Bitcoin payments processor BitPay Inc. is the latest victim in a series of massive hacking scandals that have rocked the cryptocurrency community. The Atlanta-based Bitpay was hacked on three separate occasions in December of 2014. More than 5 000 bitcoins were stolen. Subsequent to this, BitPay sent a claim to its insurer Massachusetts Bay Insurance Company, and the latter declined to pay. The matter is now in court. A Suspect Email It began with an email that was sent to BitPay’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Bryan Krohn. Court documents give the identity of the email’s sender as David Bailey. David Bailey purported to be from yBitcoin, a digital currency publication, and he sought for Mr Krohn’s comment on a bitcoin industry document. Apparently, David…
BitPay has filed suit against a Massachusetts insurance company after losing $1.8m during a phishing attack last December. According to documents obtained by the Atlanta Business Chronicle, the bitcoin payment processor was defrauded in mid-December by an unknown individual posing as BTC Media CEO David Bailey, whose computer was infiltrated prior to the attack. The attacker subsequently obtained email credentials for BitPay CFO Bryan Krohn, which were then used to prompt CEO Stephen Pair and executive chairman Tony Gallippi to authorize three payments totalling 5,000 BTC on 11th and 12th December, including one transaction from a wallet on the bitcoin exchange Bitstamp. BitPay filed a claim for the losses days after the event with Massachusetts Bay Insurance…
LedgerX, the bitcoin derivative exchange and trading platform started by ex-Wall Street honcho, Paul Chou has received a temporary approval from the United States Commodities Futures and Trading Commission. This approval means, the company can now have swap execution facility as part of its operations. The CTFC approval has been a long awaited one for LedgerX as it had applied for it almost a year ago. Even then, the approval LedgerX has received is a temporary one. However, the founder and CEO of the company Paul Chou has stated that they won’t be launching their exchange until they receive all required licenses to run their operations. LedgerX has been in the works for some time now. It has received support from various quarters. The company is already…
LedgerX, a New York-based trading platform for bitcoin options, has moved closer to becoming the first regulated exchange and clearinghouse to list and clear bitcoin options for the institutional market. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has approved LedgerX’s application for a temporary registration as a swap execution facility. LedgerX plans to list and clear fully-collateralized, settled options on bitcoin. The next step for the commission is to review the application for full registration. The CFTC approved temporary registration following a comment period from Dec. 15, 2014 to Jan. 30, 2015. The comments are available on the CFTC website. Comments from bitcoin industry players supported approval of the application. Some comments raised…
Bitcoin has been around for about 7 years now and its adoption is gradually picking up. But when we say that bitcoin adoption is picking up and lot of people are using it to make payments etc., we are actually referring to only a fraction of total world’s population. We have been reading about forecasts that say “bitcoin is going mainstream”, but how can we call that “going mainstream” when bitcoin adoption is less than a meagre 1 percent. READ MORE: Bitcoin Community to Hit 5 Million Mark by 2019 Is bitcoin ever going to be mainstream? Banks incorporating bitcoin technology for their operations doesn’t count (making it clear so that we don’t mistakenly count all the bank customers as bitcoin users). In order to count someone as a…
Bitcoin continues to enthrall the world, and its acceptance as a valid payment method is also increasing by the day. Earlier we had reported that several companies and institutions, like Good Game Studios, have started accepting Bitcoin. Sync.com is the latest one on this list and the company has announced that starting now it will accept Bitcoin as a payment method via BitPay. In a press release, Thomas Savundra, the CEO of Sync said that “Sync offers a completely private alternative to consumer-grade cloud storage services such as Dropbox, through the use of zero-knowledge encryption. Simply put, we can’t access the data stored on our servers and with Bitcoin, our customers can enjoy absolute privacy in the cloud for both their data and…