The average fees required to send a bitcoin transaction are on the rise again. After hovering steadily around the $0.50 mark over the last six months, data shows average fees hit their highest level in nearly a year in early April, according to data from Bitinfocharts. Since then, averages fees have swelled to around $1 to

Cryptocurrency exchange Gemini announced Monday that it has added “full” support for segregated witness (SegWit), an important bitcoin code change that paves the way for scaling improvements. While many bitcoin companies have adopted SegWit to some degree, Gemini is unique in it’s the largest bitcoin exchange thus far to roll out support for “native SegWit

UPDATE (April 8, 13:40 UTC): The funding round was led by Initialized Capital, not Pantera Capital. The headline has been updated. A San Francisco-based decentralized exchange (DEX) called Sparkswap launched Monday, becoming the first North American exchange to fully integrate the lightning network, a bitcoin scaling solution. Sparkswap is funded by a $3.5 million seed

Bitrefill has launched a new service that seeks to simplify the process of setting up payment channels on the lightning network, the experimental, layer-two initiative being built on top of bitcoin. Demoed for the first time Friday at the Understanding Bitcoin conference in Malta, the new service – dubbed “Thor Turbo” – helps users to

Bitcoin’s lightning torch will soon burn out, putting an end to a global payments experiment that has seen participation from hundreds of recipients, from tech luminaries like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to users in countries cut off from parts of the world by economic sanctions. Users taking part in the venture have been showing the power

nChain, the company founded by self-proclaimed bitcoin inventor Craig S. Wright, is looking to hire a patent counsel in London to manage and grow the firm’s portfolio of blockchain-related IP. The applicant must be a qualified European Patent Attorney, have a keen interest in bitcoin and blockchain and also possess a first degree in computer

Bitmain, the largest manufacturer of cryptocurrency mining equipment by market share, is scaling up its capacity to mine bitcoin itself ahead of an expected drop in electricity costs in China this summer. According to mining farm operators in China’s southwestern provinces familiar with Bitmain’s plan, the Beijing-based company will be deploying about 200,000 units of

“Hey are you set up with lightning? To send and receive lightning payments?” The day I held the Lightning Torch was the day I learned how the lightning network works. Living in Venezuela, the experimental payments network had somehow skipped my Twitter feed until I received the following message from renowned crypto advisor Jill Carlson.

Blockchain technology startup Blockstream has unveiled a revamped version of its bitcoin wallet, now called Blockstream Green. Perhaps the biggest overhaul of the wallet since Blockstream acquired it as GreenAddress back in 2016, the startup says it rebuilt the wallet “from the ground up,” adding new features that make storing bitcoin more secure and flexible. In addition

An experimental service that allows users to pay for futures data from exchanges Kraken and BitMEX with bitcoin’s in-development lightning network is now live. Launched by SuredBits Monday, the application programming interface (API) allows developers access to information about available futures contracts, specifically, according to CEO Chris Stewart: “You will be able to subscribe to market

“What happens when you need an MRI?” Someone answers for me: “You die an excruciating death… Actually, they remove them painfully quickly or the machine does.” I’m sure these paranoid, exaggerated remarks didn’t help as I sat down at the folding table in front of a large man with a 14-gauge needle. I was sweating

An experiment designed to push the boundaries of crypto payments, bitcoin’s “Lightning Torch” has so far grown from a single transaction worth less than one-thousandth of a cent to a global game whose users have included Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. But in the process of passing the Lightning Torch from one person

You’re not sure where it will end up exactly or who will actually read it. But you type up a message, pay a couple of cents in bitcoin and click the “send” button. Your message zips through space – yes, space – then is broadcast out of a satellite, blanketing the world. The result? A

In what appears to be a first-of-its-kind transaction, two developers working in separate countries have successfully sent a bitcoin lightning payment over radio waves. Organized over Twitter this past weekend, the transaction was sent by Rodolfo Novak, co-founder of bitcoin hardware startup CoinKite, to developer and Bloomberg columnist Elaine Ou. The completed payment effectively moved real bitcoin from

Bitcoin’s “lightning torch,” an ongoing experiment meant to test and showcase the next-generation payments technology now in beta, has officially made it to a user in Iran. The lightning torch finds bitcoin users testing out the network by passing around a small payment, each adding roughly 30 cents-worth of bitcoin before passing it on. As such, the

New improvements to an existing code repository are set to make it easier for developers to build their own features into bitcoin’s lightning network, the in-progress tech layer many see as the cryptocurrency’s best hope for its use in payments. Announced Thursday, Blockstream is making the largest upgrade to its c-lightning software in eight months, releasing

Bitcoin’s lightning network has taken a big step toward a better user experience courtesy of new work by one of its principal open-source developers. Widely believed to be the key to helping the cryptocurrency reach a mainstream audience by pushing it to handle millions of transactions, lightning still has a lot of work ahead of it.

