Latest News on Blockchain Technology & Nodes | Nodes.com

Mimblewimble’s Privacy Model Unveiled

Mimblewimble may not be considered a viable alternative to Zcash or Monero anymore due to the holes in its security and privacy protocols. A researcher was able to uncover the exact address of senders and recipients for almost all Grin transactions in real time using just $60 a week of AWS spend. Stick with us to find out more. The Issue at Hand Invented back in 2016, Mimblewimble has grown in popularity in the recent years as a promising lightweight privacy protocol. With time, several researchers have pointed out that there is a potential privacy weakness in the network. The researcher Ivan Bogatyy made it his mission to expose the deficiency to the community. He managed to unmask the flow...

20.11.2019

Countries Are Taking Notice of China’s Blockchain Adoption

Jack Lee, the founding managing partner of HCM Capital, stated that China’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is ready and launch can be expected within two or three months. He had an interview with CNBC, which was published earlier on 11th November, where he states that the People’s Bank of China will also be using the new cryptocurrency. He adds that it will further strengthen the oversight over capital flows. CBDC Is Taking Pole Position China’s new digital currency is ready to be launched and it will bring a wide plethora of advantages. For example, the Public Bank of China tracks cash movements with serial notes on the banknotes. Although it is working, it is not a very efficient and...

13.11.2019

Stellar’s Developer Foundation Burned Half of its Lumens Supply

As a non-profit entity, the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), has the sole purpose to make Stellar the global standard for payments. Thus, in order to accomplish this and move the project further, a resource burn had to be carried out, halving the total supply of Stellar in the network. The Burn and What Remains The resources up to the moment of the removing of half the assets were 105 billion Lumens that were in existence, which were divided roughly 20 billion in circulation for users, 17 billion in the operating fund of the Foundation and 68 billion were locked away for giveaway programs and were monitored by the SDF. Just before the Foundation made the announcement, they burned 5 billion...

06.11.2019

China Aims to Officially Adopt and Invest in Blockchain Technology

The President of China, Xi Jinping, held a study session on blockchain technology, where he stated that the country should seize opportunities in distributed ledger technology. One day after that statement, the Standing Committee of the 13th National People’s Congress in China passed new cryptography regulating law. The Proposal While China is still keeping cryptocurrency trading under a ban and its national digital asset is not yet complete, further research into cryptography could prove very beneficial. According to statistics published by the Cyberspace Administration of China, there are over 500 such projects since January this year. The application for such technology could not only be for the financial sector, but also for fields like research, administration and many more. The...

30.10.2019

A Potential Bitcoin Attack That Will Hinder Lightning Payments Discovered

Researchers discover that the Bitcoin Lightning Network could be vulnerable to attacks that can delay or completely stop payment channels. Although there is no way to know how dangerous this potential DoS attack is, it is considered a major flaw in the network. Attack With an Amplified DoS The research paper, that was written by Saar Tochner, Aviv Zohar, and Stefan Schmid, describes an amplified DoS attack that could easily slow down or even stop a huge percentage of the payment channels on the lightning network. This can be achieved because each payment in the lightning network is passed across nodes in order to get to its final destination. If one of these nodes is a “bad actor”, it can...

23.10.2019

Ethereum Friendly Fork Using Avalanche

Athereum is a “spoon”, or friendly fork, of Ethereum. Avalanche was first revealed in May 2018, making Athereum the first network that uses the Avalanche consensus. It offers superior transaction speed and better scalability for ETH. Aethereum And Avalanche With its unique technology, Athereum effectively provides a new replay-protected network for ETH, thanks to the high performance of the AVA platform. Its core characteristic is that it supports efficient and modular decentralized services, as well as focusing on reducing the challenges when it comes to trading new types of cryptocurrencies. This platform will allow developers to create their own subnetworks, which can issue and use any type of digital asset. Athereum is a “friendly fork”, meaning that it isn’t a...

16.10.2019

PayPal is The First to Withdraw From Libra

World-leading payment provider, PayPal, did not attend the latest meeting of the 28 Libra backers. Later a speaker of the company stated that PayPal will be officially withdrawing from the project as the pre-work done with regulators is not satisfactory. The First Company to Pull Out The spokesperson for PayPal informed CoinDesk in a statement the reasoning behind their withdrawal. The company has decided to not continue with its participation in the Libra project. PayPal will instead be concentrating on their current business priorities and goals. The representative of the major payment provider continued: “We remain supportive of Libra’s aspirations and look forward to continued dialogue on ways to work together in the future. Facebook has been a longstanding and...

09.10.2019

Bitcoin Lightning Network Developer Reveals Vulnerability

One of the developers of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, Rusty Russel, has revealed a vulnerability in the network, which was discovered in August. In his statement and further publications, he gave a solution to the problem. Continue reading to find out more. The Issue The discovery of this vulnerability was made public on 30th August by Russell. According to him, “An attacker can claim to open a [lightning payments] channel but either not pay to the peer, or not pay the full amount”. The Lightning Network allows very fast and cheap transactions on top of the bitcoin blockchain, as it’s a Layer 2 payment protocol. These payment channels are what two parties open between each other and exchange funds freely until...

02.10.2019

Bakkt’s Official Launch

Bakkt launched on 22nd September 2019 with the Bakkt Bitcoin Futures contracts taking the main stage. These Futures are a vital step towards adoption of digital assets to institutional investors. Continue reading as we go through what is Bakkt and what these Futures contracts are. About Bakkt Bakkt is a Bitcoin Futures exchange and digital assets platform, that was founded in 2018 by the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). ICE is the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, and it initially had plans to launch the platform in 2018. The launch date was postponed due to the sheer volume of interest it got as well as the amount of work required to prepare the platform to be ready. Additionally, there...

25.09.2019

Hedera Hashgraph Launches Open Beta Version of Mainnet

The long-awaited mainnet of the Hedera Hashgraph project is now released. It is backed by some of the world’s largest corporations as well as promising faster transactions and scalability than any blockchain currently released. Details Regarding Hedera In December 2018, the network was released in a testing environment to a group of corporations and developers. Now, anyone can make an account or build a dApp. The Hashgraph is similar to a blockchain but a different consensus mechanism is in place regarding the state of the distributed ledger. With the mainnet now live, Hedera will start to distribute HBAR tokens. More than 379 million of them will go to investors, who participated in the $124 million crowd sale held in three...

18.09.2019