Bitfury Newsroom

The Bitfury Group today released Crystal, a new, all-in-one Bitcoin Blockchain investigative tool designed for use by law enforcement organizations and financial institutions. Crystal provides a comprehensive view of the Bitcoin Blockchain and uses advanced analytics and data scraping to map suspicious transactions and related entities. The ground-breaking tool also offers a proprietary “risk scoring” system to assist investigators in revealing and tracking malicious behavior. Crystal was designed to be used by law enforcement agencies to track suspicious bitcoin transactions to real-world entities and determine relationships between criminal actors, and by financial and other institutions engaged in compliance and due diligence activities.

OKEx, a world-leading digital asset exchange that provides advanced financial services to global traders, will start listing the promising new cryptocurrency Emercoin, in early February. OKEx, which operates out of Hong Kong, is now the fifth largest exchange in the world by trading volume with more than $3 billion in trades. Emercoin recently received an investment from the Bitfury Group.

Blockchain infrastructure provider Bitfury Group will discuss its partnership with the Republic of Georgia to build the world's first blockchain-based land-titling project this week at Harvard Business School and the United Nations. Harvard Business School has authored an educational case study on Bitfury's work in Georgia and the project will be launched before a group of students at the Harvard Business School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Global Blockchain Business Council is ramping up its presence in Europe. Announced today, the technology advocacy group co-founded by blockchain services firm Bitfury Group will host a blockchain-focused summit at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, on Wednesday in conjunction with Eva Kaili, a parliament member from Greece. At the event, the council will brief members of the EU parliament and representatives from the European Commission on the challenges and solutions offered by blockchain technology.

Smith, the ex-global chief communications officer for Bitcoin hardware and software firm Bitfury and CEO of the Global Blockchain Business Council, along with Amanda Gutterman, the chief marketing officer of Ethereum venture production studio ConsenSys, rebut every common misconception about cryptocurrencies and answer all the most common questions about them.

TRANSITIONS -- FIRST IN PLAYBOOK -- JOHN MERCURIO has been named deputy global chief communications officer of The Bitfury Group. He previously worked in senior strategic roles at Purple Strategies and Burson-Marsteller.

Ukraine’s justice ministry carried out trial auctions using blockchain technology for the first time on Wednesday, part of an effort to improve transparency in government transactions. The project is part of a broader drive by the Ukrainian authorities to modernize state institutions and eliminate corruption, in exchange for a $40 billion bailout from the International Monetary fund and other donors. In April, global technology firm the Bitfury Group announced it was working with Ukraine to put a wide range of government data on a blockchain platform - a ledger of transactions that permanently records and tracks assets or transactions.

Ukraine's justice ministry has begun testing the use of a blockchain to digitally auction seized assets, according to a report by Reuters. The use of the platform will expand as the year progresses, with an eye to implementing state property and land registries onto the blockchain by the end of the year. Towards this goal, the government has been formally partnered with blockchain firm Bitfury since April.

Many blockchain and crypto asset-focused conferences have an obvious financial focus. But the most idealistic and socially conscious of them, the Blockchain Summit hosted by the Bitcoin mining and blockchain services company Bitfury Group and venture capitalist Bill Tai, commenced Tuesday on Sir Richard Branson's private island, Necker, with a different bent. Before even arriving on the island, some attendees on the same flight dived right into discussions of how to use crypto tokens to create social good such as reducing air pollution.

Bitcoin's much-anticipated Lightning Network is now compatible with seven different payment networks. Today, blockchain services firm Bitfury and payments network provider Ripple are releasing new code that makes it possible to conduct Lightning-style transactions across a range of both blockchain and legacy payment networks. While still in its early stages of deployment, it's believed the Lightning Network could one day expand bitcoin's capacity to millions of transactions by moving those transactions off of the main bitcoin blockchain.