Equicex Group, which offers regular and privacy-focused debit cards and an exchange, has decided to integrate Dash to greatly enhance the spending options of Dash users.

he Equicex Blue VISA Card is currently available for GBP, EUR and USD currency, but their CIO, David Miller, says they “will add more currencies depending on our users countries”. The card has various fees and limits based on the currency being used, but they are relatively low compared to other prepaid VISA cryptocurrency cards and their Virtual Card is even cheaper. David highlighted that “the normal Blue Visa Card is for the everyday user and in order to have higher withdrawal and transaction limits the user must be verified on our system”. Currently, this card is available in 95 countries.


Equicex also offers the Black Card, as “a unique product which has no limits, and they do not require any kind of identification documents”, David continued explaining, “it is most used by merchants who want to provide their users fully anonymous services”. The Black Card is available worldwide in CAD and CHF, in addition to GBP, EUR and USD currencies. David highlighted that since the card is “issued by an offshore bank it automatically comes with enhanced protection and anonymous services”. However, “the prices and also monthly charges are higher since the Black Card is issued by a well-known offshore bank in Belize and all offshore banks have higher prices than normal banks”.


Finally, Equicex also offers a cryptocurrency exchange as “an additional service on their website to their customers as well as all other people”. They only charge a 0.10% fee on top of network fees for these exchanges, which makes their platform a one-stop shop for cryptocurrency spending and exchange hub.

Integration of Dash to offer consumers more spending options

#DASH is now available on #Equicex. Trade against,,,, and many more. Virtual Prepaid and Plastic cards deposits are enabled. https://t.co/Ex94bu7J7H @Dashpay pic.twitter.com/rJwqeatAAj
— Equicex Exchange (@equicexgroup) March 9, 2019

Equicex’s decision to integrate Dash will benefit both parties with increased cryptocurrency usage. Consumers are currently able to spend Dash at over 4,800 merchants around the world, however, there are still many items that consumers require that cannot easily be purchased directly with Dash. A cryptocurrency debit card vastly enhances consumer options when making purchasing decisions and seamlessly switching between merchants that directly accept cryptocurrencies and those that do not. However, many of these cards have struggled with delivering their products, have long waiting lists, expensive fees/rates, and/or require consumers to sacrifice a lot of private information to meet KYC/AML regulations placed on the company by partner banks and/or governments.

This is where Equicex really shines since their Black Card does not require any of this sensitive information since their partner bank is located in Belize. Additionally, their fees and rate are relatively good when compared to other cryptocurrency debit cards that do not even offer the same privacy features. Thus, consumers that got into cryptocurrency for privacy reasons, many of which are in Dash for PrivateSend and its former Darkcoin days, can still have the best of both worlds with increased spending options, while also maintaining their privacy.


Dash committed to increasing consumer and merchant value
Within only a few years, and mostly within last year alone, Dash has been able to get over 4,800 merchants around the world to accept Dash, many of which are located in Venezuela and Colombia. Dash is providing value to merchants by saving them time and money that traditional card processors typically charge and gives value to consumers via pass-through price decreases thanks to merchant savings. Additionally, there is the benefit of monetary and financial freedom of no longer being tied to the inflationary fiat world, which is easier to see in countries like Venezuela, hence the faster adoption.

However, these card services help bridge the gap for cryptocurrency users until more merchants directly integrate cryptocurrencies. Gift card services like Bitrefill, eGifter, and Coincards help supplement direct merchant Dash adoption as well, which has seen rapid increases in availability. Dash is helping to provide additional value to consumers and merchants in as many channels as possible in an attempt to kick-start mass adoption. As more third party services help the process, direct integration will become more feasible and popular when cryptocurrencies come back into the mainstream during the next bull market.


SOURCE: https://dashnews.org/equicex-integrates-dash-into-debit-cards-and-exchange-expands-spending-options-and-liquidity/

It’s the right time to kick-start the next iteration of the web, with smart, decentralised digital services powered by blockchain and the new technologies Waves is building.

The concept of decentralization is, as a matter of fact, quite new. Surprisingly, it was first formulated around the 19th century, together with the concept of centralization itself. Before that time people did not really give much thought to the general principles of the things they built, be it society’s structure or technology. Creation of huge nation states drew attention to the general principles of society structure, and brought about suspicion that rigid vertical structures had their own drawbacks. Rigid hierarchy and chain of command do make a lot of sense in many situations, but this always creates centralized point of failure, making systems vulnerable and corruptible.

