Digital Currency

With Bitcoin trading at $4,300 and Ethereum at $300, most of the attention in the payments world has been on the cryptocurrencies’ value as an investment rather than as a payment method. Now, a year-old Toronto-based startup hopes to change that by enabling contactless point-of-sale transactions using Ether, the Ethereum …

A new unit formed by the enforcement division of the Securities and Exchange Commission will have among its responsibilities “violations involving distributed-ledger technology and initial coin offerings,” according to an announcement from the SEClate Monday. What the agency calls its Cyber Unit will also focus on market manipulation via social …

Years ago, when banks wanted to sign up more merchants for credit card acceptance, they turned to non-bank third parties to sell the service. Now, these same third parties are starting to sell Bitcoin acceptance along with credit and debit cards. Aliant Payment Systems Inc., a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based independent …

Showing resilience after recent actions that pummeled its value, Bitcoin shot up from the depths early Monday and was trading above $4,000 again. As of 10:30 Eastern Time, its price stood at $4,056, after plunging as low as $2,981 in recent days on some exchanges, according to Coindesk, which tracks …

Payments provider Aliant Payment Systems now offers Bitcoin acceptance for merchants through a deal with BitPay Inc., a Bitcoin processor, Aliant announced Monday. Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Aliant says the relationship makes it one of the first payment-processing companies to offer merchants Bitcoin acceptance. It is doing this, in part, because …

Bitcoin has taken a beating in recent days, but investors who bought earlier this year are still enjoying handsome returns. Now, some merchants of high-end goods are signing up to accept the virtual currency, hoping to cash in on that wealth effect. Bitcoin was trading at $3,498 early Thursday morning, …

Driven by higher prices and more usage, the value of cryptocurrency transactions could exceed $1 trillion this year, more than 15 times their level in 2016, a British research firm estimates. Hampshire, England-based Juniper Research in a new report pegs the value of cryptocurrency transactions in 2017’s first half at $325 …

Less than two weeks after a hard fork in its code that some observers feared might devalue Bitcoin, the digital currency is riding high. Early Sunday, Bitcoin’s price soared past $4,000 for the first time. The coin traded at $4,106 by late afternoon, up 7% over the previous 24 hours, …

Bitcoin Cash, the Bitcoin offshoot that debuted Tuesday, already ranks as the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. But by Thursday morning its value had taken a beating over the previous 24 hours. By mid-morning, Bitcoin Cash, which trades on digital-currency exchanges under the symbol BCH, was priced at just over …

Slowly but surely, a new version of the Bitcoin digital currency was emerging early Tuesday in what appeared to be the start of a hard fork in the Bitcoin code. The fork is expected to yield a parallel blockchain to support the new cryptocurrency, which is known as Bitcoin Cash. …