Ethereum’s testnet activation of the Istanbul hard fork has been pushed back to early October, according to the community manager of the Ethereum Foundation, Hudson Jameson. According to CoinDesk on Sept. 6, Jameson said on a developers’ call that the testnet launch of the hard fork is now scheduled to take place in the beginning of October. He added: “For anyone listening in who doesn’t know how this works, we pick a block number that we estimate to be around the 2nd of October. [...] However, that might be one or two days behind or forward from that date based …

Bitcoin maximalist and former Wall Street trader Max Keiser has recently claimed that Bitcoin (BTC) dominance is heading to 80% and that altcoins are dying, further urging the public to rotate out of other crypto assets and into BTC. Keiser announced his latest views in a Twitter post on Aug. 6: “#Bitcoin dominance 68.2% — heading to 80% — as alts die in favor of BTC. The 2014-2017 era of alts and hard forks is dead. Don’t be the last to rotate out of alts into BTC.” According to data provided by Coin360’s summary table, BTC is sitting at a …

Following a recent hard fork of Bitcoin SV (BSV), the network saw a three-chain split after a massive 210 megabytes (MB) block was mined. As reported by BitMEX Research on Aug. 3, Bitcoin SV nodes divided into three groups on Saturday, making the network to split into three separate chains. According to the report, 65% of nodes were located on the current tip, while 17% were stuck on the 210 MB block and 19% had not even upgraded and were on the old pre-hard fork chain. Bitcoin SV node chart. Source: Twitter According to data from Coin Dance, the 210 …

Bitcoin SV (BSV) successfully increased its block size limit today amid confusion regarding the scheduled fork time. According to a BitMEX Research tweet on July 24, Bitcoin SV was expected to fork at 2 p.m. UTC today, but the website of the BSV-promoting Bitcoin Association claimed that the upgrade was scheduled for 1 p.m. GMT (1 p.m. UTC). The reason why the exchange’s research arm expected the fork to happen on 2 p.m. UTC is that the code of the network upgrade itself defined the fork time to be at that time. Furthermore, BitMEX closely followed the fork implementation and …

Bitcoin (BTC) has more than tripled in 2019, moving from under $4,000 at the start of the year and then topping out at a little under $14,000 in June. In the earlier part of 2019, altcoins seemed to be performing strongly, with many calling the trend “altseason.” However, since Bitcoin began its 2019 charge starting with the “April Fool’s day rally,” most altcoins seem to be slipping when compared to the top-ranked cryptocurrency. There is now a growing debate about whether the altcoin market will experience the same massive price gains seen in Bitcoin during this current bullish cycle. Within …

The blockchain launched by cryptocurrency exchange Binance, Binance Chain, has completed an upgrade to its mainnet. The latest iteration is called Galileo — v.0.6.0 — as announced by Binance on July 15. According to the announcement, there are four major changes implemented in Galileo: the matching engine has been revised with “Taker” and “Maker” matching logic, trading pairs on Binances decentralized exchange, Binance DEX, can be delisted, Binance Chain token assets can now be time-locked, and state sync options have been enhanced. For Binance DEX, validators can now reportedly make a proposal to vote on delisting trading pairs for reasons …

There is perhaps no other crypto asset more subject to scrutiny and accusations of impropriety than the Tether stablecoin. The startup behind the coin has been blamed for market manipulation while its business dealings and accounting practices have stirred up many concerns. Critics argue that Tether lacks transparency, possibly engages in criminal activity and does not have the financial backing that it claims. These accusations are somewhat vindicated by the current case by the New York Attorney General (NYAG) against the business and its owner, iFinex, which is also the owner of the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange. Potentially adding fuel to …

Members of the community around decentralized platform Tezos have raised concerns about an alleged upcoming hard fork of its blockchain. The issue appeared in a blog post by Tezos Commons executive director Shaun Belcher on June 17. Discussing what he described as evidence of collusion between two third-party entities, Belcher warned that the hard fork, planned for September, was an attempt to split Tezos user sentiment. The parties involved are the management team of OCamlPro, a French programming language, and blockchain fund Starchain Capital, which Belcher intimates as mysterious. “It’s worth remembering that anyone can fork the Tezos software, which …

Cryptocurrency enthusiast John McAfee's crypto trading platform was immediately targeted by hackers with a denial of service (DOS) attack following its launch, according to an official Twitter post from McAfee on June 12. According to the post, the web servers for the “McAfeeMagic” trading platform, were hit with a cloaked High Orbit Ion Cannon (HOIC) DOS attack. Cybersecurity website Imperva describes an HOIC DOS attack as stressing a network by “flooding target systems with junk HTTP GET and POST requests.” However, McAffee tweeted the same day that the website was operational again. According to the same post, the McAfeeMagic trading …

Privacy-centric cryptocurrency Grin is finalizing its timeline for its first-ever network hard fork, according to a proposed timeline uploaded by Grin core developer Quentin Le Sceller to Github dev community forum Gitter on June 5. Grin is a privacy coin that implements scalability- and privacy-focused Mimblewimble protocol — named after a fictional tongue-tying curse from the popular Harry Potter novels. Mimblewimble is in part a variant of the cryptographic protocol known as Confidential Transactions, which allows for transactions to be obfuscated yet verifiable so as to achieve both heightened privacy and the prevention of double spending. According to Le Sceller’s …

Disclaimer: The headline of this article previously read that Tezos underwent a hard fork and was subsequently corrected. After three months, a governance vote of public smart contract-enabled blockchain tezos (XTZ) started on Feb. 28 has been concluded — as scheduled — three months later, on May 28. Cryptocurrency news outlet Coindesk reported yesterday that the voting process has approved the upgrade — dubbed Athens A — and that the implementation is imminent. Tezos is a so-dubbed “self-amending” proof-of-stake blockchain, which means that it has an integrated upgrade system managed by the votes of coin stakers. The Athens A upgrade …

Following its hard fork on May 15, bitcoin cash (BCH) appears to have experienced a two-block chain reorganization resulting in a 3,392 BCH (about $1.35 million at press time) double spend. The claim was made in a report released by the research arm of cryptocurrency derivatives exchange BitMex on May 24. Per the report, the recent BCH hard fork experienced three interrelated issues. Firstly, an apparent bug evidently exploited by an attacker right after the hard fork. The attacker was able to “broadcast transactions which met the mempool validity conditions but failed the consensus checks.” Miners attempting to produce blocks …