UPDATED 17:23 EDT / SEPTEMBER 09 2015

NEWS

Bitcoin Weekly 2015 September 9: Paymium seed funding, BitPay proposes ‘Bitcoin Association,’ ZeroNet, Coinkite, and UBS

Numerous startups and other Bitcoin businesses are making inroads and receiving capital funding this week. Amid them Bitcoin exchange and financial services company Paymium received $1.2 million (as 1 million EUR), and registration-less cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift revived $1.6 million in funding. Cloud storage company Sync.com announced bitcoin payments and Bitcoin wallet service Coinkite Inc. tweeted that the company has processed $250 million in the past three months.

Swiss bank UBS is also beginning to look into using a blockchain peer-to-peer ledger technology (similar to that that underlies Bitcoin) to create a cryptocurrency for intra-bank remittance and transfers.

In open source news, ZeroNet has launched a project that allows users to publish, edit, and distribute web pages using the Bitcoin blockchain and the peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol in a manner that is difficult to censor. See below for further details on the project.

In light of all the startups, corporate interest, and institutional funding going into Bitcoin, a representative at BitPay Inc. has suggested that Bitcoin needs a commercial association similar to that of many other commercial interests. The proposed association would promote the brand of Bitcoin and provide a collective resource for large Bitcoin businesses in a way that the Bitcoin Foundation–the presently most visible Bitcoin evangelist group–currently does not.

The discussion of Bitcoin governance along the block size and scalability debate continues, but there has been very little news that caught much attention–see the past two Bitcoin Weekly‘s (August 26 and September 2) for more details.

In spite of recent price volatility, the Bitcoin market average has crept back into the $240s, where the price was sitting during April, May and June. The price saw a rise and fall, peaking briefly above $300 in mid July. Much of 2015 has persisted in this band, having dropped from higher market values (but much greater volatility) ranging between the $600s and $300s during 2014. In all, most of 2015 looks much more stable price-wise, in spite of apparent upheavals regarding China, U.S. regulation, and the block size debate (as mentioned above).

French Bitcoin exchange and financial services

French Bitcoin exchange and financial services company Paymium serves most of Europe, allowing users to buy Bitcoin for cash.

Paymium receives one million euros in seed funding

French Bitcoin exchange and financial services outfit Paymium SAS just received one million EUR ($1.12 million USD) in funding from Newfund, Kima Ventures, Galitt and a group of business angels last week. Founded in 2011 by Gonzague Grandval, Pierre Noizat and David François and is headquartered in Paris, France.

“We intend to increase our trade volume by five by the end of 2016. In addition, the interest of Blockchain technology, on which Bitcoin grows, is now widely recognized by the banking sector. This paves the way to new applications in the field of digital trust and payments, “said Pierre Noizat, President and co-founder of Paymium.

Paymium intends to use the funding to accelerate growth in Europe and to provide new services.

The company currently delivers a Bitcoin exchange marketplace and payment services to customers. Paymium also recently opened a service that enables customers to send money by mail in euros or bitcoins throughout Europe.

Sync announces bitcoin payment acceptance

Cloud storage and file sharing platform Sync.com Inc. made news at multiple small outlets (EconoTimes, Coinfox) this week when the company began accepting bitcoins for payment. The company announced that it has teamed up with BitPay, Inc., an already popular bitcoin payment processor.

“With Bitcoin, our customers can enjoy absolute privacy in the cloud for both their data and payments,” said Thomas Savundra, CEO of Sync.

New users receive 5 GB of storage for free and can upgrade to Sync Pro—500GB for $49/yr or 2 TB for $98/yr—all of which can be paid in bitcoins.

Sync delivers cloud-based storage similar to DropBox, MEGA, and other cloud-storage services, with a desktop app and web access.

The company also provides collaboration and sharing support for enterprise teams with an admin panel for shared folders and role-based sharing control. Sync also boasts HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance for U.S. residents and numerous Canadian compliance certifications. In fact, Sync is in Canada and is not subject to U.S. data retention or tapping laws.

A screenshot of ZeroNet's homepage, the peer-to-peer web publishing software is available for Windows and Linux.

A screenshot of ZeroNet’s homepage, the peer-to-peer web publishing software is available for Windows, MacOS and Linux — and even comes in a Docker container.

ZeroNet for P2P websites using Bitcoin and BitTorrent

ZeroNet, available at zeronet.io, just announced the release of an open source app that provides peer-to-peer, no configuration hosting using Bitcoin and BitTorrent for peer-to-peer decentralized websites.

The software is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS; it can be installed with portable virtual environment manager Vagrant and even via Docker container. The source code and various apps are available at the project’s GitHub repository.

The goal of the project is to provide open, free, and uncensored network and communication. It delivers this by using peer-to-peer technologies to decentralize web hosting across peers using the BitTorrent protocol—which is used for file sharing across broad networks. The sites themselves are hosted by all the nodes running the app on the network and any given site will always be online as long as one peer is serving it.

The ZeroNet features real-time updates to uploaded sites, supports Namecoin .bit domains, can clone websites in one click, provides BIP32 authorization—protection similar to Bitcoin wallet cryptography—supports the Tor network, TLS encrypted connections (supports HTTPS) and it works with any browser/OS.

