thousands of them,
according to Elementus. And instead of withdrawing the
funds as fast as possible, they took their time extracting
the assets over the course of nearly five days after
Cryptopia realized they were being stolen from.

A Slower Than Usual Hack
“The lack of urgency on the part of the thieves is
striking,” Elementus said. Normally hacks are done fairly
quickly, with hackers discovering a vulnerability in a
wallet’s smart contract code, which allows them to
empty its funds, or when someone is able to get a hold of
a wallet’s private key and simply withdraws the funds
into their own blockchain wallet.

It is possible that future hackers may try and copy the
Cryptopia technique in order to avoid detection.
Elementus said that the exchanges should be freezing
these funds as soon as they arrive, adding that there are
“no excuses. On the blockchain there is nowhere to hide,
and no reason 100 percent of these transfers should not
have been frozen immediately.”

Police in New Zealand have since said the investigation
into the Cryptopia hack is “very complex” and that
“positive lines of inquiry are being developed to identify
the source of the transfer,” but it will take some time to
complete, according to local media .

https://news.bitcoin.com/

Euro Exim Bank, a London-based bank primarily focused on
providing financial services for export and import companies, will
become the first bank to publicly announce it is using the XRP
cryptocurrency for cross-border payments.

Ripple announced Tuesday that Euro Exim Bank, alongside
payment startups JNFX, SendFriend, Transpaygo and FTCS, would
be leveraging XRP for cross-border transactions. Further, Ahli
Bank of Kuwait, BFC Bahrain, ConnectPay, GMT, WorldCom
Finance, Olympia Trust Company, Pontual/USEND and
Rendimento have signed on to RippleNet.

As a result, the startup now has more than 200 customers
worldwide, according to Tuesday’s reveal.
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said the company is now signing
two-three customers per week, and last year saw a 350 percent
increase in customers sending live payments.

“We’re beginning to see more customers flip the switch and
leverage XRP for on-demand liquidity,” he added in a statement.
Euro Exim Bank director Kaushik Punjani noted that his bank’s
customers have traditionally been restricted from settling
transactions quickly and cost efficiently. This issue extends to
both major corporations and individual remitters, he said, adding:

“Working collaboratively with Ripple and selected counterparts,
we have designed, tested and are implementing both xCurrent
and xRapid in record time, and we look forward to the benefits
these will bring our customers.”

David Lighton, CEO and co-founder of remittance service
SendFriend, similarly touted the focus on cheap cross-border
payments as the main benefit of using xRapid.

“A distributed ledger-based solution, leveraging Ripple’s XRP
asset allows us to settle transactions in real time, with lower
capital requirements and lower costs. We’re proud to partner with
Ripple to offer our customers cheaper, faster, payments to the
developing world,” he told CoinDesk.

A number of other companies have already begun using xRapid ,
which uses the XRP cryptocurrency, for international payments,
including MercuryFX, Cuallix and Catalyst Corporate Credit Union.
However, while the three firms provide financial services, none
possess a banking license like Euro Exim does.
In the past, other companies including Western Union,
MoneyGram, Viamercias and IDT have trialed xRapid, though none
are utilizing the platform in full production at this time.

https://www.coindesk.com/

Ripple, the blockchain company that has the XRP digital
currency, reached a milestone on Tuesday (Jan. by reaching
200 customers.

According to a blog post, Ripple said that in addition to the 200
customers, it has seen a 350 percent increase in customers who
are sending live payments over its blockchain platform. The
company announced that 13 new financial institutions,
including Euro Exim Bank, SendFriend, JNFX, FTCS, Al Ahli
Bank of Kuwait, Transpaygo, BFC Bahrain, ConnectPay, GMT,
WorldCom Finance, Olympia Trust Company, Pontual/USEND
and Rendimento have joined its payment network.

The company noted that JNFX, SendFriend, Transpaygo, FTCS
and Euro Exim Bank will leverage XRP, its digital token, to
source liquidity on demand when sending payments on behalf of
their customers. Ripple said that using XRP for liquidity when
sending a cross-border payment helps financial firms avoid the
need to pre-fund accounts in the destination currencies and
enables them to make faster and cheaper payments.

