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A new governance vote would continue liquidity mining rewards for certain asset pairs as the original allocation ends.

The patent was awarded to IBM last week and proposes using a blockchain consensus model to carry out and verify purchases made within multiplayer games.

Coinbase has suffered a number of outages during busy trading periods this year including most recently on Oct. 27.

Bitcoin is at bullish 2020 highs while Ethereum transactions prove out DeFi’s fundamental use case.

November’s national elections in the U.S. have inspired a fresh round of calls from some crypto enthusiasts that blockchains be used to record vote counts — despite consistent warnings from computer security experts that blockchains could introduce even more security flaws.

So, MIT researchers have published another report reiterating those warnings.

The problem with blockchain voting is not just the blockchain component, the researchers say. In fact, all online voting systems are vulnerable to “serious failures,” which the report describes as “attacks that are larger scale, harder to detect, and easier to execute than analogous attacks against paper-ballot based voting systems.” 

Today’s blockchain technology not only fails to address these vulnerabilities but also “might introduce new problems,” according to the report’s authors, which include renowned cryptographer Ron Rivest and Neha Narula, head of the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative.

Users would still have to use a potentially vulnerable device, they write, adding:

“The cryptographic and consensus guarantees of blockchains do not prevent potential serious failures.”

A blockchain voting app developed by a startup called Voatz has already been used in a number of elections in the U.S., including during the 2018 federal elections in West Virginia. In February, another MIT research paper found the app to be riddled with security flaws. That paper was co-authored by computer science grad student Michael Specter, who also helped pen the new one.

© 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.

Breaking down a recent report that has Bitcoin Twitter salivating and skeptical at the same time.

MIT researchers resoundingly reject blockchain-based voting. A Citibank MD thinks bitcoin could break out. And another DeFi protocol was hit with a flash loan attack.

At an event Monday, FinCEN staffers discussed the “why” of a new proposal that has crypto fans concerned.

IBM scored a new patent last week that hints at potential uses of blockchain-based consensus in gaming environments — particularly those of the massively multiplayer variety.

The patent, entitled “Gaming concensus protocol for blockchain,” was awarded on November 10. First filed in 2018, the patent outlines examples by which a game’s participants — particularly those in a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game — would participate in the ordering of transactions that make up the game’s flow of information. Players would, in effect, be akin to bitcoin miners in that their hardware and software resources would be used to order transactions in blocks.

What’s more, those peers could potentially get paid for contributing their resources to the game. As the document explains:

“In one embodiment, the consensus algorithm is provided as a service from the game network to any blockchain network, thus blockchain networks can delegate consensus to a distributed network of game clients within the gaming peers. In the preferred embodiment, for each transaction processed by the massively multiplayer online gaming network, a fee would apply. These fees may be distributed between the participants of the consensus round (i.e. participants/users associated with each gaming peer ) as an incentive, be used to maintain the network infrastructure or any other purpose that serves the gaming network and the players.”

As the document goes on to stress, this player-centric consensus model only forms one part of the overall system. But their role could expand should sufficient computing power be assembled.

“The gaming peers would only perform consensus on the ordering of the transactions. The execution of smart contracts remains within the blockchain network. In some embodiments, smart contract execution could be moved to the massively multiplayer online gaming network if the gaming peers have sufficient computing power to perform the additional task of executing the smart contracts and if the business case allows it in terms of security and confidentiality,” the document explains.

To date, IBM has not revealed much in the way of its thinking on the gaming and blockchain front. The tech giant published a third-party blog post in February about the ways in which the technology intersects with the gaming world, highlighting the use of non-fungible tokens for in-game assets.

© 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.

SkyBridge Capital is giving itself an opening to indirectly invest in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.