The Tron Foundation, the firm behind TRX, the 11th top crypto by market cap, has acquired blockchain app store CoinPlay, Tron’s CEO, Justin Sun, tweeted on March 28. With the new acquisition, Tron intends to contribute to the aggregation of a wide range of blockchain apps and decentralized applications (DApps) on one platform, eliminating the need to look up those apps at conventional app stores, according to the announcement on Tron’s blog. CoinPlay reportedly offers a variety of blockchain software and games, as well as practical guides, browser navigation, ratings and indices of major currencies. By acquiring CoinPlay, Tron aims …

Leading Ethereum (ETH) browser extension Metamask reportedly broadcasts ETH addresses to all websites a user visits in its default settings, a GitHub issue submitted on March 20 states. Metamask is a browser extension featured in the Brave browser — compatible with Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera — that enables its users to interact with Ethereum-based decentralized applications (DApps). According to the aforementioned GitHub issue, Metamask broadcasts its users’ ETH address to all the websites visited in its default settings, with the post specifying that the ETH addresses are shown in data objects contained in message broadcasts as opposed to …

Blockchain projects that comprise the greater cryptocurrency sector’s market cap are unquestionably bootstrapped — a product of ingenuity and crowdsourced blockchain fundraising. But with the industry evolving further in the last few years, gaps between mature projects and less developed ones are more noticeable, exhibited by issues that a well-funded or more thorough team of development experts could avoid. The latest example of this came from EOS — a competitor with Ethereum — when a user figured out how to broadcast a fake transaction to the network for 1 trillion EOS (a single transfer for $3.6 trillion). While the incident …

Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin says that blockchain applications outside of finance face more difficulty gaining traction, as the primary added value they offer is decentralization. Buterin made his remarks during a speech at crypto event Token 2049 in Hong Kong on March 13. Buterin began by noting that finance is “realistically the first blockchain [application] that will probably achieve wide scale adoption,” and that even though he is a self-declared huge fan of other applications: “The problem is that decentralization is basically their value add. With finance you’re competing with banks that take five days to do something interesting. …

Major web browser Opera has announced the upcoming launch of Opera Touch for iOS, according to an official press release published Tuesday, March 5. Opera Touch is a Web 3 browser with an integrated crypto wallet and support for Ethereum (ETH) and interactions with decentralized applications (DApps). Back in December, Opera launched its “Web 3-ready” browser with a built-in crypto wallet for Android users. Opera explains the decision to expand its services to iOS as the result of the successful integration of the crypto wallet and DApp explorer for Android. Although the launch date of Opera Touch for iOS had …

Blockchain protocol Tron (TRX) and Tether, issuer of stablecoin USDT, have announced a partnership to introduce USDT to the Tron network by the second quarter of 2019. The news was shared with Cointelegraph in an email on March 4. The forthcoming TRC20-based USDT — a term that indicates adherence to a technical token standard supported by the Tron blockchain — will be interoperable with all Tron-based protocols and decentralized applications (DApps), and allow for the transaction and exchange of fiat-pegged coins across the blockchain. The USDT, which launched in 2014, has traditionally facilitated frictionless fiat on- and off-ramping to the …

Paying for the ultimate result of an advertising campaign, and not just impressions or clicks, has always been the dream of advertisers. There have been attempts to solve this fundamental problem, but despite technological advancements, inefficiencies have remained. Fraud has been an issue, with underperforming publishers lacking of transparency, which means that advertisers have been unable to guarantee whether their campaigns have reached the demographics they were promised. Atayen Inc., a United States-based company that was founded in 2014 — and was, until recently, engaged in developing Facebook apps — has proposed what they call an “oraclized” distributed application that …

Blockchain-centric smartphone Exodus, developed by consumer electronics giant HTC, announced that it has partnered with web browser Opera as well as added support for multiple DApps. The news was revealed in a series of tweets on Feb. 26 from the firm’s official Twitter. The company announced support for Etheremon and Decentraland DApps in its ZIONVault integrated cold storage. Moreover, according to a Verge report, the smartphone now also supports a Taiwanese DApp called Numbers. Numbers reportedly tracks user data and allows users to sell their data to third parties for cryptocurrency while retaining both control over the data that is …

What is an STO? STO stands for security token offering. Similar to an initial coin offering (ICO), an investor is issued with a crypto coin or token representing their investment. But unlike an ICO, a security token represents an investment contract into an underlying investment asset, such as stocks, bonds, funds and real estate investment trusts (REIT). A security can be defined as a “fungible, negotiable financial instrument that holds some type of monetary value,” i.e., an investment product that is backed by a real-world asset such as a company or property. A security token, therefore, represents the ownership information …

United States-based cryptocurrency exchange and wallet service provider Coinbase has added support for Bitcoin Cash (BCH) to its Coinbase Wallet, according to an announcement published on Feb. 19. The update states that users can now store Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase Wallet, adding: “The new Wallet update with Bitcoin Cash support will roll out to all users on iOS and Android over the next few weeks.” As Cointelegraph wrote in August 2018, Coinbase Wallet was introduced as a rebranding of the firm’s open source decentralized app (DApp) browser and wallet, formerly called Toshi. The rebranded wallet has several different features from …

Chinese search engine and web services company Baidu has launched its Baidu Blockchain Engine (BBE), an operating system designed to facilitate decentralized application (DApp) development. The news was officially announced by Baidu’s cloud computing unit, Baidu Cloud, on Feb. 14. Baidu Cloud states that it considers an open source, commercialized platform to be “the only way to build a blockchain operating system.” BBE has reportedly been built on the basis of Baidu’s “ABC” technology strategy — artificial intelligence (AI), big data and cloud computing — and aims to make DApp development “as simple as creating a mobile app.” Hoping to …

A new blockchain protocol is presenting itself as a place where businesses and individuals can build peer-to-peer financial applications with confidence. Bytom describes itself as the “infrastructure of the asset internet.” The company’s vision is to create diverse assets and a programmable economy and ensure that byte assets (such as cryptocurrencies and digital assets) and atomic assets — like securities, dividends, bonds and information existing in the physical world — can interact and circulate more easily. In their white paper, the team behind the protocol say its architecture for creating applications “is friendly to mobile and other terminals and convenient …