There are still people out there that believe that bitcoin transactions are anonymous. However, the Bitcoin blockchain can be used to trace cryptocurrency transactions to specific actors and money laundering networks. Last month’s indictment against the 12 suspected Russian individuals who hacked Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers is a testament to how authorities can use the blockchain to track down offenders involved in scandalous cryptocurrency activities.

According to the indictment, the 12 suspects used bitcoin during the 2016 election period to buy the dcleaks.com domain, which was later on used to post emails pilfered from the Hillary Clinton campaign. The group also paid for the server in Malaysia that hosted the site using Bitcoin and purchased a Virtual Private Network (VPN) using the same pool of funds.

The suspects, who allegedly worked for the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) unit, specialized in cyber-security operations that obtained invaluable documents through computer intrusions. They were apparently involved in large-scale operations designed to sway the U.S. presidential election and hacked emails of volunteers and employees connected to the Hillary campaign, including its chairman’s.

Using the alias Guccifer 2.0, the Russian hackers contacted a U.S. reporter and gave him access to the stolen files on the dcleaks.com site, leading to widespread news coverage. The compromising information is believed to have had an indirect impact on the elections.

Tracing Transactions Back to the DNC Hacker Group Was Easy

Tracing the Guccifer 2.0 bitcoin transactions to the culprits was relatively easy as demonstrated by Tim Cotton, a blockchain developer. He was able to trace back the purchases to the GRU unit, which hacked DNC servers while using only publicly available information. By analyzing the blockchain, which underlies bitcoin, it is possible for law enforcement and users to access the public ledger and identify a node indicating where a purchase was made.

Data found about transactions that take place on cryptocurrency exchanges is especially invaluable for law enforcement as such services usually require personal information to allow users to transact. This information can be traced back to an individual and is much more reliable than bare numbers and letters.



This article by Elizabeth Gail was originally published at CoinCentral

Opinions expressed by techsutram contributors and partners are their own.

What is ICO? 

We wrote about Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) in the past. It is one of the crowdfunding processes for any businesses or startups to raise capital in terms of cryptocurrencies instead of fiat.

If we have to compare the ICO funding process with existing ones then it can be compared with IPO (Initial Public Offerings).

Read further about ICO,
7 key side by side differences in ICO and IPO.
15 point checklist to read ICO whitepaper

The ICO Roundup - Infographics

However, we would like to share infographics from BTXchange.io at TechSutram.




This ICO Roundup infographic was originally published at btxchange.io
Opinions expressed by techsutram contributors and partners are their own.

The Internet of Things (IoT) market is known to be one of the big revenue streams in current and future markets. Now the internet of things (IoT) market is set to grow by 20.55 % CAGR over a period between 2016 and 2024. The overall market is set to generate revenue opportunity of US $1,490.31 bn by 2024 according to the latest report on the Internet of Things (IoT) market by Transparency Market Research (TMR).

There are many technologies that identify themselves as a part of the IoT revolution. Out of these key IoT technologies, ZigBee segment accounted big share in 2015 and will continue the same trajectory throughout the projected period.

ZigBee communication is IEEE 802.15.4 standard specification from ZigBee alliance. Zigbee is a low-cost and low-powered mesh network and operates at 868 MHz, 902-928MHz and 2.4 GHz frequencies in 20-80m range with a speed at 20 to 250Kbps. ZigBee communication system is less expensive and simpler as compared to other proprietary short-range wireless sensor networks as Bluetooth Low Energy, Near Field Communication, RFID and Wi-Fi etc. With the help of routers, ZigBee networks can span across many nodes in wide area network.

Segments such as manufacturing, automotive, healthcare, consumer electronics, media, and entertainment are set to drive the IoT market. Smart workplaces and residential areas, a renewed focus on the development of smart cities and interconnected processes and operations from a number of sectors are also driving the IoT market. Due to these number of big players such as Google Inc., Apple Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., and Microsoft Corp. are venturing into IoT space.

From a geographical standpoint, North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa and Latin America are the main markets for IoT (Internet of Things) market. The most lucrative of these in North America due to major players in the area and a consumer base.

Oracle announced the availability of Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database.  This is the fresh and newest addition to the Oracle Autonomous Database portfolio.

Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database is a fully managed NoSQL Database service. It can handle NoSQL applications that require low latency, data model flexibility, and elastic scaling with massive-scale applications such as UI personalization, shopping carts, online fraud detection, gaming, and advertising.  Developers can focus on application development. They do not have to worry about basic infrastructure tasks such as managing servers, storage expansion, cluster deployments, software installation, or backup.

