Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Joe Lubin has made a $6.5 million investment to secure a minority stake in enterprise distributed ledger (DLT) startup DrumG Technologies, Forbes reports October 1.

Lubin’s investment comes via his blockchain startup ConsenSys, and is notable given that DrumG Technologies is headed by senior level executives from the ostensibly rival blockchain consortium R3. Lubin will reportedly join as an outside member on DrumG’s board of directors, and reciprocally, DrumG will have a "significant presence" within the ConsenSys ecosystem.

As Forbes notes, DrumG was founded in response to a potential tension in the nascent blockchain space, as developers of open-source blockchain protocols face the task of convincing firms to adopt a technology that is fundamentally disruptive to existing business models.
DrumG reportedly attempts to address this potential “conflict of interest” and aims to make the adoption of multiple interconnected distributed ledgers a reality in the corporate world. Lubin is quoted by Forbes as saying that:

“The decentralized web future — web 3.0, linking corporations to public blockchains — that’s definitely an interledger future. It’s going to be hundreds of thousands of decentralized protocols for trusted transactions and automated agreements.”

Forbes further reports that Lubin’s connections with DrumG date back to his meeting Tim Grant while the latter was still CEO of R3’s Lab and Research Center. DrumG’s formal incorporation in the blockchain-friendly island of Bermuda in August 2017 then reportedly accelerated discussions of a serious partnership between the two.

Speaking of the partnership with Lubin, Grant told Forbes that the future of blockchain lies in not replacing one centralized, proprietary system with another; he outlined a vision of progressive “convergence” in which “tribalism will dissipate.”

As reported, R3 announced this summer the release of a “version” of its Corda blockchain platform targeted specifically at enterprises, representing a move beyond the banking sector – the main client base for Corda’s original platform.

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Russian state nuclear energy corporation (Rosatom) will develop "advanced" digital technologies, such as blockchain, according to Rosatom IT department head Evgeniy Abakumov, cited by corporate outlet Strana Rosatom Monday, October 1.
As per Abakumov, Rosatom intends to focus on three areas of new technologies, namely blockchain, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT). "We are committed to integrating 4.0 technologies on a wider scale. IoT, AI, blockchain and others are to increase the efficiency of manufacturing process," Rosatom’s IT department head said.
Abakumov also stated that Rosatom is looking to bring on new talent in the three aforementioned areas.
As Cointelegraph has reported, Russian official institutions are widely interested in crypto-related technologies. For instance, the Russian state pension fund – the country's largest social service –  revealed its plans to implement blockchain and smart contracts in labor relations this summer.
This past month, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, which included high-ranked Russian managers from Forbes billionaires list, reportedly took part in creating an alternative bill on crypto regulation in the country.
Draft cryptocurrency regulation in Russia, in the works since January 2018 and yet to be passed, is turning out to be "disappointing," according to some experts.
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2017 was a big year for cryptojacking. It increased by 8,500 percent, according to figurespublished by Symantec in March. And it would seem that 2018 has so far been an even bigger year for mining malware, as the Cyber Threat Alliance September report revealed that, beginning on Jan. 1, cryptojacking still had room to increase by a further 500 percent.
However, beneath this simple outline of growth, there is a bigger, more complicated picture. Despite reports from some quarters showing that mining malware detections increased in the first two quarters of 2018, other reports suggest that they have in fact decreased.
And while the overall growth in mining malware since last year has been attributed to the volatility of cryptocurrency prices and the existence of software bugs, other factors have played a significant role, such as the involvement of amateur cryptojackers and the cost of mininglegitimately.

Amateur cryptojackers

https://s3.cointelegraph.com/storage/uploads/view/9f92ae4a8de2c43e640b2ea1c6380694.png cryptojackers
If there's one dominant trend this year in the underworld of cryptojacking, it's that most mining malware focuses on Monero. Indeed, Palo Alto Networks revealed in July that Monero accounts for 84.5 percent of all detected malware, compared to 8 percent for Bitcoin and 7 percent for other coins.

