Celo, a stablecoin payments network, has announced the addition of more than 20 new members to its "Alliance for Prosperity" ahead Celos’s mainet launch — which is currently expected for mid-May. The new alliance members have begun working to deliver mobile-friendly decentralized applications (DApps) built on top of Celo. The alliance's total membership has now tagged 75 just two months after launching. Celo alliance membership grows by 50% The new additions include payment processors, digital asset wallet providers, custody providers, blockchain advocacy groups, privacy coins, stablecoins and teams seeking to integrate blockchain technology into supply chain management systems. “We are …

Ethereum 2.0 is expected to launch within months, but new scaling solutions and gas-free transactions are already here. The network is also growing more popular, with the number of active wallets more than doubling since January to around half a million. Synthetix scales up optimistically The developers behind the second-largest DeFi protocol, Synthetix, have partnered with Ethereum layer-2 research team Optimism to launch a demo deployment of Synthetix Exchange on the Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM). Optimism’s OVM is a layer-2 scaling solution designed to allow DeFi financial platforms to operate with comparable speeds to centralized systems. The use of scaling …

Adam Cochran, the analyst who predicts Ethereum 2.0 staking will cause a new bull run, released a 109-strong Tweetstorm on April 29, revealing his findings from a manual audit of Ethereum’s 10,000 fattest wallets. The conclusion of the research, also presented in a blog post, is that things are currently looking incredibly bullish for the number two cryptocurrency by market cap. Distribution to rival Bitcoin Cochran’s first port of call is the distribution of Ether (ETH) amongst the top wallets. This is something which many critics point to as proof of a pre-mine and centralized control, but the research suggests …

Digital asset security firm Ngrave announced sales for its flagship product, the fully offline hardware wallet Ngrave Zero, will launch next month. The devices will be made available for purchase on Indiegogo from May 26 and are slated for shipping in October. Ngrave claims the first EAL7-certified crypto wallet Ngrave’s co-founder and chief executive Ruben Merre told Cointelegraph that its product introduces “a number of innovations compared to existing solutions,” stating: “The Ngrave Zero is 100% offline, and features extreme tamper-proofing. It’s the only blockchain wallet with EAL7 security certification, which is the highest security certification in the world.” The …

Users of MyEtherWallet, an Ethereum wallet app, will soon be able to buy a .crypto domain from the wallet’s interface. Unstoppable Domains, a company that is hoping to spread awareness of the decentralized domain type, entered a partnership with the wallet provider. Announced on April 23, the integration with MyEtherWallet would allow the domain provider access the wallet’s 1 million monthly active users. Unstoppable Domains refers to the wallet company as a domain registrar, which are normally companies responsible for reselling domains. Unlike with traditional domain registration, custody of the domain is tied to the specific wallet and is not …

EOS Ecosystem, a wallet app that attracts investors to deposit EOS with promised high returns, has reportedly shut down and possibly run away with close to $52 million, according to an April 20 report. $52M is gone and more is potentially missing The local media’s investigation of EOS block transactions found the balance of one of the EOS accounts associated with EOS Ecosystem had no more than 500 EOS tokens left. The account holder had removed about 890,000 EOS tokens on Monday morning. They dug a little further and tracked down a number of other accounts that also belong to …

Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols could soon emerge as the world’s dominant liquidity pool if scaled effectively, according to Alex Batlin, the founder and CEO of cryptocurrency custody platform Trustology. Cointelegraph spoke to Batlin — also a co-founder and board member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance — at the recent BlockDown 2020 conference to discuss the outlook for decentralized finance and how DeFi is impacting crypto custody. DeFi to become predominant means of finance globally Alex emphasizes that he is “super excited about DeFi,” stating: “My macro-hypothesis for DeFi is that as and when it starts working, it potentially could be …

Leading hardware wallet producer Ledger announced that its official wallet software now supports Tron (TRX). According to an announcement, Ledger Live — the official wallet software for Ledger’s hardware wallets — now allows its users to manage their Tron addresses. Furthermore, Ledger hardware wallet owners can also stake their TRX directly from the software. The announcement reads: “You can now manage your Tron (TRX) into Ledger Live and stake them, which means getting rewards without doing anything!” Ledger also announced that — to celebrate the added Tron support — the firm is holding a contest. Among the users who participate, …

Google recently removed 49 phishing Google Chrome web browser extensions after receiving reports about their activity. Harry Denley, director of security at cryptocurrency wallet startup MyCrypto, explained in an April 14 Medium post how he got the extensions removed from Chrome’s store within 24 hours with the help of phishing-specialized cybersecurity firm PhishFort. The removed extensions include ones that targeted the owners of hardware wallets produced by Ledger, Trezor and KeepKey, and users of software wallets Jaxx, MyEtherWallet, Metamask, Exodus and Electrum. The extensions triggered the users to enter the credentials needed to access the wallet — such as mnemonic …

Volume for Samourai Wallet’s non-custodial Bitcoin mixer, Whirlpool, tripled last month, with the service processing more than $10 million worth of Bitcoin (BTC). According to data published to Twitter by Whirlpoolstats’ Matt Odell, March activity comprised 40% of the then-total volume produced by Whirlpool since its launch in May 2019. Whirlpool mixer sees record activity Samourai Wallet’s Whirlpool has seen a notable increase in user activity during 2020 so far. While Whirlpool saw a retraction in user activity at the end of 2019 after posting a record of 303.55 BTC in volume during October, each month of Q1 2020 set …

Leading hardware wallet producer, Ledger, now allows online customers to pay using Crypto.com’s wallet app. According to an April 9 announcement, the firm has chosen to accept payment in Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), XRP, Litecoin (LTC), and Crypto.com Coin (CRO) via Crypto.com’s application. This is not the first time that Ledger has allowed its customers to pay with crypto. They already accept Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and XRP via their crypto payment processor, Bitpay. An update on an old collaboration Back in December 2018, the two firms signed a memorandum of understanding, which was mean to allow Ledger’s customers to …

Interoperable blockchain project Ark (ARK) designated one million ARK valued at roughly $150,000 toward its new development grants program on March 24. While the grant program was launched one week ago, Ark’s Strategic Partnerships Manager, Ray Alvarez, told Cointelegraph that it has already received proofs-of-concept from developers. The program exclusively funds “proposals involving technical deployments and usage of [the] ARK technology stack.” The applications include standalone applications and plugins, including development contributing to Ark’s decentralized private messaging application, desktop wallet, and transaction plugins. In addition to sparking development for specific applications, Alvarez states that the program is also intended to …