Bitcoin news this week is very much in the business side of things, but Bitcoin users (and consumers in general) will reap many of the benefits of these new projects.

Gyft is partnering with Chain.com and using the Open Assets Protocol to put gift cards on the Bitcoin blockchain. Coinbase announced the launch of Instant Exchange, which will bring instant bitcoin purchase and sale to regular users (those with local currency wallets) that protects them from market volatility. Bitcoin exchange Kraken has added dark pool trades, enabling high volume traders (50 BTC and more) to place invisible trades as not to cause market shifts.

And, for those following along last week about the bitcoin mugging in Brooklyn, the victim has come forward with further details and an interview, see below.

Coinspace, a bitcoin co-working space, to open in New York

Coinspace, a cryptocurrency-based collective and workspace, will open July 20 in Brooklyn, New York.

Coinspace is a bitcoin focused coworking space in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Opening July 2015, it’s open to anyone working with bitcoin, blockchain or beyond. Designed by Kellam Clark, a well known New York woodworker, this is a truly unique space. Admission is free. However, we still use cryto-tokens for access, either our own housecoins or Swarm coins, which you can freely get by contacting us. We use these tokens so that Coinspace can run as a Distributed Collaborative Organization within the Swarm network.

In order to provide a democratized voting mechanism, Coinspace hopes to use a counterparty asset called Housecoins. Housecoins will also be used to purchase day passes and memberships in the co-working space–or to purchase time on the “Double” robot to visit Coinspace remotely.

Further information available on Coinspace’s website.

Gyft and Chain.com partner up to put gift cards on the Bitcoin blockchain

Gyft, a well known merchant selling digital gift cards for bitcoin, just partnered up with Bitcoin API developer Chain.com to use the Open Assets Protocol and Chain’s API to put gift cards on the Bitcoin blockchain. The Open Assets Protocol will provide the mechanism by which gift cards will be integrated with the blockchain and Chain.com will become the underlying technology and API for the project as well as act as one of the private key custodians.

The product is called Gyft Block.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOTQDrxJPiQ

With this project, Gyft hopes to transform the highly complex, and overburdened gift card industry, which suffers from fraud and lack of standardization. A bite of that apple would be extremely lucrative for cryptocurrency startups, as the gift card market flirted with about $125 billion in 2014, according to CEB TowerGroup.

“Consumers can redeem different forms of digital value in a single transaction: for example, a consumer can buy a cup of coffee by combining a gift card, branded reward point, and coupon, since all blockchain-based digital assets operate on the same open standards,” says Vinny Lingham, Gyft CEO.

Cryptocurrency assets also have the benefit of being born-digital, meaning that the infrastructure required to support them is cheaper than traditional card programs and can be supported by a digital wallet on a customer smartphone.

This continues an ongoing trend for companies looking to the Bitcoin blockchain to support digital assets. In the sense of data, a gift card, reward point, or other asset is not much different from a security—which Nasdaq.com is launching a service to provide—or even digital records addressing land ownership—such as the Honduras government’s partnership with Factom.

Coinbase launches Instant Exchange

Well-known Bitcoin wallet service and now also exchange, Coinbase, Inc., just announced a new feature: Instant Exchange. This feature will allow users to send and receive bitcoin payments without suffering bitcoin exchange rate fluctuation.

For merchant processing services—including Coinbase, BitPay, etc.—this is already a staple for business clients taking bitcoin payments from customers, as otherwise businesses would not want to exchange in bitcoins given the volatility of the market. With Instant Exchange, Coinbase is opening up this service to anyone with a local currency wallet.

This feature allows users to seamlessly send bitcoins by debiting from their local currency wallet. Doing so causes Coinbase to make a background purchase order in bitcoins and debit from the local currency account to send the bitcoins. The same function works with the local currency wallet upon receiving bitcoins at a specialized “Instant Exchange” bitcoin address, which triggers a background sell of bitcoins at price upon receipt.

See Coinbase’s blog for further details.

Kraken opens bitcoin dark pool trading

During most exchange trades everything goes onto a public ledger: buy and sell orders appear where everyone can see them. However, sometimes traders want to place extremely large orders onto the market, which can often lead to unfavorable pricing as the market price shifts.

To mitigate this, Kraken is offering dark pools for large trades. A dark pool trade is unknown to other parties and buy and sell orders execute against similarly sized and priced orders currently in the dark pool. Due to the anonymity of the orders buyers and sellers do not know about the larger bid and ask and thus can potentially get a better price.

The announcement went up on Kraken’s blog June 11 and it should change how high volume traders on the exchange are able to interact with the market.

Traders executing dark pool orders will be charged an extra 0.1% fee and it is available to all Kraken clients with accounts verified at Tier 2 and above. The minimum dark pool size is 50 bitcoins (almost $12.7k USD) and can only be a limit order. The dark pool can accept orders for trades between bitcoins and EUR, USD, JPY or GBP. Dark pool pairings will be designated by a “.d” extension (e.g. XBT/EUR.d or XBT/USD.d).

Brooklyn victim of Craigslist bitcoin mugging comes forward with more details

Last week, Bitcoin Weekly picked up the harrowing story of a New York man who was mugged at gunpoint during a bitcoin trade. Now, Cryptocoins News has further details on the incident. The victim, now identified as Todd Kantor of Brooklyn, NY, came forward on the You, Me and BTC podcast and spoke about the robbery.

During the interview, Kantor retells the story that it had been a trade initiated from Craigslist, but things were a lot more dangerous than originally reported. He added that the perpetrator had kept him at gunpoint for hours and forced his son to bring down electronics from their apartment.

Kantor also mentions that it appears that the demographic of bitcoin buyers in Brooklyn currently skew younger and he fears that this would put him and other older traders at a physical disadvantage in the case of potential muggings.

As a result, Kantor describes a change in protocol he and other Brooklyn bitcoin traders have decided upon. From the podcast it seems that it involves making the trade occur at a bank—to add the security of a well-lit, public space as well as provide that there’s a way to get and transfer money nearby.

As a result of the incident, he has not sworn off Craigslist as a source for trades, noting that it provides for less digital footprint than using a site such as LocalBitcoins to exact a transfer.

The exclusive interview is also available on You, Me, and BTC’s YouTube channel.