FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

Poolin has published a new tracker for mining pools that are signaling for Taproot, and in-development upgrade for the Bitcoin network that aims to boost transaction privacy. 

As previously reported, Taproot — and, by extension, Schnorr signatures — are being bundled as part of a soft fork that, if approved and integrated, would represent the first significant update to Bitcoins since the addition of Segregated Witness. Taproot aims to make all transactions appear the same to outside observers, regardless of its composition or style. 

According to Poolin’s tracker, three pools are signaling support for the Taproot/Schnorr soft fork. In addition to itself, BTC.com and Slush Pool are doing so.

The code for Taproot was merged into the library of Bitcoin Core last month, representing the final stage before the official deployment. How that process will exactly play out remains to be seen — as noted by Poolin, there are two approaches to activation for node operators (including miners). 

As of the time of writing, Poolin accounted for nearly 18 percent of mined blocks in the past 24 hours, according to BTC.com. BTC.com accounted for about 9% of blocks, and Slush for about 2%.

© 2020 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

ConsenSys, the Ethereum-focused development and investment company, announced Tuesday that it has acquired the technology and team members of Truffle Suite.

Truffle Suite is focused on the building of tools for the creation and development of decentralized apps, or dapps. As previously reported, Truffle Suite spun out from ConsenSys in April 2019, drawing some $3 million in outside funding at the time.

In statements, ConsenSys positioned the acquisition — the details of which were not disclosed — as part of a broader corporate restructuring that began last year. ConsenSys has also trimmed its overall headcount, a process that it began in late 2018.

“The acquisition concludes ConsenSys’ strategic restructuring to form two separate entities and delineate our core technology business from our investment activities, which we started in February 2020,” the company said. “Truffle will now be a wholly-owned product of ConsenSys the software company, which includes Codefi, Diligence, MetaMask, Infura, and Quorum.”

We look forward to delivering enterprise grade solutions that enable developers to build and deploy blockchain systems using Ethereum and across multiple blockchains,” Truffle’s founder, Tim Coulter, said in a statement.

© 2020 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Beleaguered crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX and its founders are facing yet another lawsuit that alleges racketeering, money laundering, and market manipulation.

Păun Gabriel-Razvan, a resident of Bucuresti, Romania, filed the lawsuit in the Northern District Court of California on Friday. He alleges that HDR Global Trading Limited, the operator of BitMEX, the exchange’s founders Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo, and Samuel Reed and others, engaged in and facilitated racketeering activities, “earning Defendants billions of dollars in illicit profits.”

The complaint comes one month after a similar lawsuit was filed against BitMEX and founders by plaintiff Dmitry Dolgov, a Moscow resident. Both Dolgov and Gabriel-Razvan are represented by the same attorney — Pavel Pogodin of Consensus Law.

“Pavel Pogodin of ‘Consensus Law’ continues to file spurious claims against us, and others in the cryptocurrency sector,” a BitMEX spokesperson today told The Block. “As we’ve said before, regrettably, Mr. Pogodin operates just like a patent troll, filing ‘copy and paste’ complaints against us based on rehashed information culled from the internet. We will deal with this through the normal litigation process and remain entirely confident the courts will see his claims for what they are.”

The new 197-page lawsuit claims that the defendants sidestepped know your customer (KYC) or anti-money laundering (AML) requirements and accepted “unlimited funds from anyone, without a single question asked.” Due to this lack of oversight, “hackers, tax evaders, money launderers, smugglers, drug dealers all flocked to BitMEX flooding the platform with hot money,” the lawsuit claims.

Gabriel-Razvan’s lawsuit also claims that “BitMEX directly participates in and financially benefits from the market manipulation and money laundering through its internal trading desk and indirectly,” and describes a specific example of how this occurs:

“A money launderer (Defendant) would open two exchange accounts – a helper account on one or more exchanges used by BitMEX to calculate its index price (Coinbase Pro, Kraken and BitStamp) and a winner account on BitMEX,” the lawsuit explains. “The money launderer would then enter into a large leveraged derivatives position on BitMEX and immediately execute market orders from the helper account with maximum slippage to move the index price in a favorable direction.”

Gabriel-Razvan claims that he suffered “significant damages” in an amount to be proven at trial. “Plaintiff suffered the loss of property…Plaintiff seeks three times the amount of actual damages sustained, costs of suit, and reasonable attorney’s fees.”

The Block has reached out to Pogodin for specific details on damages sought and will update this story should we hear back. Pogodin has previously filed similar complaints against crypto companies Ripple and FTX.

BitMEX and founders were recently also hit by twin lawsuits by the U.S. government. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) accused them of running an unregistered trading platform, violating KYC and AML regulations and the Bank Secrecy Act.

© 2020 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.