“In 2018, nearly 100 financial institutions joined RippleNet , and
we’re now signing two — sometimes three — new customers
per week. We also saw a 350 percent increase last year in
customers sending live payments, and we’re beginning to see
more customers flip the switch and leverage XRP for on-
demand liquidity,” said Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, in the
blog post. “At the end of the day, our goal is to make sure our
customers can provide excellent, efficient cross-border
payments experiences for their customers, wherever they are in
the world.”

In an interview with CNBC, Garlinghouse said Ripple is now in
more than 40 countries and has plans to expand further. As it
stands, it has a lot of work to do if it wants to make a real
impact on the global payments market, which is still under the
control of the world’s largest banks.
While Ripple is seen as a crypto play, that is not its most
popular product. CNBC reported that xCurrent, the software that
lets Ripple work with the existing infrastructure of banks to
settle payments in a speedy manner, is its most widely used
service. Its crypto product xRapid, which went live in the fall,
uses cryptocurrency as a bridge between foreign currencies, the
CEO told CNBC.

https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2019/

An Ethereum (ETH) code contributor has suggested that Ethereum
developers ‘embrace’ specialized mining hardware (ASICs) in a
reply on Ethereum developer forum Ethereum Magicians, Jan. 7.

As Cointelegraph reported last week, Ethereum core developers
have tentatively decided to implement a new proof-of-work (PoW )
algorithm, dubbed ProgPoW, which would decrease the efficiency
divide between ASICs and GPUs, while rendering current Ethereum
ASICs obsolete.

According to another developer on Ethereum Magicians, David
Vorick, ProgPoW would favor larger ASIC producers because the
more complex hardware needed would exacerbate the economies
of scale involved.
Following Vorick’s comment, a developer named Alexey Akhunov
stated in a response post:

“If we want to obsolete the current EtHash mining devices,
but at the same time not to induce more secretive
behaviour on the part of ASIC manufacturers, we need to
‘embrace’ it and switch to an ASIC-friendly algorithm now
instead of an ASIC-unfriendly algorithm. Which the
opposite of what we are doing.”

Ethereum devs’ general rationale behind objecting to using ASICs
to mine ETH is that specialized hardware has no natural
distribution, no reserve group, a high barrier to entry, production
centralization and backdoor potential.

The rationale was gently challenged by Vorick, who asked “what
needs to be done in order to bring ProgPoW hardware peacefully to
the Ethereum community?” Vorick continued:

“Nobody has interest in making enemies or being
hardforked and invalidated, yet multiple groups have
interest in making special purpose Ethereum mining
hardware, which at this point means targeting ProgPoW.”

The developer argued that the amount of money at stake
guarantees that at least some hardware producers will choose to
keep new ASICs secret to prevent a new hard fork making the tech
obsolete. Vorick then poses the question:

“If a hardware developer manages to create a ProgPoW
ASIC that outperforms GPUs by a surprising margin [...] is
it better for that manufacturer to keep their discovery secret
and mine secretly, or is it better for that manufacturer to
sell openly?”

Linzhi, a Chinese mining hardware producer, had already released
a call to Ethereum developers to “publish rules for what
constitutes a good ProgPoW ASIC maker.” The company declared
that it is currently designing an Ethash mining machine,
announcing:

“We reject arbitrary enforcement of rules, and request clear
and equal guidelines to be established for all hardware
makers. Today we are calling upon the Ethereum
developers to publish rules and requirements for what
constitutes a good ProgPoW ASIC maker.”

Akhunov commented on Twitter today, Jan. 8, that it would be
great to establish a transparent dialogue between developers and
an ASIC manufacturer, such as Linzhi. According to him, Ethereum
core developers lack the kind of expertise of such producers, and
open information about ASIC capabilities would be useful to them.
As Cointelegraph reported today, the Ethereum Classic ( ETC ) team
had tweeted that anomalous activity on the ETC network might be
attributed to Linzhi’s testing of new 1,400Mh machines meant for
the Ethash algorithm — the PoW algorithm currently employed by
both Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. Following the statement,
Linzhi Shenzhen's director of operations denied these claims in a
Tweet that has since been deleted.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/