Application specific requirements or specifications such throughput and capacity can be demanded. Once requested these provisions are made, and resources are allocated and scaled accordingly to meet dynamic workload requirements. All these will be possible with the help of simple Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

Executive vice president, Oracle Database, Andrew Mendelsohn, said, "We continue to leverage our revolutionary autonomous capabilities to transform the database market. Our latest self-driving database cloud service, Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database, provides extreme reliability and performance at very low costs to achieve a highly flexible application development framework."

According to the announcement the Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database offers lots of developer-friendly features that are Modern, Open and Easy to use. Modern features include key-value APIs including simple declarative SQL API and command line interfaces. Flexible data models for data representation including relational and ad-hoc JSON are few other features to highlight. The service supports a non-proprietary SQL language. It helps in delivering innovative interoperability between standard relational and standard JSON data models. Oracle claims that the application deployment does not bind users to Oracle by supporting the same application deployment in the cloud or on-premises. The service supports Software Development Kits (SDKs) in languages such as Python, Node.JS, and Java.
It can be noted that Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed, multi-region, multi-master database, is another NoSQL database service that delivers reliable performance at any scale. It also provides features such as consistent single-digit millisecond latency, and offers built-in security, backup and restore, and in-memory caching.

Oracle now claims that Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database delivers a significantly more reliable NoSQL database with 99.95 percent availability and is up to 70 percent lower cost than Amazon DynamoDB for read-only workloads. Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database service uses innovative machine learning and automation capabilities claim the announcement.

The Oracle Autonomous Database service runs on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and the autonomous database portfolio is self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing to automate key management processes including patching, tuning and upgrading to keep critical infrastructure automatically running. Oracle Autonomous NoSQL now joins its other services such as Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing and Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, launched earlier this year. All these database services are tuned to support specifics workload according to Oracle.

What do you think of this latest development? Which platform you will prefer? Is it Oracle's Autonomus Database or Amazon's DynamoDB?

Flexera has acquired RightScale, strengthening its total IT Asset Optimization Suite. RightScale is a recognized industry leader in the multi-cloud management and cost optimization.

Started in 2008, Flexera is a software asset management company and already partnered with several enterprise vendors such as Adobe, HP, IBM, and Microsoft. Acquisition of RightScale will let Flexera help their customers to solve the critical problem of cloud services overspend and control, reduce compliance and security risk.

RightScale was started in 2007 as a multi-cloud vendor and its Cloud Management Platform enables IT organizations to deliver instant access to a portfolio of public, private, and hybrid cloud services across business units and development teams while maintaining enterprise control. The supporting public and private cloud platforms include support leading public and private clouds – including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, OpenStack, and VMware vSphere.

RightScale’s current solutions and approach have earned industry recognition.
The company was recently recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave: Hybrid Cloud Management, Q2 2018 report, and The Forrester Wave: Cloud Cost Monitoring and Optimization, Q2 2018 report.



CEO of Flexera, Jim Ryan said, “We’re very excited about this acquisition – it’s transformational for Flexera and our customers. 60 percent of IT’s budget is driven by spend in software, hardware, and cloud.  Public cloud spend is growing rapidly and our customers have been very clear on their desire to manage public cloud costs with Flexera, just like they do for desktop, datacenter, SaaS and other IT assets.”

According to the RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud Report, a lot of businesses are already working with three or more cloud vendors.  Gartner estimates that cloud platform and infrastructure services spend is 20 percent of the IT budget today (Gartner Presentation, The Fundamentals of Software Asset Management, Matt Corsi, Gartner IT Sourcing, Procurement, Vendor & Asset Management Summit, September 2018 (IaaS 10%, PaaS 10%, n=233)).  An average 35 percent of cloud and infrastructure spend was wasted. This is where RightScale's multi-cloud cost optimization tool provides spend insights and a means to act on them has never been more important.

CEO and co-founder at RightScale, Michael Crandell said, “We share Flexera’s commitment to innovation and to delivering products that allow businesses to optimize and control rapidly evolving technology environments. With Flexera’s investment and leadership in technology asset management, we’re confident we can drive continued growth of our cloud management and cost optimization offerings.”

Managing Director at KPMG, Michael Adams said, “As the migration to the cloud continues, our clients are telling us that cloud costs are escalating at a rate much faster than they envisioned or planned for and that multi-cloud management complexities are becoming the norm – not the exception. They want to be able to control and reduce spend across all of their cloud environments with one solution.”

According to the announcement, the RightScale acquisition aligns with Flexera’s commitment to deliver the best vendor agnostic solutions to optimize and govern technology investments.  In addition, RightScale’s orchestration features can automate actions identified by other Flexera solutions.  Now Flexera gives companies the capabilities they need to stay in control of all their technology, and maximize cost savings while minimizing risks and vulnerabilities.

What do you think of this Acquisition? Let us know in the comments below.

SHIFTMobility announced today release of its Vehicle Passport, the Industry’s First Blockchain Application for Car Ownership that Delivers Rewards for Every Mile Driven.

