Nick Percoco, chief security officer at United States-based cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, announced that two-factor authentication (2FA) is now mandatory for the exchange’s users in a post on the company’s official blog published on March 26. 2FA, in this case, is an additional component needed to access an account. Often 2FA requires the user, after entering their login information, to also enter a one time password (OTP) received via SMS. Per the announcement, Kraken supports Google Authenticator and YubiKey as 2FA implementations. YubiKey is a hardware device dedicated to generating OTPs, while Google Authenticator is a smartphone app meant to do …

Update: This article was based on Ledger's post on Medium.com, which insinuates that Ledger will integrate full FIDO features. We've been told that this is not true, however. Ledger says they will add U2F authentication, but not biometric. We apologize for the error. The next generation of Ledger, a smartchip-based Bitcoin hardware wallet similar to Trezor, will be compatible with the authentication features of Fido Alliance – namely external dongles and fingerprint readers. Ledger says they will employ Fido Alliance's Second Factor (U2F) and Passwordless (UAF) authentication types. Of U2F authentication, a Ledger spokesperson tells Medium: “[It] uses Elliptic Curve …