From The Bitfury Group Newsroom

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.

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 Valery Vavilov.