This week had some interesting revelations with the Noble Markets exchange licensing Nadaq’s own software. ChangeTip began support for live streaming website Twitch.tv opening up a chance to tip bitcoin to our favorite streamers. And Coinapult has re-enabled withdrawals from its exchange in the wake of a nasty hack.

The Paybase, GAW Miners, Josh Garza saga continues as a Reddit thread accuses the exchange and CEO of “going full blown Gox,” and deposit and withdrawal issues plague the exchange. Another exchange, Cryptoine has been hacked and hot wallets drained adding to the lengthening list of exchanges that have been hit in 2015.

All these stories and more in this week’s (slightly late) Bitcoin Weekly.

Noble Markets bitcoin exchange licenses Nasdaq’s X-stream technology

Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. announced Tuesday that New York-based Noble Markets LLC, a bitcoin exchange, has chosen to license Nasdaq’s X-stream technology, reports Bloomberg. This is the same software used by securities exchanges around the world and is related to the software that runs the Nasdaq Stock Market.

“It is a vote of confidence in bitcoin the technology,” Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at Convergex Group, said in an interview. “Now that you are seeing big organizations providing technology, there’s a feeling that bitcoin is here to stay.”

Noble Markets CEO John Betts is best known to the Bitcoin community as one of the investors and organizers behind the SaveGox.com campaign. Noble Markets also brings with it a strong team of veterans from the financial sector with experience at such giants as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and UBS.

A spokesperson also confirmed that Nasdaq is open to providing this technology to other bitcoin exchanges.

ChangeTip now tipping on Twitch.tv

Internet bitcoin tipping service ChangeTip has announced a recent integration with gaming streaming platform Twitch.tv. This change will allow streamers on Twitch to open up their chat rooms to receiving and sending bitcoin tips.

After integration, ChangeTip sends a tip bot to watch the chat and then viewers can tip others in the usual fashion.

According to coverage on CoinDesk, the tipping outfit said that it would give $10,000 in bitcoin to prominent Twitch users to get tips rolling.

Before the official announcement last Friday, users noticed a ChangeTip Twitch bot on GitHub. The bot was developed by an independent developer and is unrelated to Twitch.

Coinapult re-enables withdrawals

After being struck by a hack that led to a $43 thousand loss, Bitcoin exchange Coinapult has re-enabled withdrawals—deposits will be enabled again in about a week.

The long and the short of the process is posted on Coinapult’s website. Withdrawals have been re-enabled using 2 of 3 multisignature model—this means that Coinapult staff will manually approve (co-sign) all withdrawals. Delays should be expected. The team will be signing transactions from 9am to 9pm during Panama hours.

As stated above, deposits will be re-enabled in about a week, customers are reminded to not submit deposits to any legacy Coinapult addresses.

Paybase issues continue Josh Garza controversy

Bitcoin and altcoin provider Paybase has been having issues since Monday that may be related to an ongoing saga involving GAW Miners and Josh Garza. GAW Miners and Garza originally hit the news with the discovery that he and the company were allegedly under investigation by the United States Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) for “fraudulent conduct in the sales of securities.”

Starting Monday, SiliconAngle reporter Duncan Riley discovered complaints from users suggesting that customers could not withdraw funds from Paybase. So far there has been no updates from Paybase about its current status.

This follows a long period earlier this year where Paybase did suspend withdrawals from February 27 through to March 8 after claiming to be the victims of ““a coordinated and very sophisticated effort to exploit the databases for PayBase and (related service) ZenCloud.”

Discussion of whatever is going on at Paybase hit Reddit with a thread fearing that the company has “gone full blown Mt. Gox”—a reference to the 2013 incident when then-largest bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox became insolvent and disappeared with a lot of bitcoins on board.

Garza himself has gone to Twitter to refute the “Gox” claim; but not to much success as complaints of withdrawal issues still continue. A thread on Hashtalk related to the problems still has questions mounting about deposits and withdrawals as of 4 hours ago.

On Wednesday things got a little more interesting when Coin Fire revealed that the PayCoin Foundation and Adam Matlack were under SEC investigation due to connections to GAW Miners and Josh Garza.

Cryptoine goes offline after hack

Bitcoin and altcoin exchange Cryptoine may be the next in a long line of hacked exchanges after it ceased trading earlier this week. The front page of cryptoine.com is currently a slowly unfolding news source about the diagnosis of the attack and Cryptoine’s current status.

According to Cryptoine all of the exchange’s hot wallets were drained due to a race condition bug in the exchange software, the hack was discovered on March 24. The exchange lost hot wallets with: bitcoin, litecoin, urocoin, dogecoin, bitcoinscrypt, magi, darkcoin, dogecoindark, and cannabis.

The current page states that withdrawals will be available in April.

The exchange further states that there was no break in, there was no data leak, wallet private keys are not compromised, and the attacker was not able to execute external code. The bug that allowed the hacker to manipulate balance sheets (enabling the theft of the coins from hot wallets) has been fixed, but the losses are not recoverable.

Have some Dilbert

After all this news of potential scams and hacks, perhaps it’s a good time for a whimsical send off. So here’s some Dilbert. Enjoy!

photo credit: Voxphoto via photopin cc