The Department of Energy (DOE) of the United States has announced $4.8 million in funding for university research of technologies including blockchain, according to an announcement published Jan. 7. The funding has been announced by the department’s office of fossil energy. Projects eligible for funding include those researching emerging technologies, “such as blockchain and decentralized, peer-to-peer [P2P] internet protocols” to secure data from fossil power generation sensors. The developed systems would be used to securely process data from the sensors and other unspecified information flows within distributed sensor networks for fossil-based power generation systems. The DOE said it “anticipates selecting …

The American Economic Association (AEA) will host four dedicated presentations of cryptocurrency and blockchain research today, Jan. 4, as part of its ongoing annual meeting. The session, dubbed ‘Blockchain and Tokenomics,’ will cover four academic papers from various sources. It will be hosted by the academic group the Econometrics Society and chaired by Lin William Cong, assistant professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The AEA is a major entity within the sphere of United States economics and beyond, and publishes the well-known journal the American Economic Review. The appearance of an event dedicated to …

Ledger claimed that recently uncovered vulnerabilities in its hardware wallets are not critical in an official Medium blog post on Dec. 28. Yesterday at the 35C3 Refreshing Memories conference in Berlin, researchers claimed that they were able to hack the Trezor One, Ledger Nano S and Ledger Blue cryptocurrency wallets. In the post, the company explains that there appeared to be “three attack paths which could give the impression that critical vulnerabilities were uncovered,” but according to them “this is not the case.” The reason Ledger says that the vulnerability is not critical is that “they did not succeed to …

Researchers have reportedly shown how they were able to hack the Trezor One, Ledger Nano S and Ledger Blue at the 35C3 Refreshing Memories conference. The demonstration of the hacks was published in a video on Dec. 27. The research team behind the dubbed “Wallet.fail” hacking project is made up of hardware designer and security researcher Dmitry Nedospasov, software developer Thomas Roth and security researcher and former submarine officer Josh Datko. During the conference, the researchers announced that they have been able to extract the private key out of a Trezor One hardware wallet after flashing — overwriting existing data …

There are thousands of pump-and-dump groups on popular messaging apps, a study conducted by the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) revealed Dec. 18. Pump-and-dump is the fraudulent practice of perpetrators encouraging unwitting investors to buy an asset to inflate its price artificially, and then selling it when the price gets high enough. This practice is not new, Cointelegraph having reported last year about Telegram groups organizing pump-and-dumps. The newly published data, however, “suggest that [the pump-and-dump] phenomenon is widespread and often quite profitable.” According to an article on the study, published by Bloomberg Dec. 19, the researchers have identified 4,818 …

The COMET Centers, which are coordinated by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), have approved the Austrian Blockchain Center (ABC) in Vienna, according to a Nov. 29 press release. ABC involves 21 scientific institutions, 54 companies, 17 associated participants, and 16 international institutions and companies. According to the release, the research center will be multidisciplinary and focus on Internet of Things (IoT), finance, energy, logistics, and applications in public administration. Alfred Taudes, academic director and coordinator of the center, and head of the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, said that a multidisciplinary approach …

Initial Coin Offering (ICO) performance was in part characterized by “overall disappointment” in the third quarter of 2018, according to a study from ICO analysis firm ICORating published Nov. 15. As the report states, Q3 2018 saw 597 ICOs raise over $1.8 billion, a notably lower value than the over $8.3 billion reportedly raised in the previous quarter. A similar decline in investment has been reported in traditional Venture Capital (VC) funding for blockchain projects. In the report, the decline in funding is accompanied by a median return on investment (ROI) of -22 percent in Q3 2018. As the report …

Private blockchains, such as interbanking platforms set to share information on customers, could be compatible with new E.U. privacy rules, according to research published Nov. 6. The study was conducted by Queen Mary University of London and the University of Cambridge, U.K. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) act, a recent legislation that regulates the storage of personal data for all individuals within the European Union, came into effect this May. According to the law, all data controllers have to respect citizens’ rights in terms of keeping and transferring their private information. In case a data controller fails to do …

Chinese retail giant JD.com is further gaining a foothold in blockchain technology by launching a research lab for blockchain in partnership with two technology institutes, according to an announcement published Oct. 30. Jingdong Group (JD.com) is a leading Chinese e-commerce company, controlling roughly 30 percent of the business-to-consumer online market in China with 314 million active users, according to Financial Times. The company focuses on implementation of new technologies in e-commerce, delivery services, and finance. Per the announcement, JD has collaborated with the Ying Wu College of Computing at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and the Institute of …

A new report from climate change scientists has raised the alarm over Bitcoin (BTC)’s carbon footprint and its potential future impact on global warming, published on Nature.com Oct. 29. The report extrapolates existing data for Bitcoin’s electricity consumption together with various projections for the cryptocurrency’s adoption in coming years. According to the report, in 2017, out of a rough total of 314.2 billion cashless transactions, Bitcoin’s share is estimated to have been around 0.033 percent. While acknowledging that “accelerated growth” is common at the early adoption stage of new technologies, the report nonetheless claims that even if Bitcoin follows a …

Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) have raised $20 billion since the start of 2017, which is $18 billion more than the previous year, according to a recent study by financial research firm Autonomous Research. The study dubbed “Crypto Utopia” explores the cryptocurrency industry over the past year, focusing on ICOs and the regulation to which they are exposed. Per the study, $12 billion has been raised through ICOs in the course of 2018, while last year they raised $7 billion. The ICOs of blockchain protocol EOS and messaging app Telegram are responsible for almost half of all ICO funds in 2018 …

Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) have almost broken even on funds sold versus funds they raised, new research by Hong Kong cryptocurrency trading platform BitMEX revealed Monday, October 1. The findings, compiled in partnership with crypto analytics resource TokenAnalyst, further suggested that despite Ethereum’s (ETH) price decline in 2018, ICO projects still had $93 million in “unrealized profits.” Further, the research states, net profits “realized” by ICOs that successfully closed comes to $727 million. “[R]ather than suffering because of the recent fall in the value of Ethereum, at the macro level, the projects appear to have already sold almost as much …