SHIFTMobility is Automotive Cloud Platform. It integrates parts manufacturers, distributors, repair centers, and vehicles to securely drive industry connectivity and mobile commerce with blockchain.

The purpose of Vehicle Passport is to create digital identities of any vehicle and can be used to track vehicle service history, transactions, and its real-time events. Vehicle sales deed, title, insurance, proof of ownership and receipts, and other transactions can easily be made available to dealerships and service centers. If the car owners visit any of the service centers on the SHIFTMobility Network, vehicle records are automatically available on the blockchain for easy access. Consumers can also easily order and pay for replacement parts and services for using SHIFTMobility Auton digital tokens.


As per the SHIFMobilty whitepaper, When a customer purchases a vehicle, the staff at the dealership scan the VIN and enroll basic owner information. Once done, an AutOn utility token is issued to the customer and delivered directly to their personal wallet. These tokens can be used for services or vehicle and parts purchases at the dealership.  Additional tokens can be issued to customer accounts when they make additional purchases, schedule a service, respond to promotions, and other event
triggers. Customer accounts would automatically be debited with AutoOn tokens once redeemed. This incentive model allows customers to retain tokens for future services at the facility or even transfer them to the new owner.

Managing Director, Modi Group, Nidhi Modi said, “As dealership incentive spending hits record levels, optimization has never been more critical. Managing incentive plans is difficult enough with one dealership, so to tackle our multiple stores and over two million vehicles, we needed a solution capable of scaling with our growth while simultaneously delivering the insight necessary to seize the advantage. We look forward to working with SHIFTMobility as we roll out its blockchain-powered Vehicle Passport to all our locations. Not only will the app deliver the corporate intelligence we need, but our customers will benefit from a unique, streamlined experience from vehicle purchase and service to upgrade.”

The announcement further said that Vehicle Passport empowers businesses and customers to engage with one another in a transparent and trustworthy manner from the time of vehicle purchase through its maintenance lifecycle.

CyberMiles has revealed initial performance metrics of its virtual machine compared to Ethereum’s. The performance numbers look far better than its direct competitor Ethereum.

CyberMiles is an e-commerce focused blockchain protocol and recently introduced a new programming language, litylang, for developing smart contracts. HongKong based CyberMiles is launching its MainNet "Travis" in October 2018 and claims to provide a strong alternative choice for Ethereum application developers, particularly for decentralized e-commerce apps.

The main hurdle in adopting DApp (Distributed Apps) is the slow performance of the underlying blockchain infrastructure affecting overall user experience. The announcement claims that Ethereum platform can support only 25 transactions per second (TPS) globally according to the available data. The CyberMiles blockchain platform claims to be fully backward compatible to Ethereum and 100 times faster than Ethereum in terms of transactions per second (TPS).  CyberMiles uses a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) algorithm instead of Ethereum's Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm.  According to DappRadar, the entire Ethereum blockchain ecosystem has less than 10,000 daily active "DApp" users.

Dr. Michael Yuan, CyberMiles' Chief Scientist, said, "The 'apples-to-apples' performance tests demonstrate that the CyberMiles Virtual Machine (CVM) can be 10 to 200 times faster in terms of basic arithmetic operations. When coupled with a throughput gain of 100 times the TPS, the CyberMiles platform is up to 20,000 faster than Ethereum." Dr. Yuan further added that "In a world of 'application specific blockchains,' we envision that more and more blockchains will optimize for their own business use cases through technologies like the libENI. The CyberMiles blockchain works to become the application protocol for e-commerce."

Below table summarizes performance numbers of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and CyberMiles Virtual Machines (CVM)



Transactions per second (TPS) is analogous to I/O (Input Output) throughput (i.e. network bandwidth) in a computer system. Without fast CPU, fast I/O may not lead to sufficient user experiance. CPU is anologus to "virtual machine" in blockchain world. Cybermiles is claiming 20000 time greater performance number than Ethereum in their latest annoucement. This looks like a big acheivement, however, the annoucement does not mention these performance numbers are in their labs or with actual workload.

The CyberMiles Virtual Machine's (CVM's) high performance enables applications that previously were difficult with Ethereum. CyberMiles has specifically pointed out an example of cross-chain verification of Bitcoin transactions performed via a smart contract meachanism. A conservative estimate shows that the Ethereum blockchain requires 46 consecutive blocks of computing resources (i.e. gas) in order to complete the scrypt operation required for verifying a Bitcoin transaction. (Ethereum's co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, himself has noted that it takes ~370 million gas to verify one instance of scrypt.). As per CyberMiles' announcement, same scrypt operation can be completed within 51 milliseconds, representing a 18,039 performance gain.