An ongoing experiment with bitcoin payments technology, the lightning network, continues to see support from some big name individuals and companies. The latest to receive a payment in a chain of transaction now known as the”Lightning Torch” are the digital assets team at financial giant Fidelity Investments and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, both of whom

Pascal Thellman is CMO at Bounty0x, a simple service for earning crypto, and an advisor at PolyGrowth, a crypto PR firm. — As proof-of-stake (PoS) networks gear up in an effort to compete with proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains, significant attention has been placed on their validator mechanisms and incentive structures for maintaining valid consensus. In particular,

Wladimir van der Laan, the lead maintainer of bitcoin’s most widely used software, has harsh words for those engaged in an ongoing debate about whether the cryptocurrency’s finite supply will ever be increased. A soft-spoken developer from The Netherlands, van der Laan is usually hesitant to enter the fray. Yet, he responded fiercely to the

A project aiming to empower people to build nodes that can send and route payments on bitcoin’s in-development lightning network has officially released version 1.0 of its code. Announced this week, RaspiBlitz has published finalized instructions for building a lightning node on a tiny hobbyist computer called a raspberry pi. Often used for custom tech

Schnorr signatures, a code change likely to be one of the biggest coming upgrades to bitcoin, have now gone from a theoretical idea to real code courtesy of technology startup Blockstream. Announced Monday, Blockstream has added a technology known as “MuSig” to its test cryptographic library, making it possible for developers to tinker with the

When “liking” your favorite tweet isn’t enough, you can now send small bitcoin transactions. Announced Saturday, the beta app Tippin has released a new Chrome Extension available to Google browser users. Over Twitter, app users can send bitcoin payments via the Lightning Network, considered a way to make bitcoin transactions feasible at a large scale for

If hackers felt like it, they could split bitcoin in two. It wouldn’t even be that hard, according to research from 2017. Thanks to insecure technology underpinning the internet, someone with the right credentials could exploit the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) by faking their identity and confusing the network into sending floods of data somewhere

Cryptocurrency custody startup Casa has just launched a browser extension for its lightning network-enabled bitcoin node. Now, users will be able to interact with their Casa Nodes – hardware devices that connect to and help validate the bitcoin blockchain – directly on any cryptocurrency website that boasts lightning network functionality. Lightning is a layer-two payments

A new token backed one-to-one with bitcoin is now live on the ethereum blockchain. “Wrapped BTC” (WBTC) officially launched its ERC-20 token Wednesday evening. The project was first unveiled in October as a joint initiative between decentralized exchange startups Kyber Network and Republic Protocol, as well as cryptocurrency custody company BitGo. As stated on the

James Bridle is a writer working across technologies and disciplines and author of “The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.” His work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com. The following work will appear as an introduction to “The White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto” to be published by Ignota Books.  For more on bitcoin’s

Blockchain technology firm Bitfury has released a suite tools aimed to drive adoption of bitcoin’s lightning network. Although the network is still under development, Bitfury announced a comprehensive product list to support the tech on Wednesday, including an open-source lightning wallet and hardware and software tools for merchants and payment processors to accept payments. It

It’s been over a year since the scaling upgrade known as segregated witness, or SegWit, was activated on the bitcoin network. Even so, only an estimated 36 percent of all bitcoin transactions are actually using it. Why the minimal adoption rate? It’s largely because, like any backward-compatible upgrade (otherwise called a soft fork), SegWit ensures participants in the

Stockholm-based startup Bitrefill now offers a way to mitigate bitcoin’s expensive learning curve for new users. Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, Bitrefill’s new Thor service allows people to give lightning channels to someone else with no setup on the recipient’s side. Lightning was created to allow cheaper, off-chain bitcoin payments. Bitrefill’s John Carvalho told CoinDesk: “Thor allows