Gerald Cotten, the founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX died from complications with Crohn's disease on December 9, 2018 while travelling in India. In his passing, a huge $190 million in various cryptocurrencies is locked away as Cotten was the only one with the passwords.

Cotten was the "sole officer and director" of QuadrigaCX, and has the $190 million stuck behind his encrypted laptop without anyone knowing the password. The news comes from a debt filing from QuadrigaCX to which his widow Jennifer Robertson said in an affidavit that "Gerry died due to complications with Crohn's disease on December 9, 2018 while travelling in India, where he was opening an orphanage to provide a home and safe refuge for children in need".

QuadrigaCX has since experienced major issues of pumping out customers' funds to their accounts, with the crypto exchange saying it is going through "significant financial issues". The company added that it has "very significant cryptocurrency reserves", but it couldn't locate or secure said servers. So effectively, QuadrigaCX's CEO died with the customers' money on his encrypted laptop. All of those cold wallet private keys are lost.

Sapphire today announced its new Sapphire RX 570 16GB HDMI Blockchain Graphics Card specifically aimed at mining cryptocurrency, complete with a boosted 16GB of VRAM.

Sapphire's new blockchain-focused graphics card is built on AMD's Polaris GPU tech with 2,304 Stream Processors across a 256-bit interface and a whopping 16GB of GDDR5 VRAM for demanding crypto mining. It sports dual-slot design with an 8-pin power connector, and its two 95mm fans can easily be changed out. Power consumption sits at about 175W, Sapphire says.

Sapphire's new card specifically aims at cryptocurrencies like the fledgling Grin, Cuckaroo 29+ and Cuckatoo 31+. The company says the new card can mine at a rate of 0.42GPS in Cukatoo 31+ and marks the beginning of a new fleet of mining hardware from Sapphire.

Razer's new revenue scheme gives you premium currency if you let it use your GPU for blockchain mining.

Today Razer announced SoftMiner, a new way to indirectly monetize gamers while rewarding them with digital goods. Essentially Razer is asking to use your GPU to slowly mine crypto with a new program, and in exchange it'll give you Z Silver based on how many blocks you let it mine per day. Z Silver can be used to buy apparel, gift cards, and Razer peripherals like keyboards. The tech is powered by Gamma's technology that rewards you for tapping idle GPU power.

"When your computer is idle, the Razer SoftMiner desktop application utilizes your idle GPU processing power to supplement distributed network needs for the mining process. You will be rewarded with Razer Silver, which varies depending on the amount of idle time and strength of your hardware or graphics card," Razer wrote on the announcement page.

Cryptocurrency is widening its grasp across the world, especially with many retailers and businesses accepting it as a form of payment. But now Bitcoin can be used to pay taxes in Ohio.

In a landmark move for the United States, Ohio becomes the first state to support Bitcoin for tax payments. Ohio-based businesses can now use Bitcoin to pay a wide variety of state corporate taxes including cigarette sales and employee withholding taxes reports The Wall Street Journal. Companies must register on OhioCrypto.com to use the digital currency for payments.

It's worth noting that businesses aren't technically using Bitcoin to pay taxes, at least not directly. The cryptocurrency is sent to BitPay, an Atlanta-based firm, who then exchanges the digital currency into legal tender and sends it to the state's treasury office. Ohio state Treasurer Josh Mandel says everyday residents could one day use Bitcoin to pay their personal taxes

If you thought the future was here with smartphones in our hands, Wi-Fi, and every other electronic convenience - it'll be the world of cryptocurrency that we go through in the next couple of decades that will redefine industries.

Spanish hardware hacker Richardo Reis created a Coke vending machine that accepts Bitcoin, before Coca-Cola itself has announced let alone rolled out vending machines that accept cryptocurrency as a payment. Reis is using BTCPay on the vending machine, with a QR code being generated on the machine and then scanned in from your smartphone. An instant payment is then made and the sale is complete.

Bitcoin transfers normally take roughly an hour to process but this BTCPay-powered Coke vending machine uses the Lightning Network. The Lighting Network allows for micropayments as small as .00000001 BTC to take place, compared to the blockchain which has minimum requirements magnitudes higher than that. Instead of the traditional Bitcoin blockchain that requires six blocks to be verified in order for the transaction to process (something that can take up to an hour), LN works over the blockchain and requires just two parties for the transaction to process.

Bitmain will be launching its next-gen Antminer soon, with the company announcing at the World Digital Mining Summit in Georgia its next-gen ASIC chip 'DM1391' that will mine cryptocurrencies on the SHA256 algorithm.