Ethereum works as a Turing complete world computer with gas serving a control mechanism to limit its infinite usages. CyberMjiles takes a different view of this situation and built their blockchain platform purposely optimized for e-commerce with decentralized software development and release process governed by the blockchain itself.

Announcement also ponts out that "CVM can delegate computationally intensive tasks to the underlying native operating system with the help of "libENI". The libENI functions, implemented in native and high performance C++, can be developed by the community at large, and the CyberMiles blockchain validators (i.e. "super nodes") vote to accept them as modular components. These, in turn, can be added to the CVM without stopping, forking, or upgrading the blockchain software itself.
There may be thousands of community developed libENI functions. The CyberMiles validators will accept and incorporate e-commerce related functions into the platform, creating a blockchain ecosystem optimized for e-commerce applications."

Global Blockchain Technologies announced its beta program for singularity exchange is in the test phase. Singularity exchange is a decentralized exchange (DEX) uses the abilities of both the Laser and Stellar blockchain networks. It uses a federated sidechain to bridge the two networks.

Global Blockchain Technologies provides investors access to a basket of direct and indirect holdings within the blockchain space. Also referred to as BLOC, it is listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange (“CSE”) and its common shares trade under the ticker symbol "BLOC."

The main functions of any exchange are order books, order matching, asset exchange, and capital deposits. The true decentralized exchange should support all these functions in a decentralized fashion. The crypto market valuations are mainly driven by the bigger cryptocurrency or crypto asset exchanges around the world though the custodianship of the crypto in centralized exchanges remains a weak link and it is susceptible to cyber attacks. The most of the exchanges are mandated to collect KYC (Know Your Customer) forms from their customers and regulated by rules such as AML (Anti-Money Laundering).



Chairman of the Global Blockchain, Steve Nerayoff said, “Crypto has come a long way in 2018. With Singularity now on the market, it will take the space a significant step forward, providing value to both retail and institutional investors by taking away the problems that are created by centralized custody and centralized order books. Singularity represents what the crypto space was going for from the very beginning, and I am eager to see how it will enrich the space as it gets rolled out.”

BLOC President and CEO Shidan Gouran added, “Developing Singularity in parallel to Laser has been an extremely insightful experience. The concept of decentralization is something that continues to be rapidly explored as the crypto space evolves. By taking decentralization to another level in a way that greatly benefits crypto traders, Singularity will bring a lot of value to the industry. We are excited to be leading the way with it, as one of our many projects that are going according to plan.”

The announcement says that Singularity exchange offers decentralized custody as well as a decentralized order book. The beta program offers user registration for Singularity exchange at http://www.singularity.exchange with a disclaimer that the exchange is in the beta testing phase and comes with its own risks. To start using Singularity exchange users have to deposit five Stellar Lumens.

Prime Trust has started accepting any ERC-20 token along with Bitcoin and Ethereum as part of its suite of institutional and retail custody services. The announcement claims that Prime Trust is the first and only Qualified Custodian that can reliably hold custody of BTC, ETH, and any ERC-20 token.

Prime Trust is a financial institution and a blockchain-driven trust company that provides exchanges, portals, platforms, brokers, real estate syndicators, and direct-issuers with best-in-class solutions to seamlessly meet the needs of their securities offerings as well as of secondary markets.

Investment bank Nomura Holdings Inc. already joined crypto firms Ledger and Global Advisors to create a custody consortium called Komainu in may 2018. Three Financial services giants such as Bank of New York Mellon Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Northern Trust Corp. are either working or exploring crypto-custody services, according to Bloomberg.

Coinbase Custody, BitGo already offers institutional grade custody services as well.

ERC-20 is the primary technical standard used for securities tokens issued on the Ethereum blockchain. It is always difficult to hold custody of tens of thousands of different ERC-20 tokens that have been previously issued and will be issued in the future. Prime Trust enables hedge funds and exchanges to comply with SEC regulations as a Qualified Custodian.

SEC mandates that investment advisers keep client funds with a qualified custodian. Digital assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum or other ERC-20 tokens are vulnerable to hackers. It is difficult to track, trace and recover digital assets once lost due to such events. Most of the investors hold their tokens in different digital wallets exposing these to hacking, theft, loss, estate issues, and complicated legal problems. Now investors who own tokens issued in any ERC20 ICO or STO can safeguard all of their digital assets in qualified custody and receive simplified reporting on a single statement.



The announcement said, "Prime Trust engineers spent time with developers of several different ERC-20 tokens, as well as with one of the key authors of the ERC-20 standard during a conference that a Prime Trust partner company, Polymath, hosted in Barbados. It was there that they collaboratively laid the foundation for what would become an industry innovation."

Chief Executive Officer of Prime Trust, Scott Purcell said, "We’ve had an engineering breakthrough and we are excited to be the first financial institution that can easily cold-storage any ERC-20 token--along with BTC and ETH, of course."