Coin News

Digital BTC, an Australian Bitcoin company that is publicly traded on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) as Digital CC Limited has secured a $3.5 million AUD funding round by a group of institutional and individual investors to launch a remittance-focused product, AirPocket. CEO and founder Zhenya Tsvetnenko specifically explained that the funds from the “investment will be used accelerate the rollout and commercialization of AirPocket in Latin America and Caribbean.” The company was originally seeking for a $3 million AUD funding round, until the demand from local investors rose and the company had to enlarge the funding round with another $500,000 AUD. The increased funding round raised the company’s cash to over $6 million. The product soon to be launched in […]

The post digitalBTC Raises $3.5 million AUD to Launch AirPocket appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

A bill calling for specific regulation of digital currencies such as bitcoin has been approved by the North Carolina House of Representatives and has moved to the state Senate for further deliberation. House Bill 289 seeks to enact a new Money Transmitters Act (MTA), which would specifically address the transmission of virtual currencies such as bitcoin. […]

Today’s move up appears to have reacted to compound divergence caused during the last few waves of decline. Bitcoin price is currently advancing above both the 20MA and 200MA in the 4-hour chart and this is a bullish sign, but it seems to have a ceiling below $250. This analysis is provided by xbt.social with […]

The post Bitcoin Price Slowdown Decelerates To The Upside appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Elliptic and Gem have announced a new partnership today that will involve Elliptic acting as a trusted and independent third party for the purposes of securely storing the third (backup) private key used on the Gem platform. In the past, multisig wallet users have been in control of their own backup private keys, but this new offering from Gem and Elliptic could offer a higher level of security for individuals who do not wish to take care of their own backup solutions. Up to this point, Elliptic has been an insured bitcoin storage provider for a variety of banks and exchanges who need to protect their private keys, so choosing them as the custodians of backup keys for multisig wallets […]

The post Gem Partners with Elliptic for Insured Storage of the Third Key appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

With the current one-megabyte-per-block limit, the Bitcoin network can process only a few transactions per second, which could strongly limit the ability of the network to handle high transaction volumes if the adoption of bitcoin payments grows. Lead Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen is persuaded that the best solution to the problem is to increase the maximum block size, and has developed code for a proposed Bitcoin hard fork that would allow any block with a timestamp on or after March 1, 2016 to be up to 20 megabytes. “I believe this is the simplest possible set of changes that will work,” Andresen says. In a post titled “Why increasing the max block size is urgent,” he argues that if the […]

The post Bitcoin Core Developers Disagree on Proposed Block Size Increase to 20MB appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Coinapult will be tackling the US market following a services integration with Crypto Capital, a licensed money transmitter.

MasterCard has launched MasterCard Send, a personal payments service that enables funds to be sent quickly and securely to consumers domestically and internationally. Now live for users in the United States, MasterCard Send permits sending secure real-time payments to consumers, both banked and unbanked. The recipients get the funds immediately on their MasterCard or other cards, into mobile money and bank accounts or via cash agent outlets. “This unique platform will enable disbursements and person-to-person (P2P) payments to and from virtually any U.S. debit card account, including non-MasterCard debit cards,” notes the MasterCard announcement. “MasterCard Send is the only personal payments service that can reach virtually all U.S. debit card accounts and enable funds to be sent and received typically […]

The post MasterCard Introduces Fast Bitcoin-like Global Payments to Consumers appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Mintsy recently announced a launch of its new cloud mining service as the first digital currency cloud mining company to use proof-of-reserves, accomplished through cryptographic proof-of-hashrate. Bitcoin Magazine sat down with Marshall Long, who is the CTO of Cryptsy, and more recently CTO and board member at Mintsy, to discuss what he says is unprecedented innovation in the realm of cloud mining. Mintsy provides users with malleable contracts, which assuages any worries on being locked into a contract they no longer need. Long says users are “able to sell their remaining contract time on the Mintsy marketplace where other folks may want a shorter contract and can bid on contracts that are up for sale by the user.” Mining the […]

The post Mintsy Launches Cloud Mining Service with Cryptographic Proof-of-Hashrate appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

New York’s top financial regulator, Benjamin Lawsky, has made a career out of garnering unprecedented fines from the global financial elite. He is known for holding their license to do business in New York over their heads and securing fines several times those of federal authorities on more than one occasion. However, one of the […]

The post Good for Bitcoin? Lawsky Steps Down End of June appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Bitwage bills itself as the world's first payroll startup to incorporate the cost- and time-saving benefits of Bitcoin

Much like the idea that Santa Claus wears red, the notion that you should spend a fortune on a diamond engagement ring is the invention of advertisers. So, since the act is already about ostentatious displays of wealth, why not invest your money in s...

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Financial technology — or FinTech — is booming, with money flooding into the sector on both sides of the Atlantic. 

In the UK, London's TransferWise was valued at $1 billion (£637 million) earlier this year in a $58 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Peer-to-peer lender Funding Circle also recently raised $150 million, reportedly at a similar valuation.

There just two examples from an industry that spans everything from online payment processing to bitcoin.

CB Insights, a data provider to the venture capital industry, hosted a webinar on FinTech this week and two slides from its presentation underline just how hot the FinTech scene is right now. 

The first shows more and more money is flowing into the sector via more and more deals:

The blue bars represent total funding. They show that funding is growing at a rate of 45% a year, with $13.7 billion invested into the sector last year alone.

The orange line represents the total number of FinTech funding deals each quarter and that too is rising, at a rate of 16% per year.

CB Insights say the biggest areas of FinTech investment for top VCs since 2007 are the following: payments, personal finance management, lending and bitcoin.

The second important slide shows that more and more people are looking to invest in the sector:

The number of investors in financial technology has exploded over the last five years, with four times more backers today than there were in 2010.

