Bitcoin Core developer Pieter Wuille has migrated from Blockstream to Chaincode Labs. Wuille has been with Blockstream from the beginning, having co-founded the company in 2014. When asked about Wuille's departure, Blocksteam’s CEO Adam Back said: “Pieter’s doing what he always has — working on Bitcoin — and he’s still a Blockstream advisor and continues to collaborate with our research team Andrew Poelstra, Jonas Nick and Tim Ruffing on muSig along with independent researchers and contributors. So I think that means Blockstream contributors on MuSig research roughly going from 4/5th to 3/5th of the people actively working on muSig cryptor.” …

CEO Nevin Freeman of stablecoin startup Reserve predicts that central banks will tokenize their currency at some point, but stablecoins will likely still have an advantage in offering privacy. Freeman delivered his remarks at the Consensus 2019 panel “The End of Volatility? Stablecoins on the Rise” on May 15. During the panel, moderator Joel Telpner, a partner at Sullivan & Worcester LLP, asked the speakers why banks could not simply tokenize their national currency and drive fiat-backed stablecoin services out of business. Freeman replied that he thinks banks will do this, but will not offer the same privacy of current …

Bitcoin (BTC) developer Pieter Wuille has unveiled two proposals on GitHub for a Taproot soft fork in a message to the bitcoin-dev mailing list on May 6. Taproot is a solution that aims to combine the advantages of Merkelized Abstract Syntax Tree (MAST) and the Schnorr signature scheme in order to reveal less information after a bitcoin transaction takes place. MAST allows for the alternative possibilities of how a bitcoin transaction could have occurred to remain private, and Schnorr allows for a MAST-enabled transaction to occur without revealing that MAST was used to check transaction conditions. In Wuille’s memo, he …