Автор: editor editor

News that really make you believe in the best!

Now they are trying to find a cure not only using traditional research, but also using computer technology. This unique approach to development of pharmaceuticals is that 6,000 graphics cards will be provided to the project Folding@home Stanford University. It turns out that a large number of computers from around the world will be used to create a distributed supercomputer in order to try to investigate the main disease of 2020, which managed to make noise in all countries of the world! This decision was made at the end of February.

GPUs designed to handle repetitive computing, have been doubled due to the joining CoreWeave. Brian Venturo, who is a technical Director of CoreWeave, said that this project has all chances of finding a cure. He also noted that the Folding@home project has already introduced a contribution to creating other important medicines. So, let’s hope everything works out!

World Computer

The idea of using technology began to be realized at every moment when it was proposed; the first test systems were launched. Even if the user offers his laptop with a small margin of unused computing power, the project will take advantage of this, because any initiative is only made for the best results.

In addition to creating the medicine, computing power is used to find the necessary information, and in this case, specialists need to understand the moving parts of the protein because covid-19 contains parts of the protein, which in turn are used for reproduction and the worst part of it is the suppression of immunity. Suppression of immunity can also lead to other complications.

Miners on guard of our health

Brian Venturo encourages other miners to join the project! He hopes that all participants will help to solve the global problem, and won’t try to make money on a pandemic. For example, some scammers stole more than $2 million in cryptocurrencies due to the panic of covid-19. It sounds awful that they don’t want to solve the global problem; they only want to earn as much money as it is possible. Don’t be discouraged, as some make a huge contribution!

The decision to stop work of the fund was made on March 20, 2020, after a 50% collapse of bitcoin that occurred on March 12-13. The fund was managed by such famous personalities in the cryptocurrency space as Murad Makhmudov and Willy Wu.

The main reason for unsuccessful processes is that the fund couldn’t completely and timely respond to the crypto market due to inferior infrastructure. Back in 2018, the company gave only one growing assumption about the forecast for the bitcoin exchange rate which gave a new round to growth, but now everything has changed. Adaptive has lost about 50% of capital which led to significant damage (to the investors and the fund).

Due to the problems that affected various platforms, various exchanges led to the fact that they ceased to function, and therefore a limitation of opportunities has appeared, as reported by company representatives. They also note that it is better to stop the work than to try reviving in better results since the risks are higher than potential advantages. The most interesting and incomprehensible to many people are that the fund didn’t mention in its appeal about the BitMEX exchange. Their accounts are currently liquidated on the exchange, but why details are not mentioned will remain a mystery to everyone.

The fund managed assets with a total value of more than $652 million for 2019! However, the part of the money goes to grants. For example, Tezos gave the first grants to 3 Universities and one educational site in 2018. These educational Institutes are: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA), Cornell University (USA), the University of Inland Beira (Portugal) and France-IOI educational site (France).

Other grants were given to the developers of the Ecosystem of Tezos for the second half and the sum was $37 million. These developers took part in the following categories:

• Support of community;
• Developments and researches
• Creation of ecosystem projects.

In order to participate, it was necessary to go through a very complicated selection process, and after getting approval the teams were given determined tasks and goals. For example, research and development of smart contracts were given to many participants, but grants were finally achieved by Buidl Labs, Blockmatic, Kyoto University…; improvements in security, speed —by Nomadic Labs, DaiLambda and so on. 200 applications in total were submitted and only 78 teams were able to receive grants! Additional financial support was provided to communities that distributed educational materials.

Nowadays, researchers face the situation that attacks in BTS with a demand for ransom are becoming more common fact. For 2 years the UK police registered more than 560 reports of such blackmailing.

Official data, obtained according to the freedom of information Law, shows that the UK Police in 2018 and 2019 received 562 messages from victims whose devices were attacked by hackers demanding a ransom in bitcoins. North Yorkshire police received the largest number of reports of such crimes. In 2018, only six such cases emerged, and in 2019, the number of such cases achieved 115 incidents.

The survey describes the types of attacks. In one case in Cumbria, an attacker gained access to the victim’s server and encrypted all files during the attack. The victim was demanded to pay a ransom in BTS within 72 hours, otherwise, the amount will be increased.

Threats to increase the amount of ransom were accompanied by other forms of blackmail. For example, criminals told a victim in Derbyshire that if she did not pay a ransom, the hacker would publish information in the open access about the victim’s history of visiting porn sites.

The police also investigated one of the incidents in Durham, where a hacker used social media to demand a ransom. The criminal sent the victim a message on Facebook that contained a link for transferring BTS on his account. In Manchester 83 cases of ransom demands in bitcoins were also registered. In six cases, attackers used letters that caused extreme emotional distress to their victims.