Bitmain will be one of the first to use the 7nm process with its new ASIC SHA256 algorithm acceleration chip, with over 1 billion transistors and optimized for maximum efficiency. Bitmain's new 7nm built ASIC chip is the most powerful and power efficient ever made, something that Bitmain CEO and co-founder Jihan Wu saying the new ASIC can reach a ratio of energy consumption to the mining capacity that is as low as 47J/T.

The new 7nm chips are being made by TSMC and have already entered mas sproduction, so expect new Antminer's to blow away previous-gen mining performance, with even more impressive power efficiency in the near future. Bitmain isn't new to developing world-leading ASICs with current-gen 16nm designs used in the popular Antminer S9 miner, and many other ASIC-based miners from Bitmain.

Don't forget that Bitmain owns a huge 70% of the cryptocurrency mining market, so the new 7nm ASIC miner is going to really drive things to the next level and really bolden the dominance Bitmain already has on the market. Interestingly, Bitmain is first with 7nm to market before AMD and its upcoming Vega 20 on 7nm and NVIDIA which is using 12nm right now for Turing, with 7nm planned for both companies in 2019.

The blockchain will be used for many things over the coming decades, and one of them is here now: solving online trolling. Authenteq has just announced Trollteq, their new identity management solution that taps the power of the blockchain to thwart online trolls.

Trollteq uses the blockchain in an ingenius way, where a troll is banned they can't come back and register as another person or online identity, they're banned permanently. Authenteq's new solution requires a buy-in from platforms that want a troll-free base, with Authenteq CEO Kari Thor Runarsson explaining: "The sad truth is that trolls have taken over a large swath of the Internet - our mission is to remove their greatest asset - their ability to hide behind fake names and identities, while still protecting their identities and freedom of speech".

Runarsson continues: "Any website or commenting system such as Disqus can instantly add Trollteq to their site or customers - we can scale up to a billion identity authentications in under 90 seconds. This means we are robust enough to handle even Twitter or Facebook user IDs".

Opera has been a leader in the cryptocurrency race, as they were the first web browser with crypto jacking protection and now they have another world first.

Opera has launched a new private beta version of its web browser that packs a built-in crypto wallet, something that supports the Ethereum Web3 API that will be integrated with a "default WebView" on top. Opera's new crypto wallet will automatically add tokens and collectibles into your crypto wallet, for your convenience.

Charles Hamel, the product manager of Opera Crypto said: "We believe the web of today will be the interface to the decentralized web of tomorrow. By becoming the the first major browser to open up to Web 3.0, we would like to contribute to making the internet of the future more accessible. Our hope is that this will accelerate the transition of cryptocurrencies from speculation and investment to being used for actual payments and transactions in our users' daily lives".

The future of rendering special effects and CG animation is about to change, with OTOY unveiling RNDR which looks to the cloud, blockchain, and cryptocurrency technologies to use PCs and graphics cards that are otherwise unused, to render CG images for content creators.

OTOY CEO Jules Urbach believes in the future of blockchain being used for collective rendering, opening up an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) last year with Render Token, and driving it home with the just-announced RNDR. Render Token lets people invest in it, as it uses a distributed GPU rendering network to entice users to invest, so that content creators can tap into users' unused computing power to get their jobs complete.

Venture Beat reports that OTOY has "created an ability to render graphics in the cloud, and it is using blockchain technology to enable people to make use of it. The goal is to create a decentralized economy for 3D assets, which could be rendered via the shared hardware, hosted in the cloud, and then sold and traded in a decentralized fashion".

We all know how much cryptocurrency has had an impact in the world as it hit us, PC gamers, the most: graphics cards. They disappeared from shelves shortly after seeing hyperinflation-like prices in the huge crypto mining boom, but another explosion that happened because of crypto was all of the cryptojacking in the months following.

According to data from McAfee Labs, cryptojacking has overtaken ransomware attacks. Raj Samani, the chief scientist at McAfee explains: "Attackers targeting cryptocurrencies may be moving from ransomware to coin miner malware, which hijacks systems to mine for cryptocurrencies and increase their profits".

McAfee's report is startling, as it explains: "Coin miner malware grew a stunning 629% to more than 2.9 million known samples in Q1 from almost 400,000 samples in Q4. This suggests that cybercriminals are warming to the prospect of monetizing infections of user systems without prompting victims to make payments, as is the case with popular ransomware schemes".

As you can see from the imaige above, cryptominers weren't really a concern until the start of the year with less than 200,000 new cryptominer malware surfacing in Q4 2017, while that number popped up over 2.5 million in Q1 2018 alone.