In the late 20th century technology started to have an overwhelming effect on the development of society. Computer networks became the veins through which society’s blood flows; tech that we build has a huge impact on the society we live in. The concept of decentralized technology started to take shape in the late 70s, in the form of distributed computing and consensus research.

The real breakthrough, at least in people’s minds, came with blockchain technology. For the first time in the history of human technology we were able to create truly decentralized systems controlled only by the protocol we feed into them. Blockchain is now more than 10 years old, and although we can’t do all the things we want with it just yet, we can do enough to try and go beyond prototypes and working use-cases. Mass adoption, that Holy Grail of any emerging technology, must be found ASAP, since the time has come. WEB2.0 corporations have come to hold too much power. We did not notice how they gained access to tons of sensitive and valuable big data, and now we have the kind of monopoly that just can’t last.

WEB3.0, the concept which emerged at the end of the last century, is finally shaping up in the first real products that unify a host of different technologies (Big Data, AI, IoT…) on a decentralized footing. To kick-start the revolution it is of vital importance to create retail WEB3.0 products and working enterprise applications now. We need to go beyond the crypto-community to make the ideas that emerged within it truly work.


We can’t achieve full decentralization just yet, and actually we might never achieve it. To make WEB3.0 a really useful concept we need to understand that the end-goal of WEB3.0 is the creation of robust, transparent, synergetic systems by any means necessary. Decentralizing critical business logic and using centralized tech where we can’t do without it (storage, complicated computation), we are able to create products that can gain mass adoption now, where there’s a real need in a new approach in the systems we are building. Data storage can be enhanced and allow for privacy protection. It’s time to get down to some fancy and sophisticated cryptography, such as homomorphic encryption, and really make it work. In the near future, I’m sure, we’ll also be able to use verifiable computation, using which one can outsource computation to third-parties and obtain verifiable results.

The decentralized layer, of course, has to be improved to solve scalability issues that riddle blockchain systems now. Waves’ RIDE smart contracts language update will provide a new approach to decentralized computation and business logic, which is closer to the nature of blockchain systems. It will be on the Waves mainnet by June. Waves-NG maximizes what you can get from on-chain transactions in terms of speed. To go further you need either to move off-chain or create custom sidechains, that process specific sets of transactions. The second approach is closer to our philosophy of getting the maximum from the current technology before moving forward, and it will be implemented in the second half of 2019. Future systems may (and probably should) give up on total network synchronization completely, but there’s still a long way to go, and the current technology is mature enough to disrupt WEB 2.0 architecture.

The gateway to our WEB3.0 world is going to be our Waves Keeper. Storing private keys user-side and not trusting any sensitive data to third parties is the key to WEB3, and Keeper does exactly that.

The next architecture level is the Decentralized Business logic layer. Sensitive business logic running on smart contracts, encrypted important private data, monetization through tokenization — it all goes there. Going deeper we arrive at the Centralized Layer, which soaks up WEB3 ideas as well — data is encrypted, computation is verifiable.

Based on this architecture we’re building several applications now, with mass adoption in mind.

They tap into diverse markets but are unified by the ideas of tokenization, being accessible to a mass audience, and providing an unparalleled level of transparency.

We are building a decentralized voting platform. This is one of the most promising directions for distributed tech. Its usage on the municipal level is starting to happen- and its widespread application is inevitable. Transparent, anonymous and verifiable voting can change the game completely.

We build a social network. It might seem too ambitious but this is just the right moment to do it. Privacy preserving, tokenized social network can be a huge leap forward for social interaction. We know how to do it, and you’ll see a prototype this summer.

We’re launching Vostok network, our WEB3.0 solution for enterprise. Any implementation of blockchain tech in enterprise is WEB3.0 by default, since only a combination of different technologies, on a decentralized footing, can make sense in a corporate environment. Without it blockchain is just a weird database.

We don’t solely do blockchain tech any longer; it is just a part of a bigger picture. We’re becoming the first company that focuses exclusively on monetizable WEB3.0 applications. We want to become one of the first Googles or Facebooks of the future Internet. Godspeed to us, decentralize or die!


