Bitfury Newsroom

The Bitfury Group has formed a partnership with Insilico Medicine, a Baltimore-based medical artificial intelligence (AI) firm, to create new applications for the healthcare industry using blockchain, Bitfury's chief executive officer said on Friday.

Ever since Silicon Valley’s elite became interested in cryptocurrency, they have grappled with the question of how, in their quest to build these decentralized, blockchain-based systems that have the power to democratize society, they should manage their own privilege and influence.

That dilemma was in stark relief during last week’s Blockchain Summit, the most socially conscious and idealistically minded of all such conferences, which took place on Sir Richard Branson’s luxurious private island, Necker, in the British Virgin Islands.

When Roya Mahboob, 30, a serial entrepreneur from Afghanistan, began her startup, Women’s Annex, a platform for women to upload blogs and videos and be paid for views, the company found that paying the women didn’t empower them financially. While by law Afghan women could have bank accounts, their families didn’t want them to. “For one woman, her husband always hit her and took all the money from her,” said Mahboob, who then learned about Bitcoin and decided to begin paying the women with it. This is was one of the many powerful stories around the theme of women’s empowerment told last week during the Blockchain Summit sponsored by the Bitcoin mining and blockchain services firm Bitfury Group and venture capitalist Bill Tai, with special support from China Credit Fintech, on Sir Richard Branson’s Necker Island.

Hosted by blockchain services company Bitfury and its board member, venture capitalist Bill Tai, with special support from Credit China Fintech, this year’s summit on Necker Island features attendees from around the globe such as former Estonian president Toomas Ilves, renowned Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, Afghan tech CEO Roya Mahboob and Greek European Parliament member Eva Kaili. “We’re trying always to invite the biggest thinkers of this world and discuss how we can use this technology to really do good,” said Bitfury chief executive Val Vavilov.

While Segregated Witness (SegWit) activation is looking more likely by the hour, Bitfury is getting ready to deploy a version of the Lightning network with or without the protocol upgrade. The blockchain technology company, perhaps best known for its Bitcoin mining pool of the same name, successfully sent real bitcoins over a test version of the Lightning Network this week. Interestingly, Bitfury’s implementation of the technology is compatible with the current Bitcoin protocol and is therefore functional even without SegWit.

The Bitfury Group, the world’s leading full-service Blockchain technology company, announced today that its developers have successfully tested the Lightning Network on the main Bitcoin network. Committed to the success of the Lightning Network and the wider Bitcoin ecosystem, Bitfury engineers have been conducting research and carrying out tests to perform Lightning transactions using the current Bitcoin protocol. After much research, the Bitfury team succeeded in sending a real-time bitcoin transaction on the Lightning Network, which can be seen in a video demo.

Can Bitfury Group replicate its success in enterprise blockchain?

Long a leader in the lucrative bitcoin transaction processing sector, this has been an open question since the startup expanded its mission in a bid to win the trust – and business – of the world's biggest financial firms, governments and institutions. But that it's also a question that now has new context, as Bitfury is today making public an enterprise blockchain initiative that has long been in development in the lab.

Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, the Bitfury Group is open-sourcing its first private blockchain framework, though it's one that offers a twist on the established idea. Called Exonum, the software aims to distinguish itself from DLT solutions by enabling users to secure data using the bitcoin blockchain.

U.S. technology company The Bitfury Group said on Friday it had formed a strategic partnership with advisory firm Risk Cooperative to use the blockchain digital ledger in the $60 billion insurance broking market.

Blockchain, a public record of all bitcoin digital currency transactions, can also be used to track assets across industries. Over the last two years, Bitfury has been helping national governments put data on a blockchain.

The Bitfury Group, the world’s leading full service Blockchain technology company, and Risk Cooperative, an innovative risk and insurance advisory firm, announced a strategic partnership today to pioneer Blockchain applications in the $60 billion insurance intermediation market.

The Bitfury Risk Cooperative partnership will leverage Bitfury’s expertise in designing and implementing full scale Blockchain applications across a wide range of sectors and Risk Cooperative's comprehensive insurance placement platform and partnership model with the world’s leading insurers to spur adoption of Blockchain solutions.

In the hills overlooking Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, sits a nondescript building housing rows of humming computer servers. The data centre, operated by the BitFury Group, a technology company, was built to “mine” (cryptographically generate) bitcoin, the digital currency. But now it also uses the technology underlying bitcoin, called the “blockchain”, to help secure Georgian government records. Experts are eyeing the experiment for proof of whether blockchain technology could alter the infrastructure of government everywhere.