The reason for this is simple: Monero (XMR) is not only a privacy coin, but also the most valuable privacy coin by market cap — and 10th overall. Using the Cryptonight proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm, it mixes the user's inputs with those of other users, and it also uses "ring confidential transactions" that obscure the amount of XMR being transferred. It's therefore ideal for cybercriminals.
Monero was already the most popular coin for cryptojackers in 2017, but a number of new developments have emerged in 2018 to distinguish this year from its predecessor. Most notably, cryptojacking is increasingly becoming the province of amateur 'hackers,' who are lured into the illicit activity by the cheap availability of mining malware and by obvious financial rewards. According to Russian cybersecurity firm Group-IB, the dark web is "flooded with cheap mining software," which can often be purchased for as little as $0.50.
Such software has become abundant this year: In 2017, Group-IB encountered 99 announcements regarding for-sale cryptojacking software on underground forums, while in 2018 it counted 477, signalling an increase of 381.8 percent. As the firm notes in its report:

"Low entry barrier to the illegal mining market results in a situation where cryptocurrency is being mined by people without technical expertise or experience with fraudulent schemes."

More growth

In other words, cryptojacking has become a kind of hobbyist crime, popular among thousands of amateur hackers. This would perhaps account for why there has been a marked increase in detections this year, with Kaspersky Labs informing Cointelegraph that the number of PC cryptojacking victims increased from 1.9 million in 2016/17 to 2.7 million in 2017/18. Evgeny Lopatin — a malware analyst at Kaspersky Lab – shared:

“The mining model […] is easier to activate and more stable [than other attack vectors]. Attack your victims, discreetly build cryptocurrency using their CPU or GPU power and then transfer that into real money through legal exchanges and transactions.”

Of course, whenever “detections” are mentioned, the possibility arises that any increase is largely the result of an improvement in detection measures. “However, this is not the main driver here, as we see actual growth,” says Lopatin.

“Our analysis shows that more and more criminals increasingly use crypto miners for malicious purposes across the world.”

McAfee noted in a report from April that the vast majority of its detections were of CoinMiner, a piece of malware that surreptitiously inserts code taken from the CoinHive XMR mining algorithm into the victim's computer. This occurs when the victim downloads an infected file from the web, but what's new in 2018 is that such a vulnerability now affects Apple Macs as well, which had previously been  regarded as much more secure than its Windows rivals.
This development was noted by United States security firm Malwarebytes, which in a May blogpost reported on the discovery of a new malicious crypto miner that harnesses the legit XMRig miner. Thomas Reed, the director of Mac and mobile at the company, wrote:

"Often, Mac malware is installed by things like fake Adobe Flash Player installers, downloads from piracy sites, [and] decoy documents users are tricked into opening."

In fact, this wasn't the first piece of Mac mining malware it had discovered, with Reed stating that it "follows other cryptominers for macOS, such as Pwnet, CpuMeaner and CreativeUpdate."

EternalBlue

However, while cryptojacking has become more of an amateur-driven phenomenon, it still remains the case that many of this year’s exploits can be traced to more 'elite' sources. Cybersecurity firm Proofpoint reported at the end of January that Smominru, a cryptojacking botnet, had spread to over half a million computers — largely thanks to the National Security Agency, which had discovered a Windows bug that was then leaked online.
This vulnerability is better known as EternalBlue, which most famously was responsible for the WannaCry ransomware attack/incident of May 2017. And according to Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA), it's another big factor in this year's 459 percent increase in cryptojacking.
Worryingly, the CTA's report suggests that cryptojacking is only likely to increase as it becomes more successful and profitable:

"[Cryptojacking's] influx of money could be used for future, more sophisticated operations by threat actor groups. For instance, several large-scale cryptocurrency mining botnets (Smominru, Jenkins Miner, Adylkuzz) have made millions of dollars."

And things are already bad enough in the present, with the CTA writing that infection by mining malware comes with steep costs for victims.

"Taken in aggregate, when criminals install cryptocurrency miners in large enterprise networks, the costs in excess energy usage, degraded operations, downtime, repairs of machines with physical damage and mitigation of the malware in systems incurred by the victims far outweigh the relatively small amount of cryptocurrency the attackers typically earn on a single network."

Costs
The mention of costs is significant when it comes to cryptojacking, not just for (potential) victims, but also for perpetrators. That's because cryptojacking is essentially the theft of electricity and CPU, which implies that it will continue being prevalent not only for as long as Monero and other coins remain valuable, but also for as long as it remains expensive to mine XMR and other cryptos.
According to CryptoCompare's profitability calculator for Monero, an individual U.S.-based miner using a graphics card capable of a 600 H/s hash rate (e.g., the Nvidia GTX 1080) and using 100W of power (a very conservative estimate) will make only $0.8033 in profit every month. This, clearly, isn't especially promising, which is a large part of the reason why so many amateurs have turned to cryptojacking, since mining XMR while paying for your own electricity just isn't fruitful when you're not a big mining company.
There are, however, recent signs that Monero mining has become more profitable, even for the smaller miner. This came after its hard fork on April 6, which changed its PoW protocol so as to make it incompatible with ASIC miners, which tend to dominate mining (particularly in the case of Bitcoin).
As soon as this hard fork was completed, reports came from the Monero subreddit that profitability had increased by 300 percent or even 500 percent, although this boost was soon lost in the following weeks, according to BitInfoCharts.

Likewise, Monero itself has been cautious with regard to promising that it can resist ASIC mining equipment forever. "Thus, it is recognized that ASICs may be an inevitable development for any proof-of-work [cryptocurrency]," wrote developers dEBRYUNE and dnaleor in a February blog. "We also concede that ASICs may be inevitable, but we feel that any transition to an ASIC-dominated network needs to be as egalitarian as possible in order to foster decentralization."

Decline?

Assuming that it has become more profitable to mine XMR legitimately, this would account for a flattening in cryptojacking growth that has been observed by some cybersecurity firms. In its Q2 2018 report, Malwarebytes revealed that mining malware detections dropped from a peak of 5 million at the beginning of March, to a low of 1.5 million at the beginning of June. This decline may contradict what other analysts have reported this year, but given that Malwarebytes' research is the most recent in terms of the dates covered, it's arguably the most authoritative.
It's not clear whether this decline is the result of an increase in profitability for legit Monero miners, of business and individuals wising up to the threat of cryptojacking, or of a general decline in the value of cryptocurrencies. Regardless, Malwarebytes predict that "Cryptocurrency miners will be going out of style" as a cybersecurity threat. "Of course, we are still going to see plenty of miners being distributed and detected," its report concludes. "However, it looks like we are at the tail end of the ‘craze.'"
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Australian Record Scalability Blockchain: How Crypto Is Stepping Into the Land Down Under


On Sept. 26, Australia’s National Science Agency (CSIRO), an independent Australian federal government agency responsible for scientific research, developed a blockchain network called Red Belly with the University of Sydney. They successfully conducted a pilot test on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) global cloud infrastructure, processing more than 40,000 transactions per second.
At 40,000 tx/second, Red Belly is able to process information on an immutable network at a capacity that is 6,666 times larger than the Bitcoin network and about 1,600 times bigger than the Ethereum blockchain network.
Ethereum vs. Visa
An Ethereum researcher with an online alias CPereez19 calculated the transaction per second capacity of Ethereum to be around 25.346 tx/second, evaluating the block gas limit and transaction cost of the Ethereum network:

“The block gas limit [of Ethereum] is 7,999,992 . Transaction costs 21,000 gas (let's assume nothing else is attached). That's around 380 transactions per block. With a block time of around 15.03 seconds, as ETH Stats shows, this gives us approximately: 25.346 tx/s.”

The 40,000 tx/second capacity of the Red Belly Blockchain surpassed the transaction capacity of the Visa network, which is estimated to be 24,000 tx/second. VisaNet, the base payment network for most of the world’s credit card payments and digital transactions, processes around 150 million transactions on a daily basis.
Although the transaction capacity of Visa is significantly larger than Ethereum — by more than 1,600-fold — the total value of payments processed by the two networks on a daily basis do not present that big of a discrepancy.
At its peak on January 4, Ethereum processed around 1 million transactions. Currently, according to Etherscan, Ethereum is processing about 500,000 transactions per day, which means Visa is processing a volume that is three-hundredfold larger than that of Ethereum. Even though the transaction capacity of Ethereum is significantly smaller than Visa, the relatively high daily transaction volume of the network demonstrates fairly high user activity.


Ethereum is not that far off from achieving the transaction capacity of Visa, which is highly impressive for a completely decentralized and peer-to-peer (p2p) blockchain network. Previously, Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin stated that the Ethereum network could potentially achieve 1 million transactions per second with second-layer scaling solutions like sharding and plasma.
On public blockchain networks, scaling solutions relieve pressure on the mainnet by processing information outside of the main infrastructure. For instance, on Ethereum, sharding and plasma can process transactions outside of the mainnet to increase the capacity of the network in handling information.

“The reason I think layer one and layer two [networks] are complementary is because ultimately, if you look at the math, the scalability gains from the layer one improvements and layer two improvements do ultimately multiply with each other. If you have a sharding solution, the sharding solution itself might increase the scalability of Ethereum by a factor of 100, or eventually even more. But then, if you do Plasma on top of the scalability solution, then what that means is, you’re not just doing 100 times of the amount of activity but you are doing 100 times the amount of entrances, the amount of exits and despite resolutions.”

Red Belly vs. centralized blockchains
Permissioned ledger projects initiated by large-scale technology and financial institutions — such as Intel and JPMorgan — have demonstrated a massive transaction capacity of over 100,000 transactions per second and an ability to process any size of information on demand.
However, both Sawtooth Lake Blockchain of Intel and JPMorgan’s Quorum are enterprise-focused blockchain networks that maximize transaction capacity within a closed ecosystem. Hence, by definition, most of these blockchain networks developed by conglomerates are not decentralized or peer-to-peer. JPMorgan described its blockchain as a high throughput, permissioned ledger for private transactions:
“Quorum is ideal for any application requiring high speed and high throughput processing of private transactions within a permissioned group of known participants. Quorum addresses specific challenges to blockchain technology adoption within the financial industry, and beyond.”
Instead, researchers at CSIRO and University of Sydney emphasized that the Red Belly Blockchain was created with attention to decentralization. Although the network is still in a pilot testing phase, its #DevelopmentTeam  demonstrated efforts to test the blockchain in a decentralized environment by placing 1,000 virtual machines across 18 geographic regions.
In an actual mainnet setting, these machines replaced with nodes, thus the Red Belly Blockchain would work structurally similarly to Bitcoin, Ethereum and other public blockchain networks.

“The experiment deployed Red Belly Blockchain on 1,000 virtual machines across 14 of AWS' 18 geographic regions, including North America, South America, Asia Pacific (Sydney) and Europe. A benchmark was set by sending 30,000 transactions per second from different geographic regions, demonstrating an average transaction latency (or delay) of three seconds with 1,000 replicas (a machine that maintains a copy of the current state of the blockchain and the balance of all accounts.)”

Minimizing energy consumption
More importantly, the #DevelopmentTeam  of Red Belly Blockchain established several key missions of the project to ensure that the basis of the initiative is not to replicate a blockchain network for the sake of experimenting with an emerging and disruptive technology.
It started the project to solve two issues it saw in Bitcoin and other public blockchains: the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm and scalability.

“Red Belly Blockchain is solving the issues that have plagued previous generations of blockchain systems including environmental impact from significant energy use, double spending where an individual spends their money twice by initiating more than one transaction, and throughput, which refers to how many units of information can be processed in a short amount of time.”

The Red Belly Blockchain #DevelopmentTeam  stated that it replaced the PoW algorithm on its network with a unique algorithm that does not require electricity consumption. The developers did not release technical intricacies of its algorithm, but based on claims around Bitcoin’s usage of electricity, it is highly likely that the project employed either proof-of-stake (PoS) or delegated proof-of-stake (dPoS) consensus algorithms as a replacement to PoW.
In the Red Belly Blockchain press release Vincent Gramoli, senior researcher at CSIRO's Data61 and head of Concurrent Systems Research Group at the University of Sydney, emphasized that he believes the next generation blockchain will feature consensus algorithms that do not require mining infrastructure and energy consumption, which limits the ability of blockchains to process information and increase costs involved in producing blocks of data.

"Real-world applications of blockchain have been struggling to get off the ground due to issues with energy consumption and complexities induced by the proof of work. The deployment of Red Belly Blockchain on AWS shows the unique scalability and strength of the next generation ledger technology in a global context.”