SOURCE: https://blog.wavesplatform.com/web3-0-the-road-ahead-for-waves-9bd8a51f63ce

The NEM Foundation has released its plan for a financial and organizational restructuring on March 8. The plan comes in the wake of news earlier this year that the foundation was running low on its native XEM tokens.

On Feb. 20, the foundation decided to release 210 million XEM tokens ($8.7 million) from reserves, the first 25 million ($1.04 million) of which will be used “to set up processes and structures for a new product-focused, revenue-driven approach for NEM Foundation.” The new tokens will purportedly fund the NEM Foundation’s efforts through Feb. 2020.

In additionally to releasing new financing, the foundation will also examine certain roles at the company. The NEM Foundation purportedly ran into financial difficulties due to redundant roles, inconsistent success metrics, little accountability for funds and a questionable return on investments.

Per Friday’s announcement, the NEM Foundation will set up a “transformation task force” to work on short term goals including the development of weekly and monthly reporting structures for employees and a scorecard for grading employee performance.

While the foundation appeared to be facing the possibility of massive layoffs in January, the announcement states that SDK developers have been hired to expand its current SDKs to include Python, PHP and Unity in addition to the current Javascript and Java.

The NEM Foundation was founded in 2017, two years after the release of the XEM token, and is based in Singapore. The organization’s purpose is to “introduce, educate and promote the use of the NEM blockchain technology platform on an international scale to all industries and institutions,” according to its website.

At press time, XEM is trading at $0.0417, down 1.43 percent on the day, according to data from CoinMarketCap. The token’s market capitalization is currently over $375 million.


SOURCE: https://cointelegraph.com/news/nem-foundation-releases-restructuring-plan-amid-financial-difficulties

Estonia-based digital trading platform DX.Exchange has added tokenized Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) to its services, according to press release shared with Cointelegraph on March 6.

The move involves the tokenization of popular ETFs, such as SPY, which represents the S&P 500, and QQQ, which backs the Nasdaq Composite at a 1:1 ratio. UWT (crude oil) and UDOW are among other ETFs offered on the platform. The ETFs offered can now be purchased both for cryptocurrencies and fiat during trading hours as well as after-hours.

According to the press release, the introduction of tokenized ETFs on DX.Exchange complies both with the latest guidelines issued by the European Securities and Markets Authority and with the EU Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II.

The chief operating officer of DX.Exchange, Amedeo Moscato, stated that he believes that the latest move by the EU-regulated company opens the world of popular financial assets to crypto holders. His statement reads:

“As of today, there’s over 130 Billion USD worth of Crypto that can now be invested in Digital Stocks and ETFs. Crypto investors who wished to hedge part of their crypto portfolio had only USD stable coins or limited options. Now they can invest in real world assets on the blockchain.”

DX.Exchange states that adding ETF trading to the platform will attract investors seeking to benefit from a lower-cost venue for executing their trades. Moreover, the decision will reportedly allow smaller retail investors or investors from developing countries to enter the market.

DX.Exchange first appeared as a concept in May last year and was launched in January of this year. The company uses Nasdaq’s Financial Information Exchange protocol to deliver its products.

As Cointelegraph wrote, the company initially proposed that crypto holders purchase tokens backed by stocks in various major companies, including Amazon, Baidu, Apple, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia and Tesla.

The trading at the Estonian exchange is currently only available for traders in the European Union. However, the company plans to make trading available to United States-based customers in 2019, according to a tweet from its co-founder and CEO in early January.



SOURCE: https://cointelegraph.com/news/nasdaq-powered-eu-digital-exchange-dx-adds-tokenized-etfs

United States startup VaultTel has introduced a hardware cryptocurrency wallet designed to fit in a mobile phone SIM card tray, a press release from the company reveals on March 6.

The solution reportedly combines a mobile application and a hardware chip, dubbed the VaultTel Card. The crypto storage solution will be sold in the U.S. starting today and will “immediately expand” to European countries via VaultTel's United Kingdom subsidiary.

The wallet uses biometric authentication along with the military grade encryption standard, AES 512, the press release reports.

According to the firm, users can lock the VaultTel Card to a single device and to a particular geographical location.

To store funds, customers can either insert the VaultTel Card inside an unused SIM card tray — in the case of dual SIM capacity — or connect the chip to their phone via an accessory, such as a dongle. The corresponding mobile app will then let users interface with their stored funds.

