Last week, an annual forum featuring Russia’s top people from the economic sector was held in St. Petersburg, and cryptocurrencies were a hot topic there. Notably, government agents and state-controlled businesses were vocal about their interest in blockchain, but seemed to distance themselves from digital tokens. Meanwhile, the regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies is still missing in the country, despite the fact that local authorities have been tasked to prepare the needed amendment a...

Recently, blockchain-powered network Stellar stopped confirming transactions for more than one hour, effectively going offline. Although no money was reportedly lost as a result, Stellar’s major issue has now been highlighted publicly: The project is not decentralized, at least not to the extent expected at this point. Notably, the offline scenario was predicted by researchers earlier last month. Brief introduction to Stellar and its network Stellar is a platform for money remittance. It was...

Earlier this week, United States-based security consulting firm Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) published a report on private keys for the Ethereum blockchain. Despite establishing around 700 weak private keys that are being regularly used by multiple people, the researchers found a “blockchain bandit” who has managed to collect almost 45,000 ether (ETH) by successfully guessing those frail private keys. Cointelegraph interviewed Adrian Bednarek, a senior security analyst at ISE, to...

Recently, Forbes published the fresh edition of its “Fintech 50” list, counting the world’s top financial technology firms. Notably, there are just six crypto and blockchain companies featured this year, while the 2018 list contained 11 players from the field. Given that the notorious crypto boom of 2017 has been followed by the relentless bear market, it is hardly surprising. Nevertheless, while there is considerably fewer crypto companies featured this year, less than half of them — Ripple,...

On Jan. 30, major global banking payments network SWIFT announced it plans to launch a proof-of-concept (PoC) of a gateway — titled GPI Link — that will allow blockchain software firm R3 to connect to SWIFT’s Global Payments Innovation (GPI) payments from its platform. Therefore, SWIFT has made another step toward adopting blockchain, despite having expressed concerns over the technology's maturity in the past. However, SWIFT’s competitors have already voiced their concerns, saying that the...