In the era of services like Netflix, Dropbox or Amazon Prime, it’s quite easy to forget about the times when customers were getting in line to acquire boxed digital products, like software or entertainment media, with one-time purchases. The age of annual fees started when consumer products turned into subscription-based services. The same transformation happened approximately a decade ago in the enterprise world when businesses reimagined ages-old solutions like enterprise resource planning or customer relationship management as ongoing services monetized via recurrent billings. Hence, the business-to-business (B2B) software-as-a-service (SaaS) model was born in the 2000s and disrupted the way enterprise …

Avalanche (AVAX) has opened 2023 with a bang, rising nearly 55% in the first two weeks. And now, a mix of technical and fundamental indicators hints that the token will keep rallying into March. AVAX price breakout underway The AVAX/USD pair appears to have been forming a falling wedge pattern since May 2022 and has now entered the breakout stage of this pattern. A falling wedge forms when the price trends lower inside a range defined by two converging, descending trendlines. The pattern resolves after the price breaks out of its range to the upside and, as a rule of …

Turkish automotive company Togg announced a partnership with Metaco, a digital asset custody orchestration technology provider, to secure its open mobility ecosystem built on Avalanche. Togg’s Mobility-as-a-Service platform (MaaS), a.k.a, Mobility Ecosystem, aims to deliver smart contract-powered use cases — including tokenization of mobility services, assessment of CO2 footprint and nonfungible token (NFT) ownership — for users in Türkiye and Europe. The partnership with Metaco will see the use of its digital asset custody and orchestration platform, Harmonize, to safeguard the custody and governance of Togg’s digital assets. Sharing insights on the initiative, Togg CEO M. Gürcan Karakas stated: “Blockchain-enabled …

Users of the crypto exchange Gate.io are facing slow deposits and withdrawals on transactions due to a node maintenance from a third-party cloud provider, according to an announcement on Dec. 18. Gate.io said the transactions are still being processed, and claimed the funds of users are safe. The company stated: "At this moment, we are monitoring the network connection status of our cloud service providers and will expedite the deposits and withdrawals as soon as the network connection is restored." It is unclear if the delay in transactions is related to OKX's outage, which was caused by a hardware failure …

Crypto exchange OKX witnessed service disruptions after primary infrastructure provider Alibaba Cloud announced a hardware failure in Alibaba Cloud’s Hong Kong data center. Alibaba Cloud Hong Kong IDC Zone C server went offline on Saturday at roughly 10 PM ET and failed to recover for over 7 hours at the time of reporting. On-chain data further confirms that OKX processed no transactions during this timeline. Alibaba Cloud’s website shows that the Hong Kong (China) server hosts three availability zones, which have been operational since 2014. The cloud provider confirmed the outage through an official announcement, as shown below. While announcing …

Alibaba Cloud, a.k.a Aliyun, a subset of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, announced an integration with Avalanche blockchain to power the company’s Node-as-a-Service initiatives. Avalanche’s partnership with Alibaba Cloud will see the development of tools that enable users to launch validator nodes on Avalanche's public blockchain platform in Asia. The integration will allow Avalanche developers to use Alibaba Cloud’s plug-and-play infrastructure as a service to launch new validators. Developers expecting high resource demands during peak hours can also tap into additional resources — computing, storage, and distribution — offered by Alibaba Cloud. APAC's largest cloud service provider, Alibaba Cloud, has expanded …

NEAR Foundation has announced a new partnership between Google Cloud and NEAR Protocol, providing infrastructure to NEAR’s Web3 startup platform, Pagoda. According to an Oct. 4 announcement, this partnership will allow Google Cloud to provide “technical support” to NEAR grant recipients by providing infrastructure for NEAR’s Remote Procedure Call (RPC) node provider to Pagoda. Near Protocol is a decentralized application (DApp) platform that focuses on usability among developers and users. It uses sharding technology to achieve scalability and, as a competitor to Ethereum, is also smart-contract capable and a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain. Launched in Feb. 2022, Pagoda is a startup …

Just when the Ethereum ecosystem reached its final stages in preparing for the much-anticipated upgrade, The Merge, german cloud provider Hetzner, reiterated its stance against allowing mining operations for both proof-of-stake (PoS) and proof-of-work (PoW) applications. Hetzner, a private, centralized cloud provider, stepped in on a discussion around running blockchain nodes, highlighting its terms of services that prohibit customers from using the services for crypto activities. However, the Ethereum community perceived the revelation as a threat to the ecosystem as Hetzner’s cloud services host nearly 16% of the Ethereum nodes, as shown below. In crypto, the reliance on centralized service …

The majority of 4,653 active Ethereum (ETH) nodes are in the hands of centralized web providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), which could “expose Ethereum to central points of failure,” according to crypto analytics platform Messari. An Aug.15 post shows that three major cloud providers account for 69% of hosted nodes on the Ethereum Mainnet, with over 50% of that coming from Amazon Web Services (AWS), over 15% from Hetzner and 4.1% from OVH. Figures from Ethernodes additionally show that Oracle (4.1%), Alibaba (3.9%) and Google (3.5%) also provide web hosting services on Ethereum. While the distribution of cloud service …

The cloud business unit of Chinese marketplace giant Alibaba Group Holdings launched a new nonfungible token (NFT) solution and then promptly deleted all mention of it online. According to a now-deleted Twitter post announcing the launch on Wednesday, the firm’s NFT marketplace solution included “web hosting, digital marketing & content delivery” infrastructure but is no longer listed on its website. There are also no press releases or announcements related to the NFT solution on Alibaba’s website anymore. Meanwhile, the solution’s webpage link still shows up in Google search results and now redirects to Alibaba Cloud’s solution index page. The reason …

Following the establishment of a Web3 team under Google Cloud on May 6, tech giant Alphabet’s Google is now on the lookout for a full-time candidate to lead its Global Web3 marketing strategies. As seen on the job listing, the Google Cloud division opened up a "Head of Product Marketing" role who will be tasked with raising awareness about Google Cloud’s Web3 initiatives in addition to eventually building customer demand for the related offerings. new: Google Cloud is forming a Web3 product and engineering organization that will build services for developers. new job postings have appeared on Google's internal Grow …

Ahead of Ethereum’s highly anticipated switch to proof-of-stake (PoS), cybersecurity firm Cloudflare is set to launch and fully stake Ethereum validator nodes over the next few months. It aims to study energy efficiency, consistency management and network speed of the PoS network as part of its commitment to environmental sustainability and to help “build a better internet.” Cloudflare was founded in 2010 and provides web security services such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation to protect clients from DDoS attacks. Cloudflare said it was experimenting with the “next generation of Web3 networks that are embracing proof of stake,” with Ethereum being …