The scam bots have quickly spread across the Internet and captured Twitter. Most social network users are accustomed to the incessant advertising appeals from at least a little bit popular crypto-figures, but the problem has begun to change.

Recently a cyber security company Duo Security has published a research, showing how the scale of harm from fraudulent cryptocurrency bots on Twitter has expanded. At least 15 thousand accounts were studied in the work. The researchers used machine learning to separate real accounts from bots, as well as classify scammers by their propensity for cryptocurrency. The company studied 88 million Twitter accounts, focusing on the last 200 tweets. The conclusion was as follows: at least 15 thousand pages turned out to be bot accounts dedicated to fraud with the help of cryptocurrency.

Against the backdrop of serious turnover problems Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin was forced to change his name to Vitalik Non-giver of Ether. It is worth noting that not all Twitter users are currently able to distinguish a bot from a real page, which supports fraudulent actions.

The study showed that many crypto-bots had active pages. They communicate to avoid being detected and removed. This makes removal of fraudulent accounts much more difficult. Twitter, which has taken a tough stance on cryptocurrency in the form of a ban on all advertising related to cryptography, is not in a hurry to solve the problem of fraudulent bots, despite the negative atmosphere they create on the platform.
Buterin’s response to Elon Musk’s tweet, laughing at the bots, asked Jack Dorsey and the Ethereum developer community to solve the problem. Twitter, for its part, has shown willingness to apply ready-made solutions, if they are effective for real.

Bitcoin derivatives trading provider LedgerX says it saw a “record” amount of trading volume over the last two months, says CoinDesk.

The company cleared 50 million USD in derivatives volume in July alone, president and chief risk officer Juthica Chou in her interview to CoinDesk.

LedgerX launched a new bitcoin purchasing system last month and it increased client demand. Called one-click bitcoin, the service acts as a “one-stop shop” for institutional or high net-worth clients to buy bitcoin easily through a federally-regulated platform, explains Chou. The service is built on top of the LedgerSavings platform LedgerX launched in May.

The platform is available to all LedgerX clients including 130 institutions as well as high net-worth individuals.

LedgerX is intending to add Ethereum based products and currently negotiating the guidelines with the regulator. Chou is confident that the company will receive this approval as all of its products are “full collateralized.”

The users having the biggest trading volume for some period of time will be able to get from to 2 to 1700 Cardano coins.
The most active traders of OKEx exchange will be able to get Cardano tokens for free on August, 9-16. Altcoins/Btc, Tether, Eth and local OKB token trading volume will be taken into account. 800k coins will be divided among 30k users.

The prize will be 2-1700 Cardano tokens, according to the current rate, the maximum prize is about $220. The coin is the 8th on the list of the largest cryptocurrencies by market cap.

OKEx cryptocurrency exchange is the second by bitcoin trading volume. It was launched in Honk Kong in 2017.

A bank in Zurich will work with digital money which were accepted as payment or earned with the help of mining. The growth of popularity of cryptocurrencies and high demand for them made Swiss bank Maerki Baumann start accepting digital money.

The bank won’t offer the clients cryptocurrency investments, but will provide experts who can consult everyone who gets interested. At the moment, Maerki Baumann follows development of the market and regulation of the industry.

The bank representatives noted that it is not recommended to invest a lot in digital money and that they are not suitable for long-term investments because of volatility.

Maerki Baumann is the second Swiss bank which has started to use cryptocurrencies. Previously, Hypothekarbank Lenzburg provided accounts for fintech companies connected with blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

BTC hashrate reached 52 quintillions per second 3 days ago, but this fact did not have significant impact on miners’ income. Moreover, BTC hashrate has increased by 3 times since the start of the year.
BTC hashrate is directly connected with the speed of mining of cryptocurrency. Mining equipment should perform complex calculations and find blocks, so equipment has to make a lot of calculations each second. That’s how hashrate is calculated.

Bitcoin mining, hashrate and the level of difficulty are connected in several ways. If the hashrate increases, the level of difficulty grows, too; in its turn, it leads to the fact that the miners will get some number of BTC and a part of transaction fees.

However, recent increase in hashrate didn not lead to increase of profitability of mining companies. Maybe, electricity costs are the reason. The higher the price of electricity is, the smaller the income got a miner is.
Speculators of the cryptocurrency market think that the bitcoin miners who have not bought the new equipment consume more electricity, consequently, small miners get less income.

Senior Director of Huobi Pro (Top 2 of the world’s crypto-exchanges in terms of trading volume) Wu Xing will speak at the international forum on blockchain and cryptocurrencies Blockchain life 2018 in St. Petersburg.


Huobi.Pro is the leader of the world crypto community providing professional and reliable world-class financial services, the monthly volume of which reaches $30 billion. The company’s offices are located in more than 130 countries.

Wu Xing specializes in creating educational content that allows people around the world to earn on cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. As part of her report, Wu will talk about the revolutionary stage of development of cryptocurrency exchanges – simplifying the analysis of trading trends, which will help market professionals and novice traders to increase their profits.

