Swedish Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded note (ETN) operator XBT Provider has shelved plans to offer altcoin products due to market volatility, Bloomberg reported on Feb. 13. Speaking to the publication, XBT’s CEO Laurent Kssis revealed the company did not have an understanding of Bitcoin hard forks and related phenomena when Swedish regulators greenlighted its plans in May 2018. XBT launched the world’s first regulated Bitcoin tracker, Bitcoin Tracker One, in 2015, and has since added several related products. According to Kssis, XBT needs to better its knowledge about hard forks and community politics in order to avoid listing a coin which …

The market was too focused on the Ethereum’s (ETH) Constantinople and Serenity (Ethereum 2.0) hard forks, overshadowing more important upgrades, according to a recent report by cryptoassets trading firm Cumberland Research shared with Cointelegraph. The Constantinople hard fork is an update to the ETH network, which encloses separate Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) in order to pave the way to the Ethereum 2.0, which is planned to be the system’s final upgrade. Ethereum 2.0 will switch the ETH network from the current proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm to the more energy efficient proof-of-stake (PoS). In the course of its implementation, Constantinople has …

Cryptocurrency statistics and wallet provider Blockchain.com announced it had launched partial support for Bitcoin SV (BSV) in a blog post Jan. 22. The product of a contentious hard fork of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), BSV has existed since November 15, 2018, but suffered various technical difficulties in the weeks following its creation. Some wallet providers and exchanges were initially skeptical of the new coin, with major exchange Kraken noting BSV had “many red flags” and “should be seen as an extremely high risk investment.” Blockchain.com, formerly Blockchain.info, confirmed Tuesday that users have some of the same options with BSV as with …

Top Stories This Week Ethereum’s Constantinople Hard Fork Delayed Until February After Vulnerability Found Ethereum’s (ETH) Constantinople hard fork has been delayed until late February after smart contract audit firm ChainSecurity found a security vulnerability allowing a reentrancy attack. The security bug found would potentially let an attacker steal crypto from a smart contract on the network while requesting funds from it repeatedly while feeding it false data. In the aftermath of the discovery, Ethereum developers said that the activation would instead take place at block number 7,280.000, which is expected to be mined on Feb. 27, 2019, instead of …

Core developers of Ethereum (ETH) have postponed the activation of the Constantinople hard fork until late February. The upgrade is now set to be implemented at ETH block 7,280,000, as announced by a team lead at Ethereum, Peter Szilagyi, in a tweet Jan. 18. In his announcement, Szilagyi explains that the activation will take place at block number 7,280.000, which is expected to be mined on Feb. 27, 2019. The upgrade will reportedly be implemented as “a single fork on mainnet and a post-Constantinople-fixup fork on the testnets to get them back in line feature wise with the main network.” …

Ethereum’s (ETH) Constantinople hard fork faces a delay over a newly discovered security vulnerability allowing a reentrancy attack. The critical issue was detected by smart contract audit firm ChainSecurity and reported in a blog post Jan. 15. According to the company’s report, the Constantinople upgrade introduces cheaper gas cost (transaction fees) for some operations on the Ethereum network. As an unexpected side effect, this allegedly enables reentrancy attacks via the use of certain commands in ETH smart contracts. A reentrancy vulnerability allows a potential attacker to steal cryptocurrency from a smart contract on the network by repeatedly requesting funds from …

Major United States cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase and Kraken became the latest to confirm support for Ethereum’s (ETH) Constantinople hard fork, both announcing on Twitter, Jan. 14. The two major exchanges join Binance, Huobi and OKEx in pledging to monitor the event, which will trigger at Ethereum block height 7,080,000, expected this week. “Coinbase intends to fully support the Constantinople Ethereum (ETH) upgrade,” staff wrote in the post, adding: “Upon commencement of the upgrade, for security and technical purposes, we will temporarily pause sending and receiving ETH across all of our trading platforms until the upgrade completes and we confirm security …

The next attempt to implement the Ethereum (ETH) hard fork is expected to come in the interval from Jan. 14 to Jan. 18 — or according to Afri Schoedon, the release manager for the Parity Ethereum client, Jan. 16. At that point, the 7,080,000 block will be extracted, and the Constantinople upgrade will be activated. all-core-devs call: constantinople upgrade for ethereum mainnet activation suggested for 16th of january 2019, block number to be confirmed on black friday in a fortnight — Afri 🌩️ Jan 16 (@5chdn) November 9, 2018 To be on the safe side, the Ethereum Foundation also added …

This article has been updated to include comments from MyEtherWallet concerning the clone phishing site. Altcoins Ethereum Nowa (ETN) and Ethereum Classic Vision (ETCV) are reportedly appropriating the private keys of users trying to redeem their allegedly forked coins. The suspected scam was covered in a report sent to Cointelegraph by the Guarda Wallet development team on Jan. 11. The official website of the Ethereum Nowa project — which doesn’t contain a white paper — describes the process that users are supposed to engage in to obtain ETN. According to the website, the user should first send ETH to an …

Leading cryptocurrency exchanges OKEx and Huobi Global will support the Ethereum (ETH) Constantinople hard fork which is estimated to happen between Jan. 14 and 18, according to a press release shared with Cointelegraph. The Constantinople hard fork is an upgrade, which is supposed to fundamentally change the Ethereum blockchain, with the synchronous nodes update to the entire system. The hard fork encloses separate Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) in order to soften the transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to the more energy efficient proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm. OKEx will reportedly take a snapshot of all the OKEx accounts at the block height …

The Ethereum (ETH) Constantinople upgrade appears to be proceeding as planned, as a widely used Ethereum software client has published new code that includes a Constantinople activation time on GitHub on Dec. 11. The post reads that Geth, which stands for Go Ethereum, v1.8.20 is a special release that will enable the Constantinople hard fork on the Ethereum mainnet at block 7,080,000. Geth is one of the three original implementations of the Ethereum protocol. The description further states: “It's also our last planned release of the 1.8 family, meaning that we'll start merging backwards incompatible changes onto master in preparation …

The Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange OKEx announced that it will list Bitcoin Cash ABC under the original Bitcoin Cash ticker BCH, according to an official statement Dec. 11. According to the announcement, the sixth largest crypto exchange will change the ticker of Bitcoin Cash ABC from BCHABC to BCH. It will also change the Bitcoin Cash SV ticker from BCHSV to BSV. The ticker switch will take place at 5 a.m. UTC+1 on Dec. 13. Spot trading of both BCHSV and BCHABC will be suspended while all remaining balances of the original Bitcoin Cash will be settled and removed from users’ …