Blockchain technologies expand this week as Microsoft adds Tindermint, a blockchain architecture company, to the company’s Azure cloud Blockchain-as-a-Service product. And Elliptic, a Bitcoin blockchain surveillance and auditing company, raised $5 million in Series A funding.

Competition is increasing for cards that use bitcoin as a back-end with Wirex’s launch of additional services for its debit card. The Bitcoin debit card space now has Coinbase, Xapo and Wirex–although Coinbase is still the only one available in the U.S.

BitPay continues to offer new standards and ideas for the Bitcoin community itself with the release of a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) regarding the recent debates over Bitcoin blockchain block size scalability.

And the Japanese gaming world just got a little more Bitcoin friendly as online gaming site Gesoten added bitcoin payments for subscriptions and in game purchases.

This week Bitcoin market value sit at about $421.19 (BitcoinAverage.com), which is about where it was last week. Over the progression of the week since the last Bitcoin Weekly market value dipped down near $405 March 18, stayed there for a day, then recovered to $410, before finally jumping back up near $420 again March 21.

Microsoft adds Tendermint to its Azure cloud Blockchain-as-a-Service platform

Microsoft’s Azure cloud Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform added Tendermint, a next generation blockchain architecture, to its stable of blockchain services.

“We are proud to announce our partnership with Microsoft,” said Jae Kwon, CEO and founder of Tendermint. “We’ll be integrating Microsoft Azure Cloud into our MintNet blockchain deployment tool and testing large-scale blockchain networks hosted on Azure Cloud.”

Over the past months, Microsoft has added numerous blockchain infrastructure technologies to its BaaS platform. In January 2016, Microsoft added Bitcore (from BitPay, Inc.) allowing the instantiation of Bitcoin nodes on the BaaS platform. In December 2015, Microsoft added blockchain services from Eris Industries, CoinPrism (Pixode Ltd) and Factom Inc.

Tendermint President and Cofounder Dustin Byington said on SiliconANGLE’s TheCUBE at The Block Chain 2016 conference that Tendermint’s vision is to simplify blockchain technology and bring it to the enterprise. To this end, the company provides a GitHub library filled with specifications of the company’s platform for developers (for both small business and enterprise).

Bitcoin surveillance startup Elliptic raises $5m Series A

Startup provider of Bitcoin surveillance for law enforcement Elliptic Enterprises Ltd. raised $5 million Series A in a round led by Paladin Capital Group that also included Santander InnoVentures, KRW Schindler, Digital Currency Group and Octopus Ventures.

According to Duncan Riley, the service uses machine learning to explore the Bitcoin blockchain and identify patterns of suspicious transactions or illicit use. And as the service can be used to track transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain and therefore can be used on any blockchain technology.

While Bitcoin itself has been heralded as a privacy tool, being difficult to trace (but not impossible due to its pseudonymous nature) this has been seen as a problem for business and law enforcement alike.

While Bitcoin transactions have not to date made things more difficult for law enforcement, criminal activity that uses bitcoins (such as ransomware and DDoS sites) is on the rise. A service that provides the gumshoe work that law enforcement agencies would otherwise have to do with their own IT departments would be an easy sale.

And, when it comes to the business part of using bitcoins some companies may feel timid about entering the industry due to regulatory fears. With Elliptic’s service, financial institutions would have a tool to assess risk and identify fraudulent client accounts more quickly (and hopefully more accurately) by providing the tools to audit blockchain transactions. One of the clear benefits of blockchain-technology is that it generates a secure, auditable historical chain of transactions; a tool such as Elliptic’s would allow companies to more readily take advantage of that.

Screenshot of wirexapp.com; courtesy of Wirex Limited

Wirex Bitcoin debit card looks to compete with Shift and Xapo with new services

Wirex Limited (formerly E-Coin), a company described as “a hybrid personal banking solution”, is looking to compete with Coinbase, Inc. and it’s new Shift Bitcoin debit card service with its own debit card. In a recent announcement the company released a new addition to its service enabling customers to purchase bitcoins from the Wirex app itself.

“Wirex users can use our blockchain-enabled banking services to instantly send, receive, spend, store and transfer funds, using nothing more than a smartphone and Internet access,” said Wirex quoted by Brave New Coin. “We aim to eliminate exorbitant banking fees and money transfer charges, along with the need for physical visits to banks and remittance service providers.”

The Wirex app is available for iOS and Android and integrates with the Wirex debit card enabling full service from the app. Including integrated security–users can block the card if it is lost or stolen instantly from the app as well as view past and pending swipes.

The Wirex BItcoin debit card is not available to U.S. residents (only the Coinbase Shift card has that honor currently and only 32 states) but it is available in over 130 countries–including much of South America, Canada, the European Union, and Japan.

The service itself is free but is limited to two ATM transactions per day and $1,000 per ATM withdrawal ($200 for unverified users) and $2,000 per day ($400 for unverified). While unverified users can also only withdraw a maximum of $1,000 over the lifetime of the card, verified users have no limit.

BitPay releases BIP proposing adaptive block sizes

BitPay, Inc. just released a BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) entitled “Maximum Block Size Consensus Rule Based On Median Block Size” seeking to add its own proposal to the ongoing debate over Bitcoin blockchain block size.

We propose a dynamic limit to the block size based on the median block size over the last 12,960 blocks (about three months) multiplied by 2 and calculated when a block is connected to the blockchain.

As for motivation, Steven Pair and Chris Kleeschulte, the authors of the BIP, argue that while the current block size limit is designed to stop certain types of denial of service (DoS) attacks against the network a fixed block size cannot support network growth and scale. To handle this, BitPay proposes an adaptive block size that uses historical traffic to algorithmically choose upcoming block sizes (so that miners never have to worry about submitting a block of incorrect size).

photo credit: Tokyo 3875 via photopin (license)

Japanese online gaming site Gesoten adds Bitcoin payments

The world of online gaming just got a little more Bitcoin as Gesoten (GMO Media, Inc.), a popular Japanese gaming website, announced adding bitcoin to its payment options.

According to Bitcoinist, Gesoten provides a communication and publishing platform for online games such as  PointTown, yaplog! and freeml. The company also boasts over 10 million users.

Bitcoin originally found a space on Gasoten’s platform as a point purchase currency for the game PointTown; but more recently bitcoins became a settlement currency for subscriptions and other services as well.

With this move, Gesoten joins other gaming outfits such as MMO publisher Wargaming.net (Wargaming Public Co Ltd) and gaming merchant website Kinguin both partnered with BitPay, Inc. As well as Ayden BV, developer of the MMO RuneScape, who added bitcoins as payment in 2014.

Humble Bundle, a very popular discount method for getting video games, also allows bargain hunters to pay with bitcoins.

Featured image credit: Dawson/Bloomberg News