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Editor's note: Below is a list from Tim Swanson, a Bitcoin consultant based in San Francisco who blogs at the site Of Numbers, on the top 10 firms built on or incorporating a blockchain.

Blockchains work like giant digital spreadsheets shared by everyone in a decentralized network, and are used to do things like confirm Bitcoin payments.  We recently discussed why many are saying the advent of blockchain technology could be as important the development of the Internet.  Swanson chose companies no longer operating in "stealth mode," and which he believes already provide real value. References to "the" blockchain refer to Bitcoin's blockchain. 

He owns no equity in any of the companies.

— Coinometrics is attempting to do what few people or organizations in this space have tried to do: empirically quantify and qualify the actual behavior what is happening on the blockchain.  While forum-based armchair philosophers are nearly a dime a dozen, data speaks much louder than words.  And in this case, co-founder Jonathan Levin has provided both clear analytics and corresponding interpretations of data sets that are valuable to both layman and industrialist alike.  As the industry matures, actual data as opposed to hopes and dreams will be provide much needed metrics for outside investors, developers and entrepreneurs to focus their future endeavors toward.

— Helloblock is Bitcoin infrastructure built specifically for developers.  After creating a number of Bitcoin projects, the team led by Sidney Zhang – based in San Francisco – found the developer infrastructure to be raw and primitive; the ecosystem in their view is still at the “TCP/IP” level.  And testing is both tedious and time-consuming.  Developers in general want to explore the Bitcoin protocol because it offers entirely new possibilities with money.  Their API reduces these complexities into a JSON interface, so developers can simply focus on their idea, not infrastructure – and the API is just the first step.

— Kraken is a fully compliant digital asset trading platform that goes beyond simple market or limit orders, allowing up to 9 additional advanced order types and in the future, the potential of margin trading (if pre-approved).  They have positioned themselves to be a FOREX platform for digital currencies.  Based in San Francisco, the team is managed by a group of talented early adopters including Jesse Powell who has stuck with the community through thick and thin.

— BTCJam is a San Francisco-based P2P lending platform that has provided over $5 million in bitcoin-based loans over the past year.  Founded in 2013, it is led by Celso Pitta, a Brazilian with industry experience building statistical models at Citi and who had first-hand experience with living in a country with high interest rates (200% for credit cards).

— BlockCypher is one of the first Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) infrastructure companies in Bitcoin. The team rebuilt the Bitcoin platform from the ground-up and optimized it for the cloud, exposing web APIs and callbacks for developers to easily build and scale applications on. This team is led by Catheryne Nicholson, who brings a different way of thinking in a largely male-dominated segment. She and her co-founder Matthieu Riou have a long history of building large-scale platforms together. Both want to grow the Bitcoin developer ecosystem and encourage more women to participate.

— DigitalTangibleTrust aims to be a liquidity provider and marketing partner for hard assets that are difficult to monetize, but can be easily digitized into cryptocurrencies and then traded on any centralized or peer-to-peer exchange. Whether you are buying digital gold bullion from the United Kingdom or digital mineral rights in Texas, led by a cryptofinance and experienced marketing team in San Francisco, they are trying to push the edge of blockchain innovation building an investment portfolio that will consist of coins it has issued as ownership rights to these unique assets.  Since its humble beginnings in early 2014, in a short month they have thousands of hard assets in custody and appear determined to digitize all things.

— Ripple Labs is a San Francisco-based company that is building commercial applications and infrastructure around the Ripple protocol.  Founded in September 2012, Ripple Labs has built a distributed trustless exchange system around a consensus ledger as opposed to a blockchain.  While there are many similarities between the two technologies and even some of the company employees (both David Schwartz and Stefan Thomas, were early Bitcoin adopters and developers), Ripple Labs is attempting to bridge the digital world with the traditional financial sector, connecting isolated payment systems into one rail.

— Bifubao is not just another wallet provider.  Known as Bitfoo internationally, this Beijing-based international team comprised of Americans and Chinese developers became the first commercial developer to implement proof-of-reserves.  Proof-of-reserves is a Merkle tree-based technique developed by Greg Maxwell in February 2014, to enable exchanges and hosted wallet companies to cryptographically proof to the public that they have the assets they claim to have, yet not exposing the privacy of their customers.

— Coinbase grew from a small hosted wallet company in mid-2012 to become one of the largest companies in the ecosystem.  Based in San Francisco, it began 2013 with a mere 13,000 wallets, growing to 1 million in under 14 months (3 months quicker than its competitor, Blockchain.info).  Its services have since expanded to include merchant support for companies such as Overstock.com.

— BitPay is an Atlanta-based payment gateway, one of the first 3^rd party merchant support payment systems.  Their system enables merchants to accept bitcoins, locking them into fiat conversion rates that helps protect merchants from currency fluctuations and TigerDirect is one of its tens of thousands of supported companies.

— BitPagos is also in the merchant solution space however instead of simply converting bitcoins into fiat, they are trying to help merchants move in the opposite direction: accumulating bitcoins.  Led by Argentinian Sebastian Serrano, who experienced first-hand the rampant inflation of the early 2000s in Argentina, this San Francisco-based team is focused globally but especially with respect to emerging economies such as those in Latin America.

SEE ALSO: SATOSHI'S REVOLUTION: How The Creator Of Bitcoin May Have Stumbled Onto Something Much, Much Bigger

Join the conversation about this story »

Editor's note: Below is a list from Tim Swanson, a Bitcoin consultant based in San Francisco who blogs at the site Of Numbers, on the top 10 firms built on or incorporating a blockchain.

Blockchains work like giant digital spreadsheets shared by everyone in a decentralized network, and are used to do things like confirm Bitcoin payments.  We recently discussed why many are saying the advent of blockchain technology could be as important the development of the Internet.  Swanson chose companies no longer operating in "stealth mode," and which he believes already provide real value. References to "the" blockchain refer to Bitcoin's blockchain. 

He owns no equity in any of the companies.

— Coinometrics is attempting to do what few people or organizations in this space have tried to do: empirically quantify and qualify the actual behavior what is happening on the blockchain.  While forum-based armchair philosophers are nearly a dime a dozen, data speaks much louder than words.  And in this case, co-founder Jonathan Levin has provided both clear analytics and corresponding interpretations of data sets that are valuable to both layman and industrialist alike.  As the industry matures, actual data as opposed to hopes and dreams will be provide much needed metrics for outside investors, developers and entrepreneurs to focus their future endeavors toward.

— Helloblock is Bitcoin infrastructure built specifically for developers.  After creating a number of Bitcoin projects, the team led by Sidney Zhang – based in San Francisco – found the developer infrastructure to be raw and primitive; the ecosystem in their view is still at the “TCP/IP” level.  And testing is both tedious and time-consuming.  Developers in general want to explore the Bitcoin protocol because it offers entirely new possibilities with money.  Their API reduces these complexities into a JSON interface, so developers can simply focus on their idea, not infrastructure – and the API is just the first step.

— Kraken is a fully compliant digital asset trading platform that goes beyond simple market or limit orders, allowing up to 9 additional advanced order types and in the future, the potential of margin trading (if pre-approved).  They have positioned themselves to be a FOREX platform for digital currencies.  Based in San Francisco, the team is managed by a group of talented early adopters including Jesse Powell who has stuck with the community through thick and thin.

— BTCJam is a San Francisco-based P2P lending platform that has provided over $5 million in bitcoin-based loans over the past year.  Founded in 2013, it is led by Celso Pitta, a Brazilian with industry experience building statistical models at Citi and who had first-hand experience with living in a country with high interest rates (200% for credit cards).

— BlockCypher is one of the first Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) infrastructure companies in Bitcoin. The team rebuilt the Bitcoin platform from the ground-up and optimized it for the cloud, exposing web APIs and callbacks for developers to easily build and scale applications on. This team is led by Catheryne Nicholson, who brings a different way of thinking in a largely male-dominated segment. She and her co-founder Matthieu Riou have a long history of building large-scale platforms together. Both want to grow the Bitcoin developer ecosystem and encourage more women to participate.

— DigitalTangibleTrust aims to be a liquidity provider and marketing partner for hard assets that are difficult to monetize, but can be easily digitized into cryptocurrencies and then traded on any centralized or peer-to-peer exchange. Whether you are buying digital gold bullion from the United Kingdom or digital mineral rights in Texas, led by a cryptofinance and experienced marketing team in San Francisco, they are trying to push the edge of blockchain innovation building an investment portfolio that will consist of coins it has issued as ownership rights to these unique assets.  Since its humble beginnings in early 2014, in a short month they have thousands of hard assets in custody and appear determined to digitize all things.

— Ripple Labs is a San Francisco-based company that is building commercial applications and infrastructure around the Ripple protocol.  Founded in September 2012, Ripple Labs has built a distributed trustless exchange system around a consensus ledger as opposed to a blockchain.  While there are many similarities between the two technologies and even some of the company employees (both David Schwartz and Stefan Thomas, were early Bitcoin adopters and developers), Ripple Labs is attempting to bridge the digital world with the traditional financial sector, connecting isolated payment systems into one rail.

— Bifubao is not just another wallet provider.  Known as Bitfoo internationally, this Beijing-based international team comprised of Americans and Chinese developers became the first commercial developer to implement proof-of-reserves.  Proof-of-reserves is a Merkle tree-based technique developed by Greg Maxwell in February 2014, to enable exchanges and hosted wallet companies to cryptographically proof to the public that they have the assets they claim to have, yet not exposing the privacy of their customers.

— Coinbase grew from a small hosted wallet company in mid-2012 to become one of the largest companies in the ecosystem.  Based in San Francisco, it began 2013 with a mere 13,000 wallets, growing to 1 million in under 14 months (3 months quicker than its competitor, Blockchain.info).  Its services have since expanded to include merchant support for companies such as Overstock.com.

— BitPay is an Atlanta-based payment gateway, one of the first 3^rd party merchant support payment systems.  Their system enables merchants to accept bitcoins, locking them into fiat conversion rates that helps protect merchants from currency fluctuations and TigerDirect is one of its tens of thousands of supported companies.

— BitPagos is also in the merchant solution space however instead of simply converting bitcoins into fiat, they are trying to help merchants move in the opposite direction: accumulating bitcoins.  Led by Argentinian Sebastian Serrano, who experienced first-hand the rampant inflation of the early 2000s in Argentina, this San Francisco-based team is focused globally but especially with respect to emerging economies such as those in Latin America.

SEE ALSO: SATOSHI'S REVOLUTION: How The Creator Of Bitcoin May Have Stumbled Onto Something Much, Much Bigger

Join the conversation about this story »

Newly announced services include a relaunched cash bill payment deposit option and a branded ATM network.

Durante los últimos meses, hemos visto como se han ido popularizando los cajeros automáticos de Bitcoin alrededor del mundo. Una de las primeras empresas encargadas de fabricar estos cajeros es Robocoin. Robocoin es una empresa dedicada a la fabricación y venta de cajeros automáticos de Bitcoin que opera desde Las Vegas. Con el aumento de […]

The post Robocoin presenta su nuevo proyecto: un banco de Bitcoin appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Robocoin, a Bitcoin based company in Las Vegas, Nevada, has announced that they will be launching a new project called Robocoin Bank. The new project will take all existing Robocoin ATMs and turn them into banking branches.  Through software updates, they plan to add features that allow users to bank using Bitcoin. Robocoin is offering the chance […]

The post Robocoin Announces Robocoin Banking: Bitcoin ATMs Become Bitcoin Bank Branches appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Digital currency awareness is growing as Auroracoin closes in on passing 10% of its original distribution goal.

Robocoin speaks to CoinDesk about its latest service updates, which take aim at the global remittance market.

You may have heard of Operation Choke Point over the last year in reference to payday lending, and more recently in reference to firearm sales and porn star personal accounts.  The gist of it is this: The Department of Justice (DOJ) is strongly encouraging banks and third party payment processors to close the accounts of individuals and […]

The post The DOJ’s “Operation Choke Point” Has Driven 30 Industries To Bitcoin appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

 Robocoin, a popular bitcoin ATM provider, is announcing that they're upgrading all of their ATMs to turn them into full service "banks" complete with account control, payment systems, and a method for handling multiple wallets. Read More

As a self-professed libertarian and follower of the Austrian school of economic thought, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has a lot in common with the central bank skeptics who helped get Bitcoin off the ground. 

