Speaking on a Unitize digital conference panel about proof-of-work, or PoW, attacks, James Lovejoy of MIT's Digital Currency Initiative, or DCI, said 51% attacks might not be evident, despite blockchain's public nature. Blockchains do not always show 51% attacks at first glance, Lovejoy explained on the July 9 panel. "You need an active observer to be monitoring the network to check whether or not an attack occurs," he said. Lovejoy has a blockchain reorganization tracker For his DCI master's thesis, Lovejoy spun up a blockchain reorganization tracker, or reorg tracker, that examines 51% attacks, he detailed on the panel. The …

Cryptocurrency has seen a rise in mainstream attention starting last fall — before COVID-19 measures took off, according Floating Point Group, or FPG, an algorithmic trading technology startup conceived at MIT. "An increasing portion of our inbound prospects are established industry participants coming from FX, equities and derivatives markets," FPG co-founder Kevin March told Cointelegraph on May 28 after confirming the presence of increased mainstream crypto trading interest. Cryptocurrency opportunity knocking Abiding with U.S. regulation, FPG offers institutional players a number of tools, APIs and other tech for trade automation. March noted similarities among the incoming crypto trading interest. Elaborating, …

Floating Point Group, or FPG, a startup delivering institutional crypto traders automation technologies, garnered $2 million of capital from several entities. "It's becoming clear that sophisticated quantitative traders and platform developers are viewing the cryptocurrency markets as an exciting new opportunity," FPG CEO John Peurifoy explained in a May 28 statement. The funding goes toward expansion Algorand CEO Steve Kokinos, Seabury Global Markets, AngelList founder Naval Ravikant, and multiple others invested the money into FPG, receiving company stake in return, the statement said. An outfit operating under U.S. governing bodies, FPG plans on putting the funding toward regulation approvals, as …

Major Bitcoin (BTC) derivatives exchange BitMEX has started accepting grant applications from open source developers. The initiative follows $650,000 in developer grants that the exchange has issued to Bitcoin Core contributor Michael Ford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. BitMEX expands open-source development funding BitMEX’s parent company, HDR Global Trading Limited, has opened its open-source development grants to applications from developers contributing to Bitcoin, Java, NodeJS, and Kubernetes. The application form also indicates that HDR is open to considering supporting open source development not relating to the four stated technologies, in addition to “smaller non-developer” grants for specific contributions such …

Voatz, the Massachusetts-based company touting a blockchain-enabled mobile voting app, has been met with public criticism for a lack of transparency, among other things, particularly when it comes to data security. And with the threat of election tampering, the stakes are as high as ever. Voatz has been used in elections in West Virginia; Jackson County, Oregon; Umatilla County, Oregon; municipal elections in Utah County, Utah; as well as in runoff elections and municipal elections in Denver, Colorado. The public security audit by a reputable third-party firm that experts have been calling for is here at last. In December 2019, …

On March 7, three monetary and cryptocurrency experts discussed the challenges and prospects of central bank-issued digital currencies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Bitcoin Expo 2020. The panelists acknowledged that distributed ledger technologies (DLT) could improve the existing global monetary system, however, argued that significant challenges persist regarding the privacy, interoperability, and scalability of blockchains. IMF official: central banks must not rush to adopt DLT Sonja Davidovic, an economist with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), warned central banks not to rush to implement blockchain systems without properly vetting the technology first. She stated: “What we've seen a lot …

Computer scientist Ronald Rivest has said that blockchain is not the right technology for voting, although it can find proper application in a number of other areas. Rivest delivered his opinion at the RSA Security Conference, held in San Francisco earlier this week, technology-focused news outlet ITWire reported on Feb. 28. Rivest — who is a cryptography expert and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — called voting an interesting problem that requires a more stricter approach compared to many existing security applications. He said: “Blockchain is the wrong security technology for voting. I like to think of …

MIT’s crypto and distributed ledger tech research group, the Digital Currency Initiative, recently explained that a central bank digital currency (CBDC) will eventually use some of the concepts and technology currently at play in the experimental crypto space. “CBDC should not be a direct copy of existing cryptocurrencies with exactly the same design and features but there are things we can learn from their emergence — the usefulness of programmability in money and the importance of preserving user privacy,” the MIT group wrote in a lengthy report on Jan. 22. A birth from necessity Pointing to the intersection of technology …

Algo Capital has raised $200 million — double its original goal — for its venture capital fund. According to a news release shared with Cointelegraph on Aug. 27, the new fund will invest in businesses helping to build infrastructure for the Algorand blockchain — an open-source public ledger and cryptocurrency payment system that utilizes a Byzantine Agreement message-passing protocol. The fund will also be investing in businesses focused on accelerating the adoption of the platform’s native token, Algo, as a means of payment. As previously reported, Algorand was founded by Silvio Micali, a cryptographer and Turing Award winner who is …

Alexander Lipton, a connection science fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and adjunct professor of mathematics at New York University (NYU), has claimed that Libra’s white paper copied concepts for a coin proposed in his academic work. Lipton co-authored the paper “Digital trade coin: towards a more stable digital currency” in 2018. In a July 26 interview with CoinDesk, Lipton said: “Without being particularly obnoxious, I can tell you that the actual structure of Libra is pretty much lifted verbatim from the paper which Sandy Pentland and Thomas Hardjono and I published last year.” Additionally, Lipton noted that …

It is easy to think of the most prominent blockchain advocates as a united front, whose ranks are tightly closed in the face of the common enemy — a horde of fierce crypto critics, unwieldy regulators, anti-money laundering zealots, “bitcoin is a scam”-ers, and the stakeholders of the old, centralized financial system. On this battlefield, the crypto camp’s fundamental positions are aligned, and its strategic goals are clear. However, in the times of armistice, blockchain champions get together by the campfire to ponder the important details of their common cause, and — astonishingly — at times, they disagree. This time …

Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Christian Catalini is on leave and working on the development of Facebook coin, cryptocurrency news Coindesk reported on May 3. Per the report, two anonymous sources with knowledge of the situation told Coindesk about Catalini’s collaboration with Facebook. Catalini — the Theodore T. Miller Career Development Professor at MIT — is reportedly one of the more prominent researchers in the field of token economics. He recently co-authored a report with University of Toronto professor Joshua Gans on initial coin offerings and the value of tokens. Earlier this week, news broke that social media giant Facebook …