To attend an exclusive performance by Wu Xing, you can on the largest international forum Blockchain Life 2018, which will be held in St. Petersburg on November 7-8 at the exhibition venue “Expoforum”. ?Take your ticket now here.

West Virginia authority is planning to roll out mobile voting for its midterm elections in November for the first time in the US.

The foundation of the system is based on Voatz startup. Availability will be limited “largely” to troops serving abroad as an alternative to mailed absentee ballots, and individual counties can decide whether or not to participate.
Voatz provides the data security using blockchain technology. To sign up for the app, they will need to obtain special government ID and a self-shot video for facial recognition, plus an additional layer of biometric security with either another selfie or thumbprint.

Its setup has already faced criticism from researchers despite all the innovations. The main weakness is a single-user blockchain technology that in practice is just a database, and its unpublished source code. Even if the server is well protected, there’s still the issue of insecure mobile devices and the networks people use for connections.

One of the first countries using blockchain technology in voting was Switzerland. In summer 2018 Zug municipality held elections and over 200 000 people participated in it using their smartphones.

Ethereum developers are working on testing and implementation of the next hard fork Constantinople. The update will make the ethereum network more efficient and less costly in terms of fees.

Constantinople is a second part of Metropolis hard fork. It’s accepted to be activated before October’s Devcon4 ethereum conference taking place in Prague on October 30 to November 2.

A roadmap for the upgrade has also been suggested. Under that roadmap, the implementation stage continues until August 13, after which there will be two months of testing, including the launch of a Constantinople-specific test network.

Right now developers are working on the implementation of four improvements of the network (EIP). Péter Szilágyi, the head developer of Geth, stated that most of the updates were already put into places.

Some of the upgrades that have reached the implementation stage include EIP 210, which reorganizes how block hashes are stored on ethereum, and EIP 145, which increases the speed of arithmetic in the ethereum virtual machine (EVM). They are also focused on EIP 1014 for the addition of ethereum state channels, and EIP 1052 new op-code that compresses how contracts interact.

There are two other improvements currently under discussion including a possible delay in ethereum’s difficulty bomb and an EIP that could improve how gas pricing works.

One and the same address is sending and receiving transactions consuming most of the resources
The Ethereum network is once again undergoing what looks like a spam attack. GAS is an internal Ethereum currency that is used today miners for handled transactions.

Last year, the same activity was linked to airdrops or other project-related transactions, this time, the usage looks like outright spam, which was also reflected in the comments on Etherscan. One of the users studied transactions and noticed frequently repeated wallet addresses. According to him, it’s a botted ring wallet system that owns around 150-200 thousands ETH. Bots transfer random amount of ETH from one address to another that’s why they are hard to identify in cloud chain.

The estimated cost of today’s attack is around $20,000. The cost of fact transactions went up insignificantly as well. The fees increase has a direct impact on all blockchain users.

It remains unknown who is behind this spam attack. The issue of fake network loads and transaction counts is creating a false impression of activity in the crypto space, where in fact some projects are barely used. Even Bitcoin payments remain a niche activity. Exchanges have also used faked volumes to boost their visibility and invite new users.

Bitcoin is sharply down due to unexpected news.

The SEC issued a statement today confirming that their decision on the Cboe BZX Exchange application would be postponed until 30th September 2018 at the latest, forklog reports.

In a written memo, the Commission determined that a longer period of consideration was “appropriate” in coming to this conclusion. Earlier, SEC have already used its right to postpone Bitcoin-ETF applications.
The Commission session regarding Chicago Board Options Exchange regulations changes was going to take place on August 10. However, now it has been postponed.

If approved, this decision will become a key point in cryptocurrency history for Bitcoin-ETF in the USA in general and for VanEck and SolidX liked in CBOE in particular, says ttrcoin.

The companies submitted their joint application on June 6 and SEC received many comments from the community regarding the necessity of this tool and determined that the market is ready to accept it.

If Sec approves it, VanEck SolidX Bitcoin Trust will by insured against theft and losing the access to funds. It will be also linked to new Van Eck index that will collect Bitcoin price from the USA based platforms (OTC).
VanEck SolidX Bitcoin Trust share price will be set at $200 000 which means that new ETF is focused on institutional investors. Earlier, SEC anonymous source has made it clear that the Commission is leaning towards approval.

The decision to postpone the application followed the rejection issued to the Winklevoss twins who intended to launch their own Bitoin-ETF and challenge the rejection they got in March 2017.
Many community members believe that first Bitcoin-ETF can be launched only in spring 2019. The same time frame is expected for the final SEC decision.

Bob Goodlatte, Republican congressman from Virginia and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in the US, holds as much as USD 80,000 in cryptocurrency, according to a Sludge report on Monday, citing the congressman’s annual financial disclosure.

According to Bitcoin supporters, digital currency may threaten fiat currency at certain stage of its development and government organizations won’t be able to monitor financial system. Right now one of the US congressman invests money into cryptocurrencies. He is the first who officially declared his investment in Bitcoin.

