Blockchain News 26.06.2018

Yahoo includes BTC to USD trading pair in traditional stock report

A new Yahoo report includes a list of “select financial stocks” such as American Express, Prudential Financial and JP Morgan Chase and this list includes several crypto-to-USD trading pairs such as Bitcoin to USD.

The inclusion of cryptocurrencies with traditional stocks is part of a normalizing trend of digital currency assets.

Yahoo! is the sixth largest website in the world and the eighth largest in the US, according to Alexa.

Statistica reports that as of July 2015, Yahoo! had an estimated 151.2 million monthly unique visitors from the US.

Pharma giant Merck patents using blockchain for fighting counterfeit meds

Merck seeks a patent to use blockchain for tracking goods as they move through the supply chain.

The goal here is anti-counterfeiting.

Merck notes in its filing that the technology “enables a secure, reliable storage of the reading results with very high data integrity, such that it is essentially impossible to manipulate or erase or otherwise tamper with or lose such data, e.g. due to unintended or deliberate deletion or due to data corruption.”

Korean exchange leak puts $620K worth of crypto at risk

A South Korea based exchange has inadvertently leaked sensitive information about 19 of its users, potentially putting $620,000 worth of cryptocurrency at risk.

An employee of Bitkoex, an exchange launched in May, posted the email addresses, wallet addresses, and private keys for the KRM tokens in their accounts in social media chat, which could allow anyone with the information to access the assets. The company asserted no assets have been lost.

Andreessen Horowitz launches $300M crypto fund

Silicon Valley investment powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has launched a new $300 million fund focused on cryptocurrency.

The fund will be named “a16z” and will notably feature former federal prosecutor and Assistant US Attorney Kathryn Haun as one of its co-leads. Haun has also been named as the firm’s latest general partner.

General partner Chris Dixon indicated the crypto fund would take a decidedly long-term tack in its investments.

Dixon went on to add:
“We want services powered by crypto protocols to be used by hundreds of millions and eventually billions of people,” Dixon wrote. “Crypto tokens are the native asset class of digital networks, but their value is driven by the underlying, practical uses cases.”

Kraken Daily Market Report for 25.06.2018

BTC $6,251 ↑1.23% $70.5M	ETH $460.4 ↑1.12% $54.8M	EOS $8.17 ↑1.74% $8.03M	XRP $0.4771 ↓0.07% $6.6M
BCH $758.16 ↑0.45% $5.94M	LTC $81.84 ↑0.61% $5.18M	ETC $15.67 ↑4.61% $4.26M	USDT $1.00 →0.00% $2.07M
XMR $127.49 ↑4.98% $2.07M	DASH $240.2 ↑0.26% $992,370	XLM $0.1970 ↓0.59% $826,838	ZEC $175.1 ↑5.56% $456,348
REP $32.13 ↑4.73% $163,325	ICN $0.614 ↑6.75% $74,792	GNO $47.0 ↑2.77% $44,547	MLN $29.27 ↑2.56% $23,407