Ethereum’s testnet activation of the Istanbul hard fork has been pushed back to early October, according to the community manager of the Ethereum Foundation, Hudson Jameson. According to CoinDesk on Sept. 6, Jameson said on a developers’ call that the testnet launch of the hard fork is now scheduled to take place in the beginning of October. He added: “For anyone listening in who doesn’t know how this works, we pick a block number that we estimate to be around the 2nd of October. [...] However, that might be one or two days behind or forward from that date based …

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says the Ethereum blockchain is almost full. In an interview with The Star published Aug. 19, he said the hurdle that faces big organizations interested in the Ethereum ecosystem is the still-thorny matter of the blockchain’s scalability. “Scalability is a big bottleneck” Buterin’s stark comments were made as part of a discussion of what he perceives to be the biggest roadblocks to the widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies. He conceded that: “Scalability is a big bottleneck because the Ethereum blockchain is almost full. If you’re a bigger organization, the calculus is that if we join, it will …

Ethereum co-founder said that the future of crypto is pluralist in response to a recent proposal of mixing the Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN) with Ethereum. Blockade Games using Bitcoin LN as an interface for Ethereum contracts On July 31, blockchain-focused game developer Blockade Games posted an article on implementation of Bitcoin LN as an interface for Ethereum contracts in order to enable instant payments in Bitcoin, while simultaneously triggering a series of events on Ethereum, or any other chain. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted on the news on Aug. 2, drawing attention to the fact that a blockchain developer used …

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed to using the Bitcoin Cash blockchain as a temporary scalability solution for the Ethereum network. The programmer introduced a summary of the idea in a July 13 post on the Ethereum Research. As previously reported, the Ethereum network has experienced some scalability issues, with its native blockchain capable of processing as few as 15 transactions per second (TPS), while its major competitor Ripple is reportedly estimated to have a TPS capacity of 1,500. As such, the Ethereum community has been working on Ethereum 2.0, a major network upgrade that is expected to improve its …

Joseph Lubin could arguably be seen as a star at any blockchain event these days, but at the Ethereal Summit last month — organized by Ethereum-focused development company ConsenSys, which he co-founded — he was especially revered. While inside the conference space, the co-founder of Ethereum was either listening intently to what was happening on stage or surrounded by a group of people between panels. Nevertheless, he found some time to speak with us during the two-day event. So, on a sunny Saturday, we sat down on a quaint cast-iron bench in the garden area of the Brooklyn venue, Pioneer …

On May 22, 2019, cryptocurrency mixers (also called tumblers) were front and center on the news cycle, following reports of European authorities shutting down one such service. Law enforcement officials involved said the action was necessitated by reports on Bestmixer.io — i.e., the platform in question that was being used to funnel dirty money via cryptocurrencies. Stakeholders in the crypto industry decried the action, calling it a gross overreach by government agents. They also declared that it set a dangerous precedent, one that could be inimical to cryptography as a whole. In the wake of the shutdown, Vitalik Buterin, the …

Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed creating an on-chain smart contract-based ether mixer in a note on collaborative development platform HackMD on May 24. In his note, Buterin argues that the Ethereum ecosystem needs more privacy, and points out that the default behavior is to do everything through a single account, allowing for all of the user’s activities to be linked to each other. Furthermore, he notes that simply spreading the ether across multiple addresses is not a solution, since the transactions sending ETH to those wallets connect them. Buterin also linked to a Twitter thread where it has …

The Ethereum Foundation has announced a three-pronged approach to allocating the $30 million it has designated for developing the Ethereum network over the next year, in an official blog post on May 21. The breakdown for the three categories is future projects at $19 million, current projects at $8 million, and developer supports at $3 million. Much of the funding will go to Ethereum 2.0 projects including client teams, research, documentation and communication, and layer two projects like Plasma. Plasma, which was first proposed by Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Poon in 2017, is scaling solution for the network employing autonomous …

Blockchain entrepreneur Alex Tapscott has been fined $25,000 by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC,) according to a filing on May 14. Tapscott is the CEO of NextBlock Global, and in the filing, the SEC said neither the Canadian company nor its securities had ever been registered with the commission. The 33-year-old and his company have also been ordered to cease and desist from committing further violations of the Securities Act. According to the SEC, NextBlock was founded by Tapscott and three others in June 2017 for the purpose of investing in blockchain companies and related digital assets. …

Ethereum founders Joseph Lubin and Vitalik Buterin and their respective organizations ConsenSys and the Ethereum Foundation are each donating 1,000 ether (ETH) to the Moloch decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). This donation brings the organization's total funds up to $1 million, a Cointelegraph correspondent learned at the Ethereal Summit on May 10. The stated objective of Moloch DAO, created by Ameen Soleimani — the CEO of the Ethereum-based adult token platform Spankchain — aims to crowdsource funding for shared, open-source Ethereum infrastructure. Moloch DAO states: “Our objective is to accelerate the development of public Ethereum infrastructure that many teams need but …

Top Stories This Week Fractional Reserve Stablecoin Tether Only 74% Backed by Fiat Currency, Say Lawyers According to documents released by USD stablecoin tether’s (USDT) lawyers, the company behind the stablecoin only has enough fiat reserves to back a little less than three-quarters of its existing supply — 74%. Tether executives had previously publicly promised that each tether was backed one-to-one to the USD, a claim that has been disproven by the lawyers’ document release. The need to release the figures comes from the recent claims by the U.S. attorney general in New York that cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, which shares …

A code for the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain’s first-stage transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm could be completed by June 30, as stated in an Ethereum core developers meeting on May 2. In a bi-weekly call, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake claimed that the developers team expects to prepare code specifications for phase zero by the end of June. Drake stated: “We’re still very much on track. Still, [code] simplifications are coming through, which is great and the process of fine combing is also for finding these final bugs.” Phase zero is the name of the first phase transition stage of …