Which is why Fortune's Tory Nemyer asked the senator about the cryptocurrency in a new interview. 

While he likes it in principle, Paul said there's one thing he would change about it to align it more with those values: have it backed by something of value, in this case, he proposes, stocks.

Here's the full quote:

I was looking more at it until that recent thing [sic]. And actually my theory, if I were setting it up, I'd make it exchangeable for stock. And then it'd have real value. And I'd have it pegged, and I'd have a basket of 10 big retailers… I think it would work, but I think, because I'm sort of a believer in currency having value, if you're going to create a currency, have it backed up by -- you know, Hayek used to talk about a basket of commodities? You could have a basket of stocks, and have some exchangeability, because it's hard for people like me who are a bit tangible. But you could have an average of stocks, I'm wondering if that's the next permutation."

It's true that Bitcoin is currently backed by the full faith and credit of ...  whatever Bitcoin service you're using, so in theory the idea is not without merit. But the process for making this happen would undoubtedly be arduous from a technical and regulatory standpoint. 

Something to consider.

Check out the full interview here >

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O Jeremy Rubin και ο Dan Elitzer, φοιτητές του διάσημου Τεχνολογικού Ινστιτούτου της Μασαχουσέτης (MIT), λανσάρουν ένα νέο πρότζεκτ μέσω του οποίου όλοι οι προπτυχιακοί φοιτητές -πάνω από 4.500 στον αριθμό- θα λάβουν 100 δολάρια σε bitcoins, από το ερχόμενο εξάμηνο που ξεκινάει το φθινόπωρο. Μέχρι στιγμής, και σε διάστημα περίπου 6 εβδομάδων, οι 2 […]

The post MIT: Bitcoins 100 δολαρίων σε όλους τους φοιτητές appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

The Bank of Canada is not very concerned by the advent of bitcoin and digital currencies in general.

eGifter is an online retailer specializing in electronic gift cards from a very large assortment of businesses. eGifter makes it easy to send gift cards to anyone instantly. What makes eGifter more attractive than other companies that offer similar services? In addition to offering over 100 brands, they also accept Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin as […]

The post Interview with Tyler Roye, CEO of eGifter appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

The bitcoin wallet provides new tools for financial privacy, including in-built coin mixing and 'stealth' wallet addresses.

Cryptocurrencies as a fiat alternative, bitcoin technology and Bloomberg's latest move were discussed at a 'Future of Trading' debate.

Moolah.io is a pillar of the Dogecoin community, that is undeniable.  In addition to being the first Dogecoin payment processor, Moolah has handled the donation wallets for numerous community fundraisers – including the popular Doge4NASCAR. Founder Alex Green even donated large sums to various Dogecoin charity initiatives and is quite active on the Dogecoin subreddit. […]

The post Dogecoin Disrupted: Moolah Feels The Heat Of The Spotlight appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Scryptsmining is a company that mines scrypt based cryptocurrencies using Gridseed ASICs and pays out dividends to shareholders in the form of Bitcoin. Scryptsmining uses software similar to a Multipool to ensure they are always mining the most profitable Scrypt based cryptocurrency. One share of the company represents 65 Kh/s worth of scrypt mining power. […]

The post Scryptsmining Hashrate Sale appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Bitcoin has been dancing around the $450 mark for the past month or so. Markets are asking questions about where the value is going as well as asking why the price is showing such a level of stability. Bitcoin is a volatile currency and evidence of growing stability has to be viewed positively, especially in […]

The post Bitcoin Price: Stability in Bitcoin Exchange Rate at last. appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Banks have been a part of our society for so long that we have forgotten what exactly they do. We think of them as bastions of security and stability. They hate Bitcoin because of it’s inherent instability, right? Wrong. There is more to this than meets the eye. Economists are now asking the question: Do […]

The post Why Banks Hate Bitcoin, What Banks Do And Why We No Longer Need Them appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

CoinDesk examines how the Bitcoin Foundation's bylaws could affect the results of the current voting round to close today.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Summers offered a moderate take on digital currency.