Less and less time remains until April 6th - the day when Alte Kongresshalle, Munich, will open its doors for one of the most promising industry events of this year, BlockShow Europe 2017. It was November when we wrote about this conference for the first time. Now, we are sharing the latest progress from its organizers. Rainmaking Innovation: partnership and beyond One of the most important BlockShow updates was a new partner joining the conference - Rainmaking Innovation, a global Innovation Consulting & Startup Acceleration platform. Most notably, the partnership has gone even further in that particular case - Elizabeth …

The UK’s Channel Islands have given the green light to Global Advisors Bitcoin Investment Fund (GABI), marking the launch of the world’s first listed and regulated Bitcoin fund. GABI, which has existed since 2014, is Global Advisors’ first product, the group later launching COINXBT and COINXBE, which both made pioneering debuts on the Swedish Nasdaq. It will trade on the Channel Islands Securities Exchange (CISE). GABI: ‘Time is right’ for Bitcoin “The time is right,” Global Advisor Principal Daniel Masters commented in a press release issued today: “Bitcoin now has a market capitalization of over $12.4 bln, an all-time high, …

Blockchain technology is gaining more and more acceptance worldwide. We have witnessed a boost in the adoption of Blockchain by many businesses not limited to the area of finances. Cointelegraph is on a daily mission to socialize and popularize the technology and contribute to its even wider acceptance. That was our motivation for the Helsinki Blockchain Conference, and that is exactly the reason why we are flying to Munich in April next year. An opportunity not to be missed We are happy to invite you to BlockShow Europe 2017, which is expected to become the largest platform for showcasing established …

Strictly speaking, we just provided our moral and financial support to it. The members of the expedition, held this year from February 26 to March 8, were journalists of the “Govorit i Pokazyvaet” production studio and BitNovosti web-site, who paid all their travel expenses only with cryptocurrency. The tour started and finished in Moscow, and the team drove through Lithuania, Germany, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, Poland, and Belarus. The farthermost point of the tour was the capital of Netherlands, Amsterdam. The goal of this project was to capture the current state of development of the Bitcoin infrastructure and to …

Written by Colin Kwan, COO of Magnr/BTC.sx. Colin has over 10 years experience in investment banking, including senior management roles at UBS and Deutsche Bank. Colin also holds an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management. Setting the Scene At the time of writing, the Greece debt crisis appears to have been averted, or at the least delayed. A €50 billion bailout package has been offered, if the Greek parliament agrees to implement extensive reforms that have been demanded by the eurozone. Although the risk of a Grexit has been reduced, it has not been eliminated. If the parliament …

The European Central Bank is finally launching its major quantitative easing (QE) in order to fight the euro zone’s slide towards deflation. But with the evident failure of this monetary policy so far and the emergence of negative interest rates, is the ECB creating the perfect storm for virtual currencies as a viable alternative? From March this year until September 2016 the ECB will buy €60 billion (US$68 billion) of assets a month, a total of €1.1 trillion over the given period. Moreover, the President of the ECB, Mario Draghi, left room to extend the program if necessary. The ECB …

Large European companies may eye Bitcoin as an option for securing their data and keeping it private from the United States, reports the Logistics Viewpoints blog. Steve Banker wrote about the security issue early last year for the blog, following an article in IT World that noted companies increasingly want their data “walled off” from the NSA: “Around the world, many people, Europeans in particular, were outraged by the Edward Snowden revelations that showed the extent to which the US government had access to the world’s electronic stream of communication.” Banker is a supply chain and logistics analyst who writes …

When Cointelegraph last heard from the team at Dutch Bitcoin service provider BitPlaats.nl in January, they had expanded their Bitcoin vending platform into Belgium. “As we became a more known Bitcoin seller, we started getting request from other European countries,” co-founder Bram Ceelen told Cointelegraph. This is why the founding team decided to think bigger offering Bitcoin buying and selling to the whole of Europe, or at least as many European customers as possible. That led them to create Anycoin Direct, a cryptocurrency trading platform that integrates with many of the continent’s payment systems to allow customers from all over …