Proof-of-stake and massive scaling
Since its launch in 2015, Vitalik Buterin, Vlad Zamfir and several Ethereum developers have established a solid roadmap for integrating PoS consensus algorithm in the long term.
Constantinople, a new upgrade in Ethereum’s four-stage development roadmap, is scheduled to be released in October. A part of the fork or upgrade is to enlist Vlad Zamfir’s PoS protocol Casper, which rewards validators with ETH for processing information. To discourage or prevent bad actors in the space, Casper cuts a percentage of the stake of validators that attempt to sabotage the network.
Apart from Ethereum, there are several PoS systems — like Cardano and EOS — that are seeing a consistent increase in the number of decentralized applications (dApps) and user activity.
PoS-based blockchain systems can handle a large capacity of information and transactions because it does not require miners to verify information. It allows nodes and alternative data verifiers on the network to process information by punishing bad actors in the ecosystem. Ari Paul, the co-founder of crypto hedge fund BlockTower, explained in a debate on PoS versus PoW:

“There are several PoS systems at scale today. How do you see them failing in practical terms, and why haven’t they failed yet? This is a very complex discussion. But, let’s take, say, Ripple for example. Plenty of clear game theory vulnerabilities, but PoW has plenty as well. In practice, I think many vulnerabilities, like long-range [attacks], are mostly academic. For example, with BTC, you have to have a trusted original source for consensus rules and client code. In practice, this is extremely similar to the long-range attack vulnerability of PoS.”

The shift in focus from PoW to PoS by major public blockchain networks and government agencies demonstrates a newly emerging trend in the global cryptocurrency community, which is to experiment with blockchain networks that are highly efficient and consume a limited amount of energy.
Leveraging existing infrastructure to efficiently deploy blockchain
In August, the World Bank and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (the biggest commercial bank in the country) issued the first ever bond on the Ethereum blockchain, utilizing the cloud computing infrastructure of Microsoft.
Dubbed Bond-I, the two financial institutions launched a blockchain-based debt instrument utilizing Ethereum and Microsoft’s blockchain computing platform Azure to eventually settle orders and transfers on the Ethereum mainnet. As the Commonwealth Bank Australia general manager James Wall said at the time:

“We believe that this transaction will be groundbreaking as a demonstration of how blockchain technology can act as a facilitating platform for different participants.”

Arunma Oteh, treasurer at the World Bank, revealed that the demand for the blockchain-based bond has increased to a point in which corporations, fund managers, government institutions and banks have started to show interest toward the bond and blockchain technology.
For the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the process of issuing bonds on the blockchain was fairly simple because it was able to use the cloud computing infrastructure of Microsoft to deploy its blockchain-based system.
Similarly, the developers at CSIRO and the University of Sydney cooperated with AWS and its cloud platform to deploy the testnet of its blockchain practically and efficiently. Simon Elisha, head of Solutions Architecture, Amazon Web Services Public Sector, Australia and New Zealand, explained:

"AWS Cloud provides innovative organizations of all kinds with a global network of compute power, allowing organizations like Red Belly Blockchain to quickly conduct large-scale experiments that break new ground. This is the latest example of how builders and creators all over Australia are leveraging AWS to quickly and cost-effectively move a project from concept phase right through to realizing commercial potential, locally and on a global scale."

Throughout the months to come, the global blockchain sector is expected to see more tests on centralized cloud infrastructure due to various benefits and merits. In July 2017, the Red Belly Blockchain conducted two experiments, and the first test showed a throughput of 660,000 transactions per second.
But, as the team deployed the blockchain on a larger network with significantly more nodes, the transaction capacity of the network decreased to 40,000 transactions per second, which is more realistic. Even with a PoS system in place, it is difficult to get thousands of nodes to synchronize and process information purely on the mainnet without second-layer scaling solutions.
Testing on a cloud infrastructure provides blockchain projects flexibility with nodes and the size of the environment that can realistically replicate a real mainnet setting. The presence of such platforms — and increasing progress in the blockchain sector to commercialize and scale the technology — could lead to an influx of blockchain projects in the months to come.
It is positive for the long-term growth of the sector that prestigious universities and government-backed agencies are putting in the effort to create blockchain networks that actually attempt to solve the problems that existing first-generation blockchain protocols have. It remains to be seen if these blockchain networks will be deployed publicly and potentially compete against other blockchain networks and cryptocurrencies.
Structurally and conceptually, the competition of Red Belly Blockchain, if it does intend to go public and be accessible in the global market, are fellow PoS and unique consensus algorithm-employing blockchain protocols in the likes of Cardano, EOS, Ripple and Stellar.
Crypto and blockchain regulation in Australia
In 2016, the government of Australia announced its decision to remove its law on double taxation for the digital currency.
Up until 2017, major banks in Australia allegedly denied banking services to crypto exchanges, restricting the crypto exchange market to investors in the local finance sector. This led the growth of the local cryptocurrency exchange market to stagnate until April, when exchanges started to enter the Australian market.
Up until December of the last year, crypto-related transactions, any payment sent to cryptocurrency trading platforms were  censored by the National Australia Bank, ANZ, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Westpac Banking Corporation.
On December 30, 2017, A Westpac spokeswoman did not deny the allegations against the bank and  stated that the usage of Westpac bank accounts must comply with local Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations.

