As part of New York Blockchain Week, Distributed Business Accelerator (DBA) publicly launched their global blockchain accelerator community designed to cultivate an ecosystem of blockchain startups. The CEO of the project is Tom Tao, formerly of IBM and Chainbase Accelerator. In opening remarks, Tao gave his outlook on the industry and extrapolated on where he saw DBA adding value to the blockchain ecosystem, noting that “for startups, obtaining resources and attention quickly is one of the critical factors to attain success.” Tao laid out the goals of DBA which include equipping promising blockchain startups with all the tools necessary to accelerate their growth, giving them access to an incubator in which they can develop their product and helping them to plan out business strategies to deliver that product to the world. He also touched on current issues which seem to be creating a general environment that leaves individual blockchain ecosystems too isolated. He considers the t

Hut 8 Mining Group raised $70 million CAD to invest in mining machines, and mined 828 bitcoins in the first quarter of 2018.

A monero cryptominer based on XMRig is hijacking Macs, causing high CPU and fan usage.

The U.S. Justice Department is looking into whether the price of bitcoin and other virtual currencies are being manipulated, according to a report in Bloomberg that referenced four unnamed sources for the information. Still in its early phases, the criminal probe will bring in other agencies, like the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a regulator that oversees bitcoin derivatives, sources said. On spot markets, like GDAX, Poloniex and Bitfinex, where cryptocurrencies change hands immediately, the price of bitcoin can vacillate wildly in a matter of hours. Starting in early 2017, the price of bitcoin ballooned from $1,000 to a record high of around $20,000 in mid-December. Currently, the price now sits in around $7,500. Unlike in Japan , where virtual currency exchanges are subject the same rules and oversight as any other financial institutions and are required to register with the government, in the U.S. and other countries, cryptocurrency exchanges are still largely

Thyssenkrupp successfully conducted a foreign exchange transaction using R3's Corda blockchain in partnership with Germany's Commerzebank.