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The world’s largest information technology firm, Samsung Electronics, headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, has successfully added Bitcoin support to its new upcoming distributed ledger tech (DLT) Keystore Software Development Kit (SDK), and the company has disclosed that its digital currency wallet is compatible with its latest Galaxy Note 10 smartphone handset. Samsung is one of the most active companies adopting cryptocurrency and blockchain solutions in 2018-2019.

As the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem eagerly awaits the world’s leading social networking service provider Facebook officially launching its own USD-backed token called Libra, a large number of anonymous fraudsters have already started their bad practices of creating Facebook pages pretending to sell real Libra.

Several credit card firms have started forbidding Bitcoin and cryptocurrency purchases with various decent reasons. This very week, Apple Inc. in collaboration with two American multinationals financial services firms Mastercard Incorporated and Goldman Sachs Group, officially rolled out a new card providing customers 3% cash-back (discount) on products and services bought directly from Apple, and 2% discount on any products bought using Apple Pay – Apple’s electronic wallet service - and 1% on other related transactions.

Mastercard Incorporated, the United States based cosmopolitan financial services company with its headquarters in New York, is hunting for around 28 cryptocurrency and blockchain professionals in order to help strengthen its team within the distributed ledger technology (DLT) field. They are ready to hire a wide range of blockchain experts including many senior roles, as the corporation are proposing to be intense on creating digital asset and wallet products. Mastercard deals in services such as offering credit, prepaid and debit card payment services to its massive clients in over 26,000 financial institutions globally.

The Office of the Australian Info Commissioner (OAIC) released a statement on Tuesday showing that it has joined other privacy regulators from different parts of the world I’m calling for more info about Facebook’s Libra Network. OAIC and other regulators including United Kingdom Info Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the European Union, the United States, Albania, Canada and Burkina Faso, want to know more about Facebook's information protection framework for its private cryptocurrency dubbed Libra that is expected to be launched in the first quarter (Q1) of 2020.

According to a recent analysis on Google Trends, it is clear that Bitcoin is a more searched term than Stocks. In this era of technological evolution around the world, several people in the financial industry are turning to using cryptocurrencies rather than traditional assets.

Today, Bitcoin mining activity seems to be a hurdle for most anonymous participants due to the massive competition originating from the giant pools. So far, some of the biggest miners we have in the industry include BTC.com, F2Pool, AntPool, BTC.TOP, Poolin, Huibi.pool, SlushPool, ViaBTC and many others. However, the largest share of about 40% is currently taken by only three companies, of which two of these (BTC.com and Antpool) are managed by one company (Bitmain). This has brought a lot of queries in the blockchain and digital asset industry and has left people thinking that the flagship crypto is on the brink of becoming a centralized cryptocurrency.

The US federal government revenue service, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), has started the exercise of emailing around 10,000 letters to different Bitcoin and cryptoasset holders that have maybe failed to pay or report taxes and income on digital asset transactions. They are trying to warn them to act in accordance with the federal tax laws, The WSJ reports.

One of Europe's airline giants, Norwegian air, is set to launch it’s own cryptocurrency exchange and allow ticket sales via bitcoin. The airline plans to add the most popular and biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalization as another payment option its customers.