Searching for ransom hackers used the same tactics in almost all cases – blackmail, fear and intent to cause not only economic, but also moral damage. They used threats, intimidation, and other pressure tactics for getting bitcoins. Andrew Martin, CEO of Retail Financial Consulting, said:

«The growing wave of digital financial crimes scares consumers, who are concerned about the risk of fraud and blackmail by hackers. These incidents made us be aware of risks connected with online currencies, which often become an easy way for anonymous third players to extort money without being detected.»

As hackers gain access to not only individual computers but also public institutions, some governments began to take action on these crimes. In January New York senators prepared a bill banning taxpayers` payments to hackers who spread ransomware viruses and demand ransom in cryptocurrencies. Meanwhile, that in the middle of last month, users of the Google AdSense service began to receive messages from hackers with a demand of a ransom in bitcoins, otherwise, they could make the service block user`s accounts.

PayPal has opened a new vacancy «Director for anti-money laundering (AML) and blockchain development strategies». He will join the office in New York.

The duties of the director will include analyzing potential variants of using blockchain to control the financial crime risk, monitoring AML investigations and studying new trends in the financial area.

Besides, the new employee will have to analyze the risks connected with PayPal’s investment portfolio in the blockchain industry and take charge of meetings with external partners. Moreover, the applicant for the position must have at least 10 years of experience in ensuring legal compliance.

It should be reminded that last year PayPal invested in Cambridge Blockchain. The company is engaged in the management of crucial data with the technologies of distributed register. In addition to that, the payment platform invested in the crypto-banking startup Initialized Capital. PayPal also reviews the possibility of joining the Libra Association, but finally gave up their initiative.

PayPal also pays great attention to own research activities in the field of blockchain. In 2019, the company received a patent for a device that allows you to identify ransomware of cryptocurrency and deal with the consequences of their harmful activities. Meanwhile, last November PayPal CEO Dan Schulman (Dan Schulman) noted that he owns bitcoin, but does not buy any other cryptocurrencies.

Alibaba, Giant Chinese E-commerce Group, introduced its new blockchain technology that is going to help customers to track their shipments for importers on the Koala platform.

As stated by Sina Finance, a Chinese technology company, Ant Financial blockchain algorithm will provide support for their consumers to track all logistic information about imports. If you scan QR code with the Alipay app you can get a full-detailed delivery report. That’s all you need!

The Koala application also got a useful update. From now one, Koala has a new cool feature, right after you have purchased something, special tracking icon will pop up. Clicking on it will show you «order signature» that is supposed to resist counterfeiting, and tracking Qr code.

The Koala platform expanding its technology influence. For now, tracking is only available for China, but in the nearest future, 62 countries and regions can join this blockchain system. Unfortunately, logistic info services will be accessible for a particular amount of brands, but 7 432 is still a huge number.

Furthermore, it’s needed to be mentioned that the Koala was bought by Alibaba Group at the end of last year. The company’s selling price was 2 billion dollars. Alibaba stated that blockchain is supposed to solve many logistic issues of platforms like Koala. Seller-consumer conflicts, loss of goods, incorrect tracking, irresponsibility just some of the problems that will be resolved. Ant Financial is a member of Alibaba Group and one of the most-advanced «fintech» companies. It’s also hard-working on blockchain development in all areas. Last year, small and medium-sized businesses got effective blockchain assist systems.

An ex-employee of the Chinese company Baidu was convicted with three years in prison and a 1 568$ fine for mining the Monero cryptocurrency on company servers in 2018.

According to the report published by the local publication Abacus, Chief Engineer An Bang, who was working on a popular search engine named Baidu, got three years of prison and a fine of 15 668$. In the time between April and June 2018 he uploaded mining scripts to approximately 200 Baidu servers.

However, the additional load on the system was noticed by the company, which reported it to the police, which ultimately led to Ban’s arrest. According to the report, Ban was convicted for three years in prison, as well as an 11 000 Yuan fine (1 568$) last month.

This case has added to the pool of incidents when employees tried to mine cryptocurrency through the servers of their companies. Last month the Kyiv prosecutor’s office reported about an employee of the “Informational judicial systems” state enterprise, who unlawfully used company-issued equipment for mining. In September of last year an ex-employee of a Sarov-based nuclear center was fined for mining on a supercomputer, and in May the Australian Government Contractor was prosecuted for mining on duty. In 2018 a Chinese school principal was eliminated from the Communist Party for mining on duty, and Crimean ex-government officials were fined for a similar crime.

