Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin became the center of attention on Christmas Day amid fears he plans to sell $25 million of the cryptocurrency. Records from monitoring resource Etherscan showed a total of 92,000 ETH (currently worth $11.5 million) move from a single wallet to U.S. exchange Kraken on Dec. 25. Funds’ source “likely whale or Buterin” As noted by blockchain analytics service ViewBase, the wallet contained over 300,000 ETH before the transaction and received most of its content from Buterin several years previously. “The whale is likely an ETH dev or VB himself,” it summarized in accompanying comments. The …

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has recently published an alternative proposal for an early transition to Ethereum 2.0. In a Dec. 23 post on the ETH Research forum, Buterin has set out an “accelerated schedule” for the transition from Ethereum 1.0 to Ethereum 2.0 through a new type of ETH validator referred to as “eth1-friendly validators.” According to Vitalik, this new alternative proposal will require less “rearchitecting” in the network. He wrote: “Specifically, it requires stateless clients, but NOT stateless miners and NOT webassembly, and so requires much less rearchitecting to accomplish.” At the same time, the proposed alternative transition would …

Binance’s decentralized exchange is a better target for criticism over being centralized than Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin believes. In a recent Twitter discussion, Ethereum co-founder Buterin triggered a wave of argument over decentralization in the crypto industry, particularly Binance DEX as well as Ethereum itself. Criticizing Ethereum for being centralized is bad, Vitalik says The discussion started after Buterin retweeted a promotional video by multi-currency digital asset and derivatives exchange BTSE on Dec. 21. While the video apparently has nothing to do with questions like Ethereum’s decentralization, the Ethereum co-founder has spurred crypto community on arguments by tweeting: “The part I …

Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin has declared his solidarity with Virgil Griffith, the American citizen arrested for his blockchain educational activities in North Korea. In a tweet posted on Dec. 1, Vitalik shared a link to a blog post penned by blockchain firm CEO Enrico Talin, which had appealed directly to the Ethereum co-founder to start a petition in support of Griffith. “Let’s not have another Aaron Swartz martyr in our hands,” Talin had written, in reference to the hacker and political activist who killed himself in 2013 ahead of a high-profile federal trial. Buterin: “geopolitical open-mindedness is a *virtue*” …

Blockchain advisory and product development firm Akomba Labs conducted a test on the Ethereum network that shows it can make block propagation at least twice as fast. Coindesk reported on Nov. 27 that Akomba Labs — in collaboration with the scalability-focused blockchain startup BloXroute — ran a two-week test measuring the results of running BloXroute's Blockchain Distribution Network (BDN) on the Ethereum network. Test findings showed that the average block propagation performance significantly improved, dropping from 360 milliseconds without the BDN to 172 milliseconds with it. The test results further indicate that BDN could potentially present itself as a solution …

Bran Cohen, best known as author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol, has responded to some of Vitalik Buterin’s opinions about the state of technology around cryptocurrencies. On Nov. 25, Cohen, also the current CEO of the Chia network, explained in a Twitter thread why he considers many of Vitalik’s opinions in his Nov. 22 blog post addressing the so-called “hard problems in cryptocurrency,” to be “wrong-headed.” Sharding is not the only option Cohen started out by taking a few stabs at Vitalik’s views on sharding and blockchain scalability, where the Ethereum co-founder points out that fully sharded blockchains still …

Visit the website of any stock exchange platform, like the Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange, and the listing fees for new companies are there to see. There is hardly any controversy when it is clearly stated like this, but the same cannot be said for the cryptocurrency space. Here, numerous reports show that crypto exchanges are being decidedly opaque about the structure of their listing fees. Take Blockstack, for example: A recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission revealed a $250,000 payment to Binance in its listing of STX token. The cryptocurrency trading giant, however, denied …

Recently, Canada’s central bank has been leading working groups with global partners exploring a blockchain future. Their crypto presence has soared with Ernst & Young’s announcement that it is using Toronto to test its public government expenditure blockchain. But what is the cryptocurrency landscape currently like in Canada? The history of crypto in Canada may seem as volatile as a token with a small market cap, yet mainstream use and adoption have been on a consistent incline since 2013, when Canadians started pushing mainstream adoption. Now, the Canadian government is leading working groups. What else has the country been up …

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has sparked controversy among cryptocurrency users after suggesting developers could reverse transactions. Buterin’s community feedback falls flat In a Twitter survey on Oct. 26, Buterin quizzed followers about their opinion of reversing chain activity in the event of a major hack of an exchange or similar entity. “Suppose a popular smart contract wallet that a large portion of the ETH community uses gets hacked. This could be reverted by reverting all chain activity since the hack and doing a DAO-style HF to recover the funds,” he wrote. Continuing, he asked how many coins would need to …

Ethereum 2.0 validators can expect to earn from 4.6% to 10.3% as rewards for staking on an annual basis, a senior ConsenSys exec says. 32 ETH required to become a validator Collin Myers, head of global product strategy at blockchain firm ConsenSys, reportedly claimed that in order to become a validator on the Ethereum 2.0, one is required to maintain a minimum amount of 32 Ether (ETH), which is worth $5,760 at press time. Myers revealed the news at a recent blockchain event Devcon 5, Coindesk reports Oct. 25. Ethereum 2.0 is a major network upgrade on the Ethereum blockchain …

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is not at all impressed by the perceived threat Bitcoin (BTC) faces from Google’s quantum computer. Buterin took to Twitter on Oct. 23, where he commented on the news that Google had achieved quantum supremacy, meaning that a quantum computer has solved a mathematical calculation that would take any traditional computer millenia to solve. Buterin shared a seemingly snarky analogy: “My one-sentence impression of recent quantum supremacy stuff so far is that it is to real quantum computing what hydrogen bombs are to nuclear fusion. Proof that a phenomenon and the capability to extract power from …

Ethereum (ETH) co-founder and ConsenSys CEO Joe Lubin has characterized both Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum’s conceptions as being “immaculate.” Lubin made his remark during a panel with Vitalik Buterin and Yoni Assia at the Ethereal Summit Tel Aviv on Sept. 15, according to live reporting from eToro analyst Mati Greenspan on Twitter. Twin titans To a seasoned ear, Lubin’s comment pointedly reproduces a phrase previously used by staunch Bitcoin maximalists in reference to the conceptual and technological elegance of Satoshi’s invention and to the equally shrewd choice of timing for the publication of its white paper. His sleight of hand …