Controversial military spending bill NDAA proposes blockchain for national defense

Can blockchain technology be used in the name of national defense? The U.S. government aims to find out.

Buried within the annual military defense spending bill, the highly controversial National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), is a provision requesting research on the “potential use of distributed ledger technology for defense purposes.”

Section 255 of the bill, “Briefing on use of blockchain technology for defense purposes,” briefly describes the ways in which the Pentagon could use blockchain for military applications.

Should it pass, the spending bill for fiscal year 2020 stipulates that the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering must provide a briefing that explains how blockchain technology can be used to improve cybersecurity for “vulnerable assets such as energy, water and transport grids through distributed and centralized computing.” 

Millennials love Bitcoin, still don’t trust or understand it: survey

A survey released today conducted by U.K.-based research firm One Poll, and commissioned by peer-to-peer Bitcoin marketplace Paxful, suggests young people in the United States have a growing interest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The trouble is a sizable portion of them still don’t trust crypto—and some even struggle to understand it, according to the report.

he survey polled approximately 500 young people between the ages of 18 and 42 earlier this year and found that nearly half of the Millennial and Gen Z respondents—43 percent—think crypto could replace the U.S. financial system today. And another 26 percent believe it will get there one day soon. (A whopping 98.4 percent associate cryptocurrency with Bitcoin, according to the survey, while 77.4 percent said they’ve heard of Ethereum.)

Here are the biggest stories in the cryptoverse:

• US Congress to talk to SEC about crypto next week. 
• Kyrgyzstan cuts power to crypto miners. 
• Fake Telegram Crypto ads appear on Facebook. 
• Venezuela to mandate use of crypto for housing project.

Coinbase opens up Dash trading for all retail customers, except NY and U.K.

What you need to know

Dash is now available on Coinbase, the San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange announced in a blog post today. Dash, currently among the top-20 cryptocurrencies by market cap, is available everywhere Coinbase operates, apart from New York and the United Kingdom.

Today’s news follows the launch of Dash on Coinbase Pro last week. Coinbase Pro is designed for institutional clients—an exchange where users can trade crypto between each other. On Coinbase.com, retail customers can buy crypto instantly, directly from Coinbase itself.
 

Why it's important

Dash’s main priority is payments and e-commerce. It offers lower transaction fees than credit cards, and, unlike its slower brethren Bitcoin, settles transactions quickly. 

And it turns out people actually use the thing: Dash’s volume hit over $350 million in the past 24 hours, and thousands of merchants across the world accept it, including Overstock.com. It’s also recently signed deals with a bunch of ATM operators, who operate around 1,000 Dash-friendly ATMs worldwide. 

Binance critiques Santander's 'crypto bond'

European banking giant Santander last week announced it had successfully completed the first “end-to-end” blockchain bond. The bond, worth $20 million, took place entirely on the public Ethereum blockchain.

But a report published this week by Binance digs deeper into the bond issuance and concluded that, though the bond is certainly significant, Santander was over-egging some of the claims. It went so far to say it wasn’t “bond-issuance,” but a bond “tokenization.”

Read more here.