“Where we cannot verify the origin of transfers, we may act to ensure we comply with Australia’s Anti-Money Laundering obligations.”

However, on April 11, 2018, the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), announced the implementation of new regulations for crypto-related businesses to improve its local crypto and blockchain sector.
The government of Australia has since licensed three cryptocurrency exchanges, allowing the businesses to operate as money transmission service providers with guaranteed banking services.
The government has also begun to protect investors from misleading Initial Coin Offering (ICO) projects, warning blockchain projects that raising money from the public comes with serious legal obligations that must be compliant with local regulations. Newly imposed policies by the government of Australia regarding blockchain projects might help investors build awareness of poor and illegitimate projects.
With active blockchain development initiated by government-funded agencies and a growing cryptocurrency exchange market, Australia could see rapid improvement in the country’s crypto and blockchain space in the years to come.

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Kenyan Distributed Ledgers and Artificial Intelligence task force chairman Bitange Ndemo has said that the government should tokenize the economy, local news outlet The Star reported September 25.
The taskforce was established in March by the government of the Republic of Kenya in order to evaluate proposals on how to deploy blockchain technology in the public sector. The working group consists of local blockchain startups, experts, researchers, regulatory bodies, lawyers and other associated parties.
Speaking at an Information and Communication Technology Ministry (ICT) stakeholders meeting with the private sector, Ndemo reportedly asserted that the government should consider tokenization of the economy in order to deal with “increasing” rates of corruption and uncertainties. This move, according to Ndemo, would have the government print less hard currency. The chairman said:

“We must begin to tokenize the economy by giving incentives to young people to do things which they are paid through tokens that can be converted to fiat currency.”

In addition, Ndemo stated that the adoption of tokens could reduce unemployment levels, outlining the necessity of issuing a digital currency equivalent to a fiat currency. The ICT Principal Secretary Jerome Ochieng said that the government will develop relevant policies to process the recommendations proposed by the taskforce.
Notably, the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) issued a circular to all banks in the country in April, warning them against dealing with cryptocurrencies or engaging in transactions with crypto-related entities. CBK Governor Patrick Njoroge cited crypto’s prevalence in illegal activities, its anonymous nature, and its lack of centralized control as the impetus for the ban.
In June, decentralized liquidity network Bancor launched a network of blockchain-based community currencies to fight poverty in Kenya. The project seeks to stimulate local and regional commerce and peer-to-peer activity by enabling Kenyan communities to create and manage their own digital tokens.

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The Crimean government is considering the possibility of creating a cryptocurrency fund for foreign investors in order to avoid sanctions, local meda  TASS reported April 18.

The Crimean Deputy Prime Minister Georgy Muradov, told a group of journalists on Wednesday:
“We are discussing ways to avoid sanctions. One of these methods is the creation of a cryptocurrency investment fund in Crimea where we will accumulate cryptocurrency resources, transfer them to normal money, and then use them for the realization of any kind of investment projects on Crimean soil.”
Muradov said that the subject would be brought up during the Yalta International Economic Forum, and that foreign investment in the Crimean economy will be one of the key points of discussion. Muradov added that throughout the course of the conference, they hope to secure ten investment agreements between various foreign and Crimean companies.
The Fourth Yalta International Economic Forum, “The Future of the World. The Future of Russia” will take place from April 19-21. Organizers say that 3,000 people from 60 countries are taking part.
Earlier this week, the Russian government blocked the crypto community’s favored messenger app Telegram. In order to enforce the ban, communications authority Roskomnadzor blocked nearly 20 mln IP addresses. Despite all efforts by the government to disable the app within Russia, most users report that it is functioning without applying additional means to circumvent the block, like proxy or VPN services.
Meanwhile, dozens of other websites are down as a result of Roskomnadzor’s IP blocking. Xbox Live, Microsoft updates, and even the very website of Roskomnadzor experienced crashes.