Big investment banks who used to simply buy in technology are now investing in emerging players to make sure they aren't left behind in the fast changing industry.

JPMorgan has invested in companies including peer-to-peer lender Prosper and mobile credit card processor Square, while Goldman Sachs has backed bitcoin business Circle and online broker Motif Investing.

On this side of the Atlantic, Santander last year launched a $100 million FinTech investment fund and Barclays sponsors a Tech Star's 'accelerator' programme for FinTech firms so it can keep an eye on what's going on.

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NOW WATCH: We got our hands on 'Kinder Surprise Eggs' — the global candy favorite that's still illegal in the US

Finviz plainly states its mission on their website: “to provide leading financial research, analysis and visualization.” In the case of Bitcoin, Finviz is hardly a leading website, as many other market chart websites added Bitcoin before Finviz. Nevertheless, Finviz makes a useful tool even more useful for individuals interested in following Bitcoin by adding the […]

The post Large Financial Research Website Finviz Adds Bitcoin To Forex Charts appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Following an investment in Ripple Labs, Seagate's senior vice president Dave Morton discusses why his firm is excited about blockchain technology.

BitPay wants ChainDB to secure data using the block chain, and the payments processor needs the Bitcoin community’s help with the project. In an effort that is more like Factom than storj, BitPay outlines in a recent paper a mechanism for creating counterfeit resistant databases using the Bitcoin mining network. A so-dubbed ChainDB (chain database) would benefit […]

The post ChainDB: A Peer-to-Peer Database System from BitPay appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

PayPal has been fined $10 million for engaging in deceptive practices. The crux of their deception was enrolling customers into a credit program without their consent, creating a situation where people were on the hook for credit they’d never asked for. As you know, any credit program can have an effect on your credit score. […]

The post Bitcoin 1, PayPal 0: PayPal Fined $10 Million for Deceptive Practices appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

By Olivia Oran

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - In Goldman Sachs Group Inc's latest move to bolster its street cred as a cool, tech-savvy bank, it is holding its annual shareholder meeting in San Francisco on Thursday.

Goldman has been one of the top investment banks handling mergers and IPOs for the tech sector since the dot-com boom of the 1990s. But more recently, the bank has been trying to mold itself into a tech firm of sorts, too.

Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein has been saying for years that Goldman, founded in 1869, is more of a cutting-edge technology company than a gray-haired investment bank. Lately he's been putting Goldman's money where his mouth is: The bank has led several high-profile investments in startups that are disrupting the financial sector and is taking big steps to shift more of its business through electronic channels.

In just the past few weeks, Goldman has hired an executive to build a digital lending platform, co-led a $50 million investment in a bitcoin startup and launched a podcast called "Exchanges at Goldman" in which senior executives talk about technology on Wall Street, among other things.

"When you ask me...what might this technology be doing to disrupt the industry or our company, it's a little bit of a funny sentence, because we are a technology company," Blankfein said in the first podcast this week.

On Thursday, the bank will hold its annual shareholder meeting at 555 California Street, an office building in downtown San Francisco that houses several financial services tenants. It's the third year in a row Goldman has held its meeting away from the East Coast.

Shareholders will decide whether to approve pay packages for senior management, as well as Goldman's board of directors, including new additions Mark Flaherty, the former vice chairman of investment management firm Wellington Management Company, and former Goldman fixed income co-head Mark Winkelman. Blankfein is expected to offer some comments on the bank's financial performance, as well as its focus on technology.

Of course Goldman is not the only Wall Street bank to notice how technology is changing the world - all of its major competitors have been talking a lot more about technology, spending a lot more money on it and trying to win more business from tech clients. But Goldman has arguably been the most aggressive in making strategic investments and reshaping itself for a digital world. Roughly one-quarter of its 34,400 employees now work in tech.

The person in charge of Goldman's technology efforts is chief information officer R. Martin Chavez, a scientist by training who developed trading systems inside Goldman before taking on his current role. Under Chavez's tutelage, Goldman also has been looking at ways to use technology for lending, compliance, risk management and cost-cutting.

The bank has been doing this in part through a team called the principal strategic investments group, which puts money into companies that are disrupting the financial services industry.

That group recently chaperoned Goldman's portion of a $50 million funding round for a startup named Circle Internet Financial Ltd, which uses technology to perform transactions without a middleman. Goldman sources say the bank views the technology, called "blockchain," as a transformative tool for trading.

Last year, the strategic investments group also orchestrated a $66 million investment in a secure chat and data platform called Symphony Communication Services Holdings LLC. Goldman executives view the platform both as a way to cut costs from external providers, and as a way to streamline communications.

Though Goldman has no branches or ATMs, it is planning to make inroads into traditional lending though technology. It recently hired Harit Talwar from Discover Financial Services to create a digital lending business that can put its $83 billion in deposits to more profitable use.

In a more familiar realm of banking, Goldman remains one of the top two global investment banks handling mergers, stock offerings and private transactions.

It competes head-on with Morgan Stanley in courting technology entrepreneurs to take their companies public and manage their wealth afterward. Goldman was ranked as the top underwriter for technology public offerings last year, according to Thomson Reuters data, capturing 18.4 percent of market share. Goldman advised on 26 technology mergers globally last year, the highest number of its peers.

A sign of Goldman's tech savvy may come from its role – or lack thereof – in taking two of the most high-profile tech companies public.

Although Goldman did not manage Facebook Inc's disastrous IPO in 2012, it was a major investor in the social-media network before it went public. Goldman did lead Twitter Inc's 2013 IPO soon after; its top tech banker, Anthony Noto, left to become Twitter's CEO.

(Reporting by Olivia Oran; editing by Lauren Tara LaCapra and Leslie Adler)

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