From The Bitfury Group Newsroom

According to Kyrylo Chykhradze, head of Bitfury’s Crystal, a software solution designed to track activity on the Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash Blockchains, Crystal collects information about all the transactions recorded to the blockchain to determine which addresses belong to the same entity to identify criminal activities. As financial institutions and law enforcement begin to use tools such as Crystal, organizations can start to easily detect illegal activities happening across blockchain networks.

The Bitfury Group, a crypto mining and software company, has recruited two veterans of the traditional financial world to guide its strategy and growth. Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, Antoine Dresch, co-founder of tech investment fund Korelya Capital (which led an $80 million funding round for Bitfury) and former executive at several major investment banks, will join Bitfury’s board of directors. At the same time, Annette Nazareth, a former member of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, has joined Bitfury’s advisory board.

Cryptocurrency venture Bitfury raised $80 million from investors including the merchant bank founded by billionaire ex-Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner Mike Novogratz. The private placement was led by Korelya Capital, a European investor backed by Korea’s Naver Group, according to a statement from Bitfury. Other participants include Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital and Europe-based firms Jabre, Lian Group and Armat Group. Bitfury was valued at more than $1 billion in the deal, according to people familiar with the matter.

Anyone who’s ever bought or sold a home knows how expensive and drawn out that can be. Other countries are moving to blockchain-based deeds faster, often because their land registries are less reliable and there’s rampant fraud, or because data are centralized nationally thus easier to change. Startup Bitfury Group, for example, has already helped register more than 300,000 titles in the Republic of Georgia on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Some of Malta’s largest real estate agents are planning to use a blockchain platform to share data related to the local property market between themselves. The plan was announced by Ledger Projects, a Maltese company which last year presented a blockchain application for notaries to record promise-of-sale agreements onto as soon as they have been signed. This new platform will be an extension of the original product and will be supported by the Exonum platform, built by Bitfury, one of the world’s largest DLT infrastructure providers.

A Bitfury laboratory equipped with the most modern equipment and technologies was opened at the Business and Technology University (BTU) last Friday (21.09.18, Tbilisi Georgia) in cooperation with Bitfury Group. The laboratory offers the students an opportunity to train in and study blockchain development. In addition, workshops and seminars will be held in the new space. Cooperation between Bitfury Group and Business and Technology University (BTU) began early this year after signing Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).

Bitfury Group has developed a new, more efficient bitcoin mining chip, the firm announced Wednesday. The new chip, according to the firm, is customized for the SHA256 algorithm, boasts power efficiency up to 55 mW/GH and a hashrate up to 120 GH/s. It has 8,154 rolled hashing cores, fully integrated controllable clock generation and an integrated power-on-reset circuit.

Blockchain firm Bitfury has come up with a novel product aimed at making it easier to pay for products with bitcoin. A specialized engineering team within the company has developed a coffee vending machine capable of connecting to the Lightning Network, a second-layer transaction protocol designed to make bitcoin more scalable by processing transactions off the main bitcoin blockchain.

Despite the downturn in the crypto markets so far in 2018, executives from several bitcoin mining firms have said this scenario has been seen before and they are not deterred by current low prices. The Bitfury exec also commented that the mining industry shouldn't be "overly concerned" that traditional chip makers such as Intel and NVIDIA have now entered the space. The design requirements for traditional chips are very different from those needed for crypto, he said, and in fact that provides the industry a special advantage.

Cryptocurrency miners have tried just about everything to keep their super-fast machines cool. They’ve moved them to Siberia and submerged them in vats of oil. One startup buried its mining rigs in a chilly Soviet-era bunker beneath the Eurasian steppe. But even by crypto industry standards, the 40 megawatt plant Bitfury built in Georgia’s capital of Tbilisi is exotic. It submerges the computers in a non-conductive liquid to keep them chilled as they make millions of calculations a second.