Social media giant Facebook has released the white paper for its long-awaited cryptocurrency and blockchain-based financial infrastructure project today, June 18. According to the paper, Facebook’s global stablecoin, dubbed “libra,” will operate on the native and scalable Libra blockchain, and be backed by a reserve of assets ostensibly “designed to give it intrinsic value” and mitigate volatility fluctuations. These assets consist of a basket of bank deposits and short-term government securities that will be held in the Libra Reserve for every Libra that is issued. The website for the digital asset, calibra.com, was briefly down around 5AM EST, about when …

On June 10, one of the top cryptocurrency media sites, CCN, initially announced that it would shut down, citing a June 3 Google Core Update for stifling its traffic. Writing on the website, the director and founder of CCN Markets and Hawkfish AS, Jonas Borchgrevink, blamed the update for an overnight fall of 71% of the site’s mobile traffic. While Borchgrevink noted that ups and downs are part of the business, such a vertiginous fall is unprecedented in its history. At the time of the post, the founder said that it could not support new additions to its team or …