The head of Russia’s central bank, the Bank of Russia, has said that while the launch of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) is being explored, it is not a matter for the near future. The news was reported by Russia government-backed media agency TASS on June 15. A CBDC is a digital currency issued by a central bank that has the status of legal tender and other properties of centralized, fiat money. TASS reports that Bank of Russia’s head Elvira Nabiullina told an audience at a student conference in the Russian city of Skolkovo that a CBDC cannot be …

The testnet of private smart contract network Enigma has been launched, the developers announced in a Medium post published on June 11. Per the announcement, the test network, dubbed Discovery, allows developers to start developing their decentralized applications (DApps). Furthermore, contracts hosted on the Discovery testnet will reportedly be immediately deployed on the Ethereum (ETH) network once Enigma has been implemented on the mainnet. The newly launched network reportedly enables privacy for general computations, which enables DApp developers to create secure applications, according to the post. The author of the post further notes that the developers have been using and …

Canadian-based University of British Columbia (UBC) has announced a blockchain and distributed ledger technology training program for master’s and PhD students. UBC announced the development in a press release on June 11. The training path is reportedly designed to build competency around blockchain tech, and is focused on its application in four public benefit areas: health and wellness, clean energy, regulatory technology and Indigenous issues. UBC says they hope to train 139 students over a six-year period, and graduates should have the tools to evaluate blockchain solutions as well as identify opportunities for blockchain implementation. Canadian national non-profit research organization …

Blockchain firm Nebula Genomics has announced a collaboration with EMD Serono, the North American biopharmaceutical business of Merck KGaA — the world’s oldest operating pharmaceutical firm. The news was announced in a press release shared with Cointelegraph on June 11. As previously reported, Nebula is a blockchain-powered platform for genome-sequencing data, co-founded in 2017 by renowned geneticist Professor George Church and his Harvard colleagues Dennis Grishin and Kamal Obbad. The platform leverages blockchain technology in a bid to incentivize genomic data generation and sharing, and to lower the costs of genome-sequencing while preserving privacy and individuals’ control over their unique …

The research organization Data Foundation and IT firm Booz Allen Hamilton have published a report with five proposed questions to guide the United States federal government on where and how to implement blockchain initiatives. Their research was published in the report “Bringing Blockchain Into Government: A Path Forward for Creating Effective Federal Blockchain Initiatives” on June 10. According to the report, blockchain solutions make the most sense when applied to some sort of procedure with a predetermined level of consistency and a low level of agility, assuming that the immutable ledger provided by blockchain is valuable for the task in …

One of the main themes to be discussed at the G-20 Financial Ministers and Central Governors Meeting this weekend has to do with money laundering and cryptocurrency. What kind of agreement would be a surprise? Even for the purpose of introducing Anti-Money Laundering (AML), should we allow our financial privacy to be compromised? Alexander Zaidelson, the CEO of Beam, shared his views with Cointelegraph. A new agreement on crypto and AML? Jiji Press, a major Japanese publication, recently reported that there will be “a new kind of agreement as to cryptocurrency and AML/CFT.“ But for blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, which …

Joseph Lubin could arguably be seen as a star at any blockchain event these days, but at the Ethereal Summit last month — organized by Ethereum-focused development company ConsenSys, which he co-founded — he was especially revered. While inside the conference space, the co-founder of Ethereum was either listening intently to what was happening on stage or surrounded by a group of people between panels. Nevertheless, he found some time to speak with us during the two-day event. So, on a sunny Saturday, we sat down on a quaint cast-iron bench in the garden area of the Brooklyn venue, Pioneer …

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 …

Big four auditing firm Ernst & Young (EY) open sourced the code of its Nightfall Ethereum (ETH) private transactions solution and released it on GitHub on May 31. The readme information file featured on the GitHub repository explains the function of the software in question: “Nightfall integrates a set of smart contracts and microservices, and the ZoKrates zk-snark toolkit, to enable standard ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens to be transacted on the Ethereum blockchain with complete privacy.” In the same file, EY claims that it decided to release its research in the hope of speeding up the adoption of public blockchains. …

Cryptocurrency mixing service Bitcoin Blender has reportedly willingly shut down after issuing a short notice asking its users to withdraw their funds, tech news outlet BleepingComputer reports on May 30. Per the report, the message describing the service that appeared on the homepage of the website present both on the Tor network (often referred to as the darknet, dark web or deep web) and on clearnet before it shut down was the following: “We are a hidden service that mixes your bitcoins to remove the link between you and your transactions. This adds an essential layer of anonymity to your …

On May 22, 2019, cryptocurrency mixers (also called tumblers) were front and center on the news cycle, following reports of European authorities shutting down one such service. Law enforcement officials involved said the action was necessitated by reports on Bestmixer.io — i.e., the platform in question that was being used to funnel dirty money via cryptocurrencies. Stakeholders in the crypto industry decried the action, calling it a gross overreach by government agents. They also declared that it set a dangerous precedent, one that could be inimical to cryptography as a whole. In the wake of the shutdown, Vitalik Buterin, the …

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) — the United States’ largest bank — is reportedly poised to release an open-source extension that enhances the privacy of payment mechanisms on Ethereum-based blockchains. The development was reported by crypto media outlet Coindesk on May 28. The new tool has reportedly been designed as an extension to the Zether protocol. As reported, Zether is a privacy-focused payment mechanism that is compatible with Ethereum and other smart contract platforms. The protocol uses zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology and was developed by researchers from Stanford University and Visa Research earlier this year. JPM reportedly plans to release its extension …