This article has been updated to correct that Cointelegraph’s traffic was not affected by the Google Core Update as previously written. Top cryptocurrency media site CCN is shutting down today, June 10th, according to an announcement on their website. The post, written by Jonas Borchgrevink, director and founder of CCN Markets and Hawkfish AS, states that the reason behind the closure is a large drop off in traffic from Google searches following a June 3 Google Core Update. Borchgrevink writes that the crypto news site’s traffic fell over 71% on mobile overnight. The founder notes that while traffic levels have …

Fraudsters have been adding fake cryptocurrency wallets to the Google Play store in an attempt to cash in on rising bitcoin (BTC) prices, ESET antivirus researchers claimed on May 23. One malicious app imitated the hardware wallet Trezor — and the investigation found that the software had ties to another fake app that has the potential to scam unsuspecting users out of money. While the app’s page on Google Play looked legitimate, the researchers said the software itself contains no Trezor branding at all, with a generic login screen phishing for credentials. According to ESET, more than 1,000 users had …

Decentralized blockchain platform Qtum is working with Google Cloud as a software partner to increase the ease of launching native products for users, the company confirmed in a blog post on May 2. Qtum, which like the Ethereum (ETH) platform focuses on smart contracts and decentralized applications (DApps), has already released a suite of developer tools on Google Cloud, which executives hope will further uptake. “Google Cloud is the perfect partner to help us make the blockchain ecosystem simpler and more intuitive. Where launching a node was once an intensive and complex process, Qtum’s new developer suite introduces helpful shortcuts …

A former engineering executive at PayPal and Google will join the team behind the institutional digital asset platform Bakkt, the firm’s CEO Kelly Loeffler announced in a blog post on Medium on April 11. With over 25 years of experience in digital payments, engineering, strategy and operations, Mike Blandina has joined Bakkt as its chief product officer (CPO). As the new CPO of Bakkt, Blandina will lead the firm’s efforts to converge a trusted ecosystem for digital assets with payments use cases in order to help Bakkt bring real applications to Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies, the announcement notes. Blandina …

The promise is great for so-called smart cities, which will deploy a network of interactive sensors to achieve efficiency and innovation. The smart city vision includes driverless cars, renewable energy to aid a city’s power consumption, energy-efficient buildings, and communications systems that work with the location’s infrastructure to avoid waste, among other features. A report by the International Data Corporation (IDC) indicates that spending on smart city technology is expected to grow to $135 billion by 2021. Despite the promise of a futuristic and more environmentally friendly city, the results — at least so far — are not vast. Politicians …

Google searches for "Bitcoin" nearly tripled during the recent price spike, according to Google Trends data. According to Google Trends, search requests for Bitcoin (BTC) jumped from roughly 30 to 100 following the leading cryptocurrency’s surge on the night of April 2. That night Bitcoin pushed over $4,500 for the first time this year, gaining 15 percent overnight. The rating is compiled by algorithms, wherein “numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that …

Video-sharing platform YouTube purportedly ran a malicious advertisement for Bitcoin (BTC) wallet Electrum by mistake, according to a Reddit post published on March 26. Viewers interested in the advertisement were redirected to a malicious link using a common scamming method called typosquatting or URL hijacking. In the Reddit post, a user named mrsxeplatypus warned the public about the promotion of a malware version of Electrum, and described how the scam ad worked: “The malicious advertisement is disguised to look like a real Electrum advertisement [...] It even tells you to go to the correct link (electrum.org) in the video but …

A Google Chrome browser extension tricking users into participating in a fake airdrop from cryptocurrency exchange Huobi claimed over 200 victims, a security researcher reported in a blog post on March 14. The extension for Chrome web browser, with the name NoCoin, gained 230 downloads before Google deleted it, according to Harry Denley, who runs cryptocurrency scam database EtherscamDB. Denley noted that hackers had purposely disguised the malicious extension to look like a tool protecting users from cryptocurrency malware or so-called cryptojacking. “From the start, it looked like it did what it should — it was detected [sic] various CryptoJacking …

A company says it is combining the power of IT and marketing to deliver high-security, functional and profitable pieces of software that not only work flawlessly, but also sell. CPI emphasizes its software is scalable and geared toward the finance and blockchain industries. The firm offers white-label products that allow businesses to achieve their financial goals by converting casual visitors into paying customers. Among its suite of products is a crypto exchange that is available on the web and through mobile apps. The platform delivers high-frequency trading for virtual currencies and fiat, along with assets such as real estate that …

An exchange has launched a new service designed to take the guesswork out of investing in cryptocurrencies. Lykke says that it is often difficult for crypto users to know where digital assets they’ve acquired will be in the future. They could be the next Google, something that’s going to rise astronomically in the years to come. But on the other hand, they could turn out to be the next MySpace — popular until something else comes along. The exchange has created a service token called LyCI, which enables users to access the top-25 cryptocurrencies based on their market capitalization. Lykke …

Coinomi Wallet denied recent claims that its software sends wallet recovery seed phrases to Google’s remote spell checker servers in plain (unencrypted) text. The company refuted the claims in an official statement published on Feb. 27. In the statement, Coinomi claims that, unlike what was reported, the seed phrase transmission was encrypted via SSL (HTTPS), with Google being the only recipient capable of decrypting the message. Coinomi notes that the phrase was only transmitted if the user chose to restore his wallet and only on the desktop version. Finally, Coinomi states that the spell-check requests sent to Google were not …

The development software of corporate-oriented cryptocurrency Ontology (ONT) has been added to the Google Cloud Platform Marketplace, a Medium post from Ontology revealed on Feb. 23. The newly supported software, called ont_dev_Platform, is a set of tools for developing smart contracts on Ontology’s blockchain. The DApp product includes a block explorer, a smart contract Integrated Development Environment (IDE), SmartX, and an Ontology test environment. According to the announcement, this addition makes the project “one of the first public blockchains to have a development platform on the leading cloud provider marketplaces.” This statement is referring to the fact that Ontology is …