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The Chief Scientist of Quebec Rémi Quirion says public concern that Bitcoin is being used for illicit activities like tax evasion and money laundering is largely overblown,  Forbes reports

The statement prepared by the l’Agence Science-Presse, which is a partner of Fonds de Recherche du Québec, said, “Bitcoin is not above the law, nor is it a magnet for illicit transactions: it forms only a tiny part of the criminal money circulating around the planet.”
They add that the transparent and public nature of the Bitcoin Blockchain, where transactions are recorded and distributed across a global network, is not an ideal platform for engaging in anonymous criminal activity.

“The anonymity of Bitcoin is a myth, [it] is no more transparent as money, because you have to go through a platform where you have to give personal information. At the limit, if the name is not his, we always know the address of the transmitter and that of the receiver.”

The statement cites a study from the Center for Sanctions and Illicit Finance of the Defence of Democracies Foundation, stating that “dirty Bitcoins” only represent 0.61 percent of trade and conversion services between 2013 and 2016. The largest proportion in the targeted period was 1.07 percent.
Geneviève Bruno of the Quebec provincial police, Sûreté du Québec, said that money laundering via Bitcoin is “not an emergent phenomenon here and we do not have any records related to that.”
The agency also characterizes allegations of tax evasion via Bitcoin as “anecdotal” adding:

“Most users do not have the skills for themselves [to] manage their portfolios and exchange platforms or online portfolios are already subject to anti-money laundering rules...Since Bitcoin is transparent, it will be very easy to identify all the people trading on an online exchange or portfolio platform."

While the statement largely refutes allegations of Bitcoin as a tool for criminals, it does urge investors in Bitcoin to remain cautious and exercise due diligence, adding that the ultimate responsibility falls upon the user.
Last month, the operator of the Toronto Stock Exchange, TMX Group, announced that one of its subsidiaries had entered into a partnership to open a cryptocurrency brokerage firm in Canada.

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Top cryptocurrency investors Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures urged the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to consider a cryptocurrency exemption at a private meeting, the  Wall Street Journal reports April 19.

The Silicon Valley-based venture capital firms met with top officials of the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance, which regulates Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), to argue against stringent cryptocurrency regulations that they claim would impair the development of the young growing industry.
According to WSJ, the group of crypto investors argued that ICO tokens should not be considered as investments, but as products that can be used to access services of startup companies, which would allow startups to carry out token sales without observing formalities  such as business reviews and financial reports. The group assured the SEC that ICO issuers would be held accountable in cases of fraud.
The SEC has privately expressed skepticism to such a broad exemption, and is more likely to opt for a “limited exemption” from oversight, wherein each investor would acquire investments limits, and the purchased tokens would not be resold to third parties for profit.
Since the SEC introduced its cryptocurrency probe in February, which followed previous suggestions that ICOs may be violating securities laws, the regulatory body has increased pressure on ICO projects. The SEC even shut down stock trading of three companies due to “questions regarding the nature of the companies’ business operations” vis-a-vis ICOs.
The question of cryptocurrency and ICO regulations is a crucial issue, with many crypto believers expressing their concerns over excessive regulatory scrutiny towards the industry. Others, like head of regulatory relations at Ripple Ryan Zagone, encourages regulatory measures. Recently, Zagone compared the existing crypto regulatory framework to the early days of the Internet.

“We’re at that time now where we need more clarity and rules and we need more certainty. It’s a good time to start revisiting that ‘wait and see’ ­approach taken by regulators.”

According to Perianne Boring, president of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, developing sensible regulation will take time, “You can’t start writing laws and regulations today and expect to get it right, it’s building on wet cement.”
In March, Chief Legal and Risk Officer at Coinbase Mike Lempres claimed that at its current stage, the US regulatory system “is harming healthy innovation” due to a lack of understanding of what should be allowed and what should be not, and how digital assets should be considered; either as securities, commodities, property, or currency.

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