This was reported by Cardano’s leadership on their official website with an elaboration that the trial concerned the partnership concluded between Cardano Foundation and Z/Yen Group Limited in July 2017. Later the startup was forced to annul and end the partnership for a variety of reasons. Cardano isn’t opening up about the dispute details, however, it fully refutes their ex-partner’s claims, adding that it will not disclose such information until the conclusion of the trial.

It is known that at the very end of 2017 Cardano Foundation became partners with Z/Yen Group to conduct collective research in apps regarding blockchain to expand the scope of Cardano and the ADA cryptocurrency. In addition to that, the companies were working on the implementation of the Distributed Futures program, designed to study blockchain, digital currencies and the technology of artificial intelligence. The program was led by the co-founder of the company Michael Mainelli, who later became head of the department of research at the Cardano Foundation.

Mainelli believed that based on the results of the study on implementing different tools like smart registries, these tools could be implemented into different areas of activity, given that investors, government officials and regulators learn to use them. The assumption can be made that during the research Cardano and Y/Zen disagreed, and, as a result, a dispute arose which could only be settled in court. In January Cardano entered a partnership agreement with the PRIViLEDGE consortium for collective research and solution of the problems connected with using the technology of the distributed registry. Aside from that, last week the founder of Cardano Charles Hoskinson reported the conclusion of the research in the Hydra technology of sharding, which, in theory, can increase the capacity of the network to 1 million transactions per second.

Bitcoin’s share in Tezos Foundation’s storage has dropped from 61%, as of July last year, to 47%, as in January 2020, according to the organization’s reports. The money has been invested in different currencies and classes of assets, which include equities, stocks and fiat currencies. The fund has also upped its share from 15% to 23% by acquiring Tezos tokens (XTZ).

As per the reports, Tezos Foundation owned around 397.7 000 000 USD worth of Bitcoin as of 31st of July 2019. As BTC cost 10000$ around that time, the fund had, as it appears, around 39700 BTC. In addition to that, as on January 31st 2020, the fund already had 31800 BTC translated to around 298.5 million USD, with one coin being worth 9400$.

This information means that Tezos Foundation has sold 8000 BTC in the latter half of 2019, which, taking the diminished prices in the account, would be worth around 46 000 000 USD today. The general cost of the fund dropped from 652 000 000 USD as of July 31st to 625 million USD as of January 31st. The fund’s assets are managed through the strategy which was established and audited in coordination with the report issued by the Tezos Foundation Council, the organization’s leadership group.

Tezos Foundation’s Chief of Finances Roman Schnider has said that, although he believes Bitcoin to be the “key means of keeping up cost”, his strategy of managing assets is to focus and accomplish long-term goals, “not getting distracted by the market’s short-term fluctuations”.

Schnider added that the investment in the multiform range of funds and equities, as well as in cryptocurrencies, are tools of risk management, which ensure “operational efficiency” during the times of cryptocurrency’s volatility. Recently it became known that Tezos and Cosmos had become the more popular projects in Japan. Let us recall that Tezos Foundation gave away 37 million USD in grants to the developers of the Tezos ecosystem.

Cryptocurrency project Zilliqa and exchange Switcheo that supports trade tokens based on Ethereum, EOS и NEO are working to build the non-custodial decentralized exchange Zilliqa DEX.

According to the developers initially on the new platform traders will be able to trade tokens Zilliqa (ZIL) in pairs with different digital assets based on Ethereum. Then, and as system exchange expanded, it will be added tokens based on EOS and NEO. Also, through integrating mobile money API users will not have to register at Zilliqa DEX for trading transactions.

The developers also stated that a new platform will solve the problem faced by current decentralized exchanges. In particular, Zilliqa DEX will use the Uniswap exchange protocol along with atomic swaps for the automatic exchange of digital assets without centralized intermediaries. Also, the exchange will be used improved mechanisms for harmonizing off-chain the orders and pool algorithms for sustainable system Zilliqa DEX.

The internal product testing with a minimum functionality will be completed by the end of the second quarter and in the third quarter the developers plan to organize an open test. Zilliqa estimates that a new decentralized platform will be ready by the end of this year. Amrit Kumar, the president and chief science officer of Zilliqa, means that cooperate with Switcheo would assist in developing the StraitsX stable coin and will reinforce the influence of startup in international system decentralized financing (Defi).

In turn, Switcheo General Director Ivan Poon said that owing to the absence of the central administrative authority the decentralized exchange Zilliqa DEX will ensure a high level of safety of assets and users’ personal information. He added that using improved instruments the holders of tokens ZIL can constitute a new experience of trade. In last year Kyle Samani co-founder of Multicoin Capital cryptocurrency fund said that decentralized exchanges will be a trend in the 2019 year and may make for a very different digital industry.