As a newly launched project, ZeroNet is still under development, but is fully functional and has a Reddit sub dedicated to discussion of the app and network.

Coinkite tweets about $250M in transactions over the last three months

According to Bitcoin multisig wallet service Coinkite, the site has processed over $250 million USD worth of transactions in the past quarter.

As a company, Coinkite has been part of the Bitcoin ecosystem since 2013 and provides not just a multisig wallet for consumers but also provides merchant services and an API for securing and monitoring Bitcoin wallets. Also in 2013 began work on a card plus Point of Sale (POS) system designed to mimic a debit card for bitcoin, in 2014 Coinkite assured customers that its service was unaffected by transaction malleability (while it affected other services) and recently Coinkite integrated with BitQuick LLC, a service that lets customers buy bitcoins quickly for cash.

Erik Voorhees’s ShapeShift cryptocurrency exchange requires no log in.

Erik Voorhees’s ShapeShift cryptocurrency exchange requires no log in.

ShapeShift.io cryptocurrency exchange raises $1.6 million

Erik Voorhees’s registration-less cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift Ag just raised $1.6 million in a seed round from the Digital Currency Group and Roger Ver as well as angels Bruce Fenton, Trevor Koverko and Michael Terpin according to a report published at TechCrunch.

ShapeShift represents an interesting type of exchange, and not just because exchanges occur without registration or login, but because the exchange does not trade in fiat or terrestrial currencies (i.e. no U.S. dollars, Japanese yen, or euros) only cryptocurrency (e.g. Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Nucoin, etc.).

“ShapeShift has no user accounts, signup, or registration process whatsoever,” Voorhees said about the service. “But it’s faster and far more convenient than traditional exchanges.”

Roger Ver was also part of the seed funding round for ShapeShift in March of this year when the exchange received £525,000 British pounds (approx. $800,000 USD), and Voorhees was revealed to be the founder of the project.

BitPay's Cheif Commercial Officer Sonny Singh, via LinkedIn

BitPay’s Cheif Commercial Officer Sonny Singh, via LinkedIn

BitPay Chief Commercial Officer proposes Bitcoin Association

BitPay Inc., one of Bitcoin’s largest payment processors, believes that Bitcoin as a brand, network, community, and industry could benefit from a professional association similar to those of other commercial industries. BitPay Chief Commercial Officer Sonny Singh proposed the idea that larger Bitcoin payment processors such as Coinbase, Inc., Circle (Circle Internet Financial Limited) and Xapo Inc. could form a professional association similar to that formed by MasterCard and Visa.

Duncan Riley, SiliconANGLE senior writer and reporter, published the details of Singh’s thoughts on the matter:

“Have a Bitcoin Association. Like in America they used to have those commercials for milk: ‘Milk does the body good.’ That was a very powerful thing,” Singh said about the proposal. “Not marketing for their company, but marketing about Bitcoin: ‘Why a normal person would use bitcoin, how it can be used.’ … Getting the word out there – working together. You’ve got all this money people have raised. Let’s try to promote the community.”

Singh’s suggestion comes as more Bitcoin startups rise in the industry and the premier Bitcoin “association,” the Bitcoin Foundation, has been described as “effectively bankrupt.” Major Bitcoin payment processors such as Coinbase, BitPay and others may be competitors, but together they maintain a large, open presence and a lot of money that could be used to enhance the brand of Bitcoin.

UBS-logoUBS working on prototype virtual currency to facilitate bank transfers

Swiss bank UBS is reportedly developing a virtual currency designed to facilitate intra-bank currency transfers, according to an article published at the Wall Street Journal. The proposed technology, dubbed a “utility settlement coin,” would be linked to central bank assets and real world currencies. It would also be built on blockchain technology, a distributed peer-to-peer ledger system similar to that that powers Bitcoin.

Hyder Jaffrey, the bank’s e-commerce commercial director, has already stated that UBS had already reached out to potential customers, but could not comment on details.

UBS is not the only financial institution looking into blockchain-based technologies as financial instruments. For example, NASDAQ (NASDAQ OMX Group), the American stock exchange company, began developing enterprise-level asset tracking this year in May using blockchain technology. Unlike the UBS development, NASDAQ’s blockchain tech appeared it would use the Bitcoin blockchain via the Open Assets Protocol and colored coins.

Financial institutions are slowly becoming aware that blockchain technology could become a de facto method for reducing costs and increasing efficiency for bank transfers. The current time it takes to settle trades for institutions is two to three days, but a commonly cited speed using blockchain technology is mere minutes.

According to the WSJ article:

Clearing, settling and managing post-trade processes costs between $65 billion and $80 billion a year globally, according to consultancy Oliver Wyman. In a joint study with the venture arm of Spanish bank Santander, the consultancy estimated that blockchain technology could reduce the bank’s infrastructure costs in cross-border payments, securities trading and regulatory compliance by as much as $20 billion a year by 2022.

UBS and NASDAQ may only be the beginning of the foothold for wide adoption of blockchain utilizing technologies and if so adopted could revolutionize banking.

Featured image credit: Dawson/Bloomberg News

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU