Former Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft employee Tim Wagner has joined Coinbase as vice president (VP) of engineering, according to a blogpost August 6. Wagner will now lead Coinbase’s engineering team, which is “central to [Coinbase’s] mission of creating an open financial system for the world,” Coinbase writes in the post. Aiming to build the “most open, secure, and accessible financial system,” Wagner will also be responsible for expanding the team by hiring engineering talent in San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, according to his LinkedIn profile. Prior to Coinbase, Wagner served as general manager (GM) at AWS for …

Sirin Labs, a Swiss-based smartphone developer, will release a blockchain-based phone in November this year, the company told Cointelegraph on July 11. In December 2017, Sirin Labs raised $157.8 million for the project during their Initial Coin Offering (ICO), with $110 million gathered over the first 24 hours. Sirin Labs had also previously released a privacy-focused smartphone in 2016, with a market price of $16,000. The new blockchain-based phone, called Finney, is scheduled to go to market with an expected price of $1,000, Sirin Labs told Cointelegraph. Based on the Android system, Finney will run on SIRIN OS and include …

A cloud platform, with the goal of building a fairer internet, has made its mainnet live — allowing its growing suite of network-ready applications to offer faster and more secure hosting services for websites, APIs, apps and e-commerce stores. DADI says its peer-to-peer network helps to shift the emphasis of computing power away from large corporations, as its infrastructure is owned by users. The company claims that those who use its network enjoy greater performance and efficiency as a result, with costs slashed by as much as 60 percent when compared to traditional cloud providers. This shift away from server …

Since Bitcoin’s uses started to be thrashed out in forums and around dinner tables alike, there was always the belief that it would be a perfect thing for the likes of Amazon to accept. Digital cash for a digital store. Amazon may well be getting into the blockchain game, albeit slowly, and not with Bitcoin. But what about Alibaba? Alibaba is in the East, what Amazon is in the West, and is a massive eCommerce business with huge sway and power in the tech market. So, if Amazon’s Bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrency journey is pretty much mapped out and accounted …

Do we really depend on review sites? With 58 percent of consumers looking at online reviews at least once a week, the influence of sites that aggregate them should not be underestimated. Research reveals that 93 percent of shoppers say the testimonials they read affect their purchasing decisions. In an era where we are buying things online without seeing them in person, this is somewhat understandable. The personal experiences of other consumers can resonate more than the sales jargon they may encounter in stores, and that’s why 85 percent of them trust online reviews as much as advice from friends. …

Multinational software company SAP has launched a blockchain-as-a-service platform, SAP Leonardo Blockchain, the company reported Wednesday, June 6. The platform is designed to let corporate customers build applications and networks using blockchain technology. SAP’s official announcement notes that the new blockchain service will support Hyperledger Fabric and MultiChain, and will be built on top of SAP’s SAP HANA data management system. Gil Perez, SAP’s senior vice president for product and innovation as well as head of digital customer service initiatives, explained that SAP will not commit to any one underlying distributed ledger technology in order to be more flexible as …

Bitcoin, and the idea of digital cash, has taken hold of the banking sector as banks and financial institutions start to experiment internally with blockchains and cryptocurrencies in order to be at the forefront of these technologies. This, coupled with the fact that government organisations and even global leadership bodies such as the G20 are looking to regulate cryptocurrencies, again give more legitimacy and longevity to the industry. The latest wave of adoption is now coming from corporations who, traditionally have come to be successful thanks to their centralized domination over different aspects of the market. Microsoft, in the world …

The Coinhive crypto mining code has been recently detected on more than 300 government and university websites worldwide, cyber security researcher Troy Mursch reported Saturday, May 5. According to the report, all the affected websites are using a vulnerable version of the Drupal content management system. As the researcher posted on Twitter May 4, he was alerted to this particular campaign via the attack on the websites of the San Diego Zoo, and the government of Chihuahua, Mexico. Both websites reportedly had Coinhive injected into their Javascript libraries in the same way. Coinhive is a JavaScript program created to mine …

The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of Cointelegraph.com. The cryptocurrency craze over the past year saw the prices of crypto tokens rise to tens of thousands of times their original values. And Bitcoin wasn’t the only token to reach its all-time high. Even the prices of altcoins like Ethereum, Cardano, Ripple, Stellar, and NEO were all buoyed to new heights by the increased demand from investors seeking to take a piece of the action. The cryptocurrency market hit a peak of total capitalization of nearly $800 billion in January earlier this …

A curious user recently asked members of the Bitcoin subreddit how they spend their bitcoins on an everyday basis. Because Reddit is a global community, it's likely that their responses are reflective of overall patterns. Here's how the bits are flowing today: 1. Coffee and Food Delivery – Couture coffee got a whole lot cheaper the day that Foldapp started offering 20% off Starbucks purchases. Redditors also use bitcoins for food delivery services like Foodler, Magic and Thuisbezorgd (Netherlands). Word on the street is that Foldapp will soon add both Whole Foods and Target to its 20 % off list, …

[Note: Brawker and BillPayForCoins are both now closed. Do not attempt to send money to any site posing as either.] As someone who's gotten two mothers to use Bitcoin, I thought I'd offer up a few tips on what seems to entice the maternal amongst us. It's a falsehood that only the young (and male) are fans of digital currencies. If all goes well, you mother may not start waxing technical about the subtleties of Merkle trees, but she will no doubt rave about how easy it is to send payments online. And she'll feel extremely cool while doing it. …

If only everything were available for purchase in Bitcoin. Oh, wait, it is. Anything from plane tickets to houses, sex toys to groceries, can be purchased just by using CheapAir or BitPremier, Purse or Magic (respectively). But you can also just buy good ol'-fashioned gift cards. The companies Gyft, eGifter, and newly-rebranded Gift Off stand out in the crypto-for-gift card space: 1. Gyft Founded in 2012 with the aim to eliminate the use of physical gift cards, Gyft began accepting Bitcoin relatively early on. They offer cards for over 200 retailers, including: Amazon Whole Foods Home Depot Starbucks Target Best …