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by Rebecca Campbell Reddit Weibo A Florida software engineer and a New Jersey pastor are expected to face trial connected to the Coin.mx bitcoin exchange investigation and a security breach at JPMorgan Chase & Co, reports  Reuters . According to the report, jury selection is set to start in Manhattan federal court for Yuri Lebedev, the suspected planner behind Coin.mx’s platform, and Trevon Gross, a pastor and ex-chairman of a now-defunct credit union. Lebedev is suspected of misleading financial institutions into processing transactions for bitcoin exchange Coin.mx, which was unlicensed. He is also alleged to have taken part in bribing Gross to gain control over the credit union to help the digital currency exchange. Both men have pleaded not guilty. The men facing trial are among nine other people who also face charges after being linked to a security breach at JPMorgan in 2014 that saw over 100 million customers’ account information hacked. Last mon

A dedicated bitcoin bank, possibly the world’s first, has opened on Mariahilfer Strasse in downtown Vienna,  Austria , according to  The Local , an English-language Austrian news site. The bank is owned by a Berlin-based blockchain startup, Bit Trust Services, and it is named Bitcoin-Bank. The bank is designed to make buying and selling bitcoin easier and safer than other in-person options. The bank’s ATM machines exchange  bitcoin  for euro, and vice versa. The bank also provides information about the virtual currency. Magdalena Isbrandt, managing director of Bit Trust, told state broadcaster ORF that digital currency transactions are faster than other transactions and can be done without a middleman. “Value and money can be sent straight from user to user,” she said. Touting Digital’s Advantages Andreas Petersson, co-founder of Bitcoin Austria, said digital currency’s main advantage is anonymity. “If I pay online with bitcoin, I have a degree of privacy,” Pe

Hong Kong The Securities and Futures Commission, an independent statutory authority that regulates the securities and futures markets in one of the world’s major financial hubs in Hong Kong is joining the R3-led financial blockchain consortium. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the Hong Kong regulator is working with R3’s numerous members that includes banks and technology developers to test blockchain ledgers to record and settle securities and futures transactions. The collaboration is yet another example wherein banks and regulators are coming together to push blockchain prototypes out of the lab environment to real-world financial systems. Claim Your own Bitcoin today “Both sides need to understand why this tech works and what needs to be changed to make it comply,” stated R3 managing director Charley Cooper as quoted by the publication. Bringing Fintech into a Financial Hub Widely known as a traditionally technology-forward country, Hon

Japan’s largest banks Mitsubishi UFJ, Mizuho and SMBC are now investors in bitFlyer, Japan’s largest bitcoin exchange. Samburaj Das Less than a year after  raising ¥3 billion ($27 million)  in a record funding round by a bitcoin and Fintech company in Japan, Tokyo-based bitFlyer now sees all three of Japan’s ‘mega-banks’ as investors in the bitcoin exchange. In an announcement today, bitFlyer, Japan’s largest bitcoin exchange and blockchain services company, revealed fresh funding from Mizuho Capital and SMBC Venture Capital, both of which are the investment arms of the Mizuho Banking Corporation and the Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation respectively. The two banking corporations join Mitsubishi UFJ as investors in bitFlyer. Mitsubishi UFJ Capital  participated in a ¥510 million ($4.5 million) round  of funding in August 2015. Altogether, all three of Japan’s megabanks have now invested in the country’s leading bitcoin exchange. Interest in Bitcoin Grows Investm

Technology giant Microsoft is reportedly among several other industry firms alongside banks and financial institutions coming together to form a new blockchain working group called the ‘Enterprise Ethereum Alliance’. The coalition of tech firms and banks aim to accelerate the adoption of Ethereum’s public blockchain technology in corporations and enterprises, according to a  Bloomberg  report. Flocking to Ethereum With companies like Microsoft pushing toward development and service offerings, Ethereum, as a smart contracts-based public blockchain is seeing a number of adopters in the corporate space. Companies and financial institutions working on their own private blockchains are increasingly choosing to fork Ethereum. In early 2016, a year revealing several blockchain prototypes and proof-of-concepts, one of the  earliest known cases  of a banking collective using a blockchain to transfer value came to light. A total of 11 banks across four continents from the R3-led banking con

In a  report  by Swiss multinational financial institution Credit Suisse, bitcoin and blockchain are deemed to be ‘relatively safe’. Bitcoin has some unique risks, the report noted. The value of the cryptocurrency has been three times more volatile than the price of oil and 11 times more than the post-Brexit exchange rate between the British pound and the U.S. dollar, according to the bank’s markets research department. Bitcoin transfers are also irreversible, so someone making a mistake entering an account number when making a payment will be out of luck. In addition, if a bitcoin user loses their private key, they can lose all their bitcoin. Blockchain’s Immune Structure Bitcoin’s blockchain architecture has demonstrated immunity to hacking risks. The blockchain is not an interconnected series of individual accounts, but a record of past transactions. When a user wants to transfer bitcoins, all computers running the bitcoin software process the sender’s signat