In February, after weeks of rumours and speculations, South Korean tech giant Samsung officially announced at the Mobile World Congress that its new smartphone, the Galaxy S10, will include a digital wallet that supports Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), COSMEE’s token (COSM) and Enjin’s token (ENJ).

In January, cryptocurrency hardware wallet firm Ledger presented its new Bluetooth-based wallet, Ledger Nano X, that has the capacity to store 100 different crypto assets. Later that month, the company released Ledger Live — a mobile app for Android and iOS that allows Nano X wallets owners to use their wallet without the need for a cable via their mobile device and a Bluetooth connection.



SOURCE: https://cointelegraph.com/news/us-startup-introduces-crypto-hardware-wallet-chip-for-cell-phones

VegaWallet, the comprehensive cryptocurrency wallet and merchant solution, is integration Dash via BitGo.

Huge News! Our Update Has Hit The Google Play Store For All Android Users. VegaWallet has also announced a partnership with @Dashpay! We are the 1st platform to use @BitGo Multi-Sig & InstantSend for the #DASH network! You wanted real-world applications for $crypto! We Deliver. pic.twitter.com/pgXko6mBWb
— VegaWallet (@VegaWallet) March 5, 2019

The press release highlights that Vegawallet will be “the first wallet to use BitGo’s multi-signature Dash implementation with InstantSend transactions, and in the future it will be developing real world applications for Dash’s Evolution hard fork”. The integration provides a lot of opportunity for both parties due to the increased attention that both will see from the integration, as Bradley Zastrow, Global Head of Business Development at Dash Core Group explained.

“VegaWallet’s ability to provide Dash users with with a secure wallet and payment solution plays a strong role in the value proposition. VegaWallet’s goal of creating a payments solution for the legal cannabis industry aligns with Dash’s goals to support underbanked businesses, making them a key partner for us going forward. Our primary focus is making daily commerce easy with Dash, and VegaWallet’s current and future products will add immense value to the Dash ecosystem. We are looking forward to our ongoing partnership with VegaWallet, as we continue to progress towards the launch of Evolution.”

Dash will be added to both the mobile and desktop wallets and will feature a full suite of tools for merchants, such as “inventory management system, business metrics, employee information panel, and other features, such as a cryptocurrency rewards and loyalty program powered by Dash and the VegaWallet Token”. VegaWallet also offers a merchant POS solution that also supports a credit card reader to support multi-payment options. VegaWallet also focuses on streamlined interfaces for seamless use by cryptocurrency beginners, in addition to “market trend data, full transaction history, and other popular user requests”.


Incentivizing Dash integrations
The VegaWallet integration will help bring Dash to more consumers and merchants by making it easily accessible through a seamless interface, as Tarek Hajri, CEO of VegaWallet, highlighted.

“VegaWallet’s partnership with Dash provides a unique atmosphere for improvement concerning real world applications in the blockchain based payments space. We believe customers will be excited for these future applications regarding the shared interests on our roadmap.”

This integration was made possible by Dash building out its infrastructure and a previous integration with BitGo last year. BitGo is an industry leader in institutional-grade cryptocurrency security and multi-signature wallets, which was touted as a way to make exchange and wallet integrations easier since many utilize BitGo for their platforms and thus only want to stick with coins supported by BitGo. However, the integration did not yield immediately clear adoption results, but now those results are starting to become more clear.

Additionally, another exciting development is that VegaWallet and Dash are holding a design contest for a new Dash themed wallet for VegaWallet. The winner will be selected by representatives from both VegaWallet and Dash and will be a permanent theme option in the VegaWallet Dash Wallet. VegaWallet also hopes to soon introduce an exchange that can easily be accessed via their mobile or desktop app to further incentivize user adoption.


Driving Dash adoption through multiple uses
Dash has focused a significant portion of its resources towards achieving merchant integrations, now almost 5,000 merchants around the world, and various ways to spend cryptocurrency. Merchants want simple solutions for their businesses, and thus, they need all-inclusive point-of-sales equipment, which is why devices like Salamantex, AnyPay, Spark with Uphold, and now VegaWallet provide these solution in one location. While the Dash community has worked diligently on their own solutions for merchants, the BitGo integration helped make VegaWellet possible to provide the market with more options. Consumers will now also have access to yet another wallet with additional features to make spending Dash easier and more fun. Thanks to the Dash treasury, which helped fund many of these ventures, merchants and consumers now have a plethora of choices when it comes to accepting or spending Dash, which will further help drive adoption.



