From The Bitfury Group Newsroom

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.

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.

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.

“The best way to think about this technology is that it’s like a global notary,” said Jamie Smith, ex-president of the Global Blockchain Business Council. “People are using this mostly to move money at the moment, but it’s really a digital token for people to use and access databases around the world.”

Cointelegraph spoke to Valery Vavilov, The Bitfury Group CEO, about mining, government Blockchain implementation, the first SegWit block mined and future plans for the company.

n April 2016, the Georgian government and the Bitcoin company BitFury initiated a project to record land titles on the Blockchain.

Following the project initiation, on Feb. 7th, 2017, in Tbilisi, the government of Georgia signed an agreement to use the Bitcoin Blockchain to verify property transactions.

And on 19th of April 2017, Valery Vavilov, CEO of BitFury during his speech at the Russian Internet Forum in Moscow, said, that since the launch in February 2017, when his company along with the government of the Republic of Georgia implemented the property registration on Blockchain had registered more than 100,000 documents.

Ukraine has partnered with global technology company the Bitfury Group to put a sweeping range of government data on a blockchain platform, the firm's chief executive officer told Reuters, in a project he described as probably the largest of its kind anywhere.

In April 2016, the Republic of Georgia's National Agency of Public Registry (NAPR), renowned Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto, and Bitcoin company Bitfury announced a partnership to design and pilot a blockchain land-titling project. Now, Bitfury and NAPR have signed a new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to expand the blockchain solutions developed by the project to other government departments.

In a vote of confidence for a fledgling technology, the Republic of Georgia committed in a signing ceremony in Tbilisi on Tuesday to use the bitcoin network to validate property-related government transactions. In April last year, the government and bitcoin hardware and software firm Bitfury Group launched a project to register land titles via a private blockchain, which is a tamper-proof ledger, and then to make those transactions verifiable using bitcoin’s blockchain, which is public.