The committee’s memorandum, released June 18, requires all house members and their spouses to disclose cryptocurrency holdings over $1,000 under “Assets and Unearned Income” in their annual financial report. Further, members have a maximum of 45 days to register cryptocurrency transactions over $1,000 as the exchange of “other forms of securities”.

Goodlatte Jr. invested into CoinBase crypto exchange however, the amount invested as well as the date remain unknown. He expresses very optimistic feeling about the main virtual currency. The politician also does cryptocurrency trading but this information had not yet been confirmed.

Mess Media also report that other congressmen intend to add their digital assets to financial reports. Jared Polis, the richest democrat with a personal net worth estimated at nearly $122 million. He is one of the founders of the Congressional Blockchain Caucus which is first and foremost interested in how blockchain technology can improve government. Polis became a congressman in February this year.

Major investments and historical high amount of power used along with cryptocurrency price downfall that’s why is happening in the market right now.

According to the information provided by Blockchain company, Bitcoin mining power usage is at an all-time high with the speed of 52 quintillion per second.

Cryptocurrency investments keep being poured into the industry despite Bitcoin price of 6500 USD at the press time which makes it hard to find a break-even point of this business. However, it also means that the investments are made for the long term when Bitcoin price double or triple as miners expect and that’s what Twitter users under the name ecurrencyhodler believes.

It explains why the leading company in ASIC mining hardware manufacturing Bitmain announced the launch of 7 years investment project in Texas. The total amount of investment is expected to be over 500 million USD.
Earlier, New-York based company Coinmint is planning to increase mining investment up to 750 million USD through its subsidiary North Country Data Center Corp. Another direct investment company Brookstone Partners is developing the project in Morocco focused on wind power that could be used for Bitcoin mining.The project price is expected to be over 3 billion USD after it’s finished.

Software giant Microsoft has developed a new product Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) that allows businesses across industry verticals to deploy a flexible instance of Ethereum tailored specifically for enterprise environments.

As announced on Tuesday, Ethereum Proof-of-Authority on Azure allows businesses to create apps on Ethereum blockchain that works without Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm and consequently does not require mining — features that are better suited for networks in which participants do not trust one another.

PoW algorithm ?works great in anonymous, open networks where cryptocurrency promotes security on the network?, — said Cody Born, a software developer of Azure Global. ?However, in private/consortium networks the underlying ether has no value?.

Born explained that since there are no anonymous blockchain network participants, governance can be separated from network operation.

The Bitcoin ABC team has told about preparation for the hardfork of Bitcoin Cash, scheduled for November. By August 15, they promise to prepare a package of changes and then start testing new networks.

As the developers note, Bitcoin Cash is ready for the network update, which will take place in November 2018. The team is finalizing the package of changes. The deadline is August 15. Once the changes are accepted, Bitcoin ABC will officially release the new version (0.18.0) and start testing the network.

One of the changes will affect the minimum transaction size of 100 bytes to prevent attacks on the Merkle tree (a system for storing transactions in the blockchain and their verification). Also, the structure of remuneration will be modified, which allows to reduce commissions for transactions.

This will be the second step in updating the Bitcoin Cash network. The first took place in May this year. Then, in particular, the maximum block size was increased to 32 MB.

On the day of birth of the currency – August 1 – Bitcoin Cash network processed a record number of transactions in 24 hours, exceeding the previous maximum almost seven times. In just a day, the network conducted 687 thousand transactions. This figure even exceeded the number of transactions in the bitcoin network. Now, the network of the main cryptocurrency processes an average of 150-300 thousand transactions per day. And the maximum was noted in December 2017, when 490 thousand transactions were recorded in the bitcoin blockchain.

A known supporter of the hardfork and crypto-millionaire Roger Ver in his Twitter account noted the new record and said that Bitcoin Cash had got ahead of the main bitcoin network by the number of transactions per day. According to him, this proves once again that BCH is a successfully used electronic money system. And BTC is not.

Analysts of the largest investment company in Canada said when a new financial instrument would appear on the crypto-currency market.

According to the analysts of Canada’s largest investment company Canaccord Genius, many investors consider bitcoin-ETF from VanEck and SolidX to be the most serious candidate for approval by the US securities and exchange Commission (SEC). They published a quarterly review – “Blockchain and digital assets” – in which they drew attention to the new investment tool.

According to experts, the community is optimistic about the possibility of launching bitcoin-ETF, so the postponement of the case to September 30 had such a negative effect on the exchange rate of digital money. Analysts believe that next month the SEC will postpone the meeting again.

Canaccord Genuity noted that such securities already existed outside the United States. In Sweden, for example, Bitcoin Tracker One has been trading since May 2015. Currently, Canada is developing its own exchange traded fund Evolve Bitcoin ETF.

On the night of August 8, the SEC postponed a meeting on the launch of bitcoin-ETF from VanEck and SolidX to September 30. After that, the total capitalization of the digital money market decreased by $26 billion within a few hours.