SOURCE: https://dashnews.org/vegawallet-comprehensive-platform-adds-dash-first-bitgo-integration/

In order for a blockchain network to work well, new blocks need to be distributed to other nodes quickly. Lots of research has been done into how to transmit blocks using as little bandwidth as possible. The less bandwidth that is used, the quicker the messages will propagate. The Graphene protocol transmits blocks with what is believed to be the least amount of bandwidth possible.


How block propagation works, and the bandwidth chokepoint
When a Dash user makes a transaction, that transaction is submitted to one or more computers or nodes. Those nodes will send that transaction to other nodes and so on. Eventually almost every node will have that transaction. The nodes store that transaction for processing. All of the transactions that are not yet processed are stored in memory and collectively referred to as the mempool. Eventually, usually in two an a half minutes the transaction is included in a block. When the transaction is included in a block, it is generally considered valid and processed by the network.

So if one node is to communicate all the transactions in a block there are a few options. One way is to just transmit the whole block with all transaction. The first Bitcoin implementation did this. Another way is to communicate identifiers for all the transactions in a block and the order. The expectation is that the receiving node would be able to construct the block from the transactions it already has in the mempool. Compact Blocks, Xthin, and Graphene use this second idea to reduce the bandwidth needed to transmit blocks.


How Graphene mitigates bandwidth issues
A node with a new block that uses that Graphene protocol will construct two data structures. First, a Bloom filter with all the transactions in a block is constructed. Then an IBLT (invertible bloom lookup tables) with all the transactions in a block is constructed. Then this will be sent to nodes without the block. The receiving node will then pass all transactions in the mempool through the bloom filter. This should provide a list of all transactions in the block. However there could be too many transactions as the Bloom filter could have a false positive. There could also be transactions missing from the mempool. The receiver will then unpack the candidate transactions from the IBLT. This will identify any false positives and any missing transactions. Lastly if needed, the receiver will query other nodes for the missing transactions.

The result is that the set of transactions in a block can be recovered from just these two data structures. The only thing left to do is put the transactions in the correct order. The first version of the Graphene protocol would transmit order information with the Bloom filter and IBLT. The order information is not huge, but grows with the number of transactions in the block. For example a block with fewer than 256 transactions will take less than 1 bytes per transaction. A block with fewer than 65 thousand transactions will take less than 2 bytes per transaction. A block with fewer than 16 million transactions will take less than 3 bytes per transaction. For comparison, if Dash blocks could handle 16 million transactions that would provide 24 times the average transaction volume of Visa.

Bitcoin unlimited has taken this protocol one step further. November of last year the Bitcoin Cash chain hard forked to change a consensus rule to require blocks have transactions in a given, predetermined order. Such a choice of order is called a canonical order. After this change, Graphene can be used without including the order information. This is where Graphene shines. Blocks can become very large and the optimal bloom filter and IBLT stay very small.


Challenges to Graphene
However, the situation is more complected than that. The implementation of Graphene developed by researchers from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst assumes that all memory pools all transactions. Meanwhile our research at ASU research suggests that mempools will inevitably have some discrepancies, which can be refereed to as mempool divergence. Further, our research suggests that mempool divergence gets worse as the network grows. This means that the probability of decoding the IBLT calculated by Umass researchers will in practice be smaller. This means that performance of Graphene will not be as great as expected.

During a summer internship with Nakul Chawla funded by Dash Core Group, we explored how to fail gracefully in the event of an IBLT failure to decode. It is a fact that another bloom filter and IBLT could be requested from any other node. Once two are acquired, they can be put together, and have an almost certain chance of decoding both put together. We can even take a cue from BitcoinXT that asks three nodes for the block at the same time. Try to decode the first full response and if there is a decode failure, most likely there would be a supplemental response that could be combined with the first. During this internship malformed IBLTs were identified that would cause a infinite loop. That was easy to deal with. During this internship a working Dash Core implementation was made that would employ the Graphene protocol. We were able to do some testing with this client. There were a few clean up things that needed to be done before network wide distribution. It would also be nice to have this graceful fail implemented before going live. However, I feel that this work led to an even better idea.


SOURCE: https://dashnews.org/the-graphene-block-propagation-protocol-advantages-and-limitations-challenges/