Human resources firm Ranstad, which recently became global leader in the sector, has chosen to further automate its workflow using a smart contracts-focused blockchain. The firm’s 40,000 employees will be using an enterprise blockchain solution from New York-based Cypherium, which has struck partnerships with major cloud providers Google Cloud Wing, IBM Cloud, and Amazon Web Services. All of the paperwork-intensive processes involved in HR allocation, Randstad revealed on Feb. 28, will soon be automated using the platform in conjunction with Google Cloud. Automating verification Cypherium has a hybrid design, combining two consensus mechanisms: Proof-of-Work (PoW) and HotStuff (also used for …

Coinbase, the U.S. cryptocurrency exchange boasting over 20 million views per month and over 30 million total accounts, has tested Clearview AI facial recognition technology according to a BuzzFeed News report. However, Coinbase has denied that the test involved customer data. The controversial software has been the subject of intense scrutiny since a New York Times article exposed the company’s database of over three billion images, scraped from “millions” of websites and social media platforms without the consent of the users or publishers. Clearview AI has been threatened with legal action by some of those companies and platforms, including Facebook, …

Top cryptocurrency exchange Binance has partnered with public blockchain protocol Shyft Network as it readies itself to comply with Financial Action Task Force (FATF) regulations. The Shyft Network was designed to provide a decentralized solution for crypto industry players to fulfill global compliance standards, including the FATF’s “travel rule.” In a statement shared with Cointelegraph on Feb. 27, Binance’s chief compliance officer Samuel Lin said that, until the creation of the Shyft Network, there was no existing infrastructure by which firms could comply with the new FATF rules. As part of the FATF’s updated guidance for Virtual Asset Service Providers …

A privacy expert who compared some of the most popular browsers on the market reached an unambiguous conclusion: Brave trumps competition. Trinity College Dublin’s chair of computer systems, Dr. Douglas Leigth, authored a study comparing Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Edge and Yandex in terms of how much personal data they share with backend servers. Brave’s default configuration was by far the best of the bunch. The study reads: “Used ‘out of the box’ with its default settings Brave is by far the most private of the browsers studied. We did not find any use of identifiers allowing tracking of IP …

In an interview with Cointelegraph at the Stanford Blockchain Conference on Feb. 19, Stanford University cryptography Ph.D. student Ben Fisch described Supersonic as a trustless zero-knowledge proof system, also referred to as a zk-SNARK. Fisch helped create a trustless zero-knowledge proof system designed specifically for decentralized finance. Trustless versus trusted zk-SNARKs While zero-knowledge proof systems are needed for preserving privacy across blockchain networks, almost all require trusted-setups. Fisch said, “This means that users of the privacy tool must trust a third-party to configure the system properly.” For example, the privacy-focused digital currency Zcash (ZEC) leverages zk-SNARKs to allow users to …

Startup Status raised $100 M in its 2017 initial coin offering on the premise of building a private messenger based on the Whisper protocol that allows Ethereum DApps to communicate. Each smartphone that runs a Status app becomes a node, and all the messaging runs on a peer-to-peer network which is censorship-resistant. After three years of hard work, it is ready for the spotlight. Picking up where Ethereum dropped off Whisper currently allows for only about 100 daily users before bandwidth consumption becomes an issue according to the company's simulations. Status hopes to overcome this limitation. “Whisper has scalability issues. …

As the new decade unreels, a new wave of disruption seems to be coming to the shores of the global financial system. That wave is called decentralized finance protocols. Decentralized finance, or DeFi, simply refers to financial software that is built on the blockchain to make it easy for anyone to piece together digital assets and financial smart contracts. Think of DeFi as a Lego system for the finance industry. According to Defi Pulse, an analytics site that tracks the sector’s growth, the entirety of the DeFi ecosystem achieved its highest valuation in 2019 when its value peaked beyond $600 …

The team behind Brave Browser thinks that Google has an unfair competitive advantage due to its massive trove of user data. In a submission filed with the United Kingdom’s consumer protection agency, Brave argued that the country’s failure to enforce European data protection laws gives Google an unfair advantage. Brave’s stance In an interview with Cointelegraph, Dr. Johnny Ryan, Brave’s chief policy and industry relations officer, insisted that it’s not about the competition between Chrome and Brave, but enforcing the laws that protect consumers: “RTB [Real-time-bidding, an auction for online ads] is the biggest data breach in the world, personal …

Cryptocurrencies could not exist without cryptography. Advances in this field can have far-reaching impacts on blockchain technology and its potential. We will examine the opinions of industry experts on the latest cryptographic advances and their potential for cryptocurrencies. Zero knowledge proofs: more than just privacy Director of research at blockchain firm Blockstream and mathematician Andrew Poelstra told Cointelegraph that zero-knowledge proof (ZK-Proof) systems are “one of the most exciting areas of development” in the cryptography space. This kind of cryptography is known and appreciated for being the basis of privacy-preserving solutions. ZK-Proofs are the basis of the privacy-preserving technology included …

A company is using nonfungible tokens to help consumers establish ownership and control over their DNA data. GenoBank.io’s approach comes as the world’s scientific community begins to scratch the surface of what can be achieved through DNA sequencing — understanding our ancestry, detecting and treating breast cancer earlier, and prescribing personalized medicine. Although consumer-focused DNA testing products have exploded in popularity over recent years, concerns about privacy have grown with it. In direct response to that, millions of Americans who have received DNA data from major providers like 23andMe or Ancestry will be able to use a GenoBank.io algorithm to …

A major global company that helps fight illicit cryptocurrency-related activity does not think that privacy in crypto markets is necessarily bad. Despite representing one of the primary sources of crypto transaction data for federal agencies like the Internal Revenue Service and the FBI, Chainalysis does not exactly oppose the privacy and decentralization of crypto. “Complete transparency is not necessarily an ideal place” Jonathan Levin, co-founder and CSO at blockchain and crypto analytics firm Chainalysis, reiterated his stance to privacy in crypto, claiming that full transparency of cryptocurrency transactions might not turn out to be the best situation. Speaking in an …

Privacy-centric computing network and app ecosystem Blockstack has paused its App Mining pilot due to a range of challenges. Rolled out in 2018, the App Mining project is designed to incentivize developers to build apps on Blockstack. Although the startup has ostensibly seen a healthy app growth throughout 2019 — from 46 to more than 400 apps so far, — it admitted an array of challenges in running a program of increasing size and complexity, according to a Feb. 10 blog post. Three key challenges to be solved As such, Blockstack has decided to pause the pilot until it resolves …