2018 Year Review

Which milestones did BTC.com achieve in 2018 ? Get an overview of the developments from the BTC.com Mining Pool and Wallet.

Eléonore Blanc
The BTC Blog

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CashAddr in the BTC.com Wallet

After the BCH hard fork in August 2017, some users got confused and were sending BCH to a BTC address and vice versa. In order to solve this issue, the industry developed a new standard to help users easily distinguish BCH addresses from BTC addresses. We quickly adopted the new standard and as of January, all BCH addresses generated by the BTC.com Wallet used the CashAddr format: bitcoincash:pqkh9ahfj069qv8l6eysyufazpe4fdjq3u4hna323j versus the legacy address type: 35qL43qYwLdKtnR7yMfGNDvzv6WyZ8yT2n. Read more about it on the BTC.com blog.

More Control for the Wallet users

Due the increased BTC transaction fees, many users were asking for more control over their fees. As such, the BTC.com Wallet increased the fee options to allow users to pick the fee that best fits their goals. Read more about it on the BTC.com blog.

Buy BTC or BCH: Simplex Integration

In January, we were delighted to announce our new partnership with Simplex to allow all BTC.com Wallet users to buy BTC or BCH directly in their Wallet. After filling their billing information, payment details and KYC, users are free to purchase BTC or BCH directly through Simplex. Read more about it on the BTC.com blog.

How to buy Bitcoin (BTC) or Bitcoin Cash (BCH) in the BTC.com Wallet

Merge Mining RootStock (RSK) in the BTC.com Pool

BTC.com Pool miners can now merge mine RootStock (RSK)

In July, the BTC.com pool, started to merge mine RootStock (RSK). Merged mining allows different crypto currencies with the same algorithm, such as SHA 256, to be mined together. This allows crypto currencies with lower hash rate to gain additional hashing power by bootstrapping on a crypto currency with higher hash rate. For cryptocurrencies with Proof-of-Work (POW) consensus algorithm, it is crucial to have substantial hashing power in order to secure the network against attacks. The BTC.com pool, the world’s largest bitcoin mining pool, was happy to offer its miners better profitability while offering massive hashing power to validate and secure RSK sidechain transactions. Read more about it on the BTC.com blog.

Wormhole Protocol

Wormhole is a new meta-protocol that enables token issuance and smart contract creation on Bitcoin Cash without affecting the underlying BCH blockchain consensus. Thanks to the application of different programming languages including Javascript, it could easily be used by developers for the creation of tokens, ICOs, and digital assets on top of the Bitcoin Cash blockchain with the ERC-20 format enabled and the ERC-721 coming soon.

Ethereum Mining Pool & Block Explorer

In November, we expanded our mining pool to include Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC) and added GPU and CPU mining options.

https://pool.btc.com/

“The decision to offer GPU and CPU mining comes from the depressed prices across the crypto market this year. GPU miners are versatile, still profitable and are not easily replaced in a bear market. It’s common for miners to split investment into both.” — Zhong Zhuang, Director of BTC.com.

In addition, building on the experience of developing one of the most popular Bitcoin & Bitcoin Cash block explorers, we started offering support for tracking transactions and network statistics for the Ethereum blockchain. The BTC.com’s Ethereum block explorer provides data for real-time price, market cap, pool distribution, top miners, transaction fees and users can view the latest blocks information, hash rate, and network difficulty. Read more about it on the BTC.com blog.

https://eth.btc.com

Replay Protection and BSV Extraction Tool

On November 15th 2018, the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network successfully upgraded and adopted new consensus rules. This hard fork resulted in a chain split and a new coin: Bitcoin SV (BSV). Since there is no replay protection on the BSV chain, we only re-enabled BCH transactions after adding a built-in replay protection feature in the BTC.com Wallet and a BSV extraction tool to allow users to claim their BSV. Read more about it on the BTC.com blog.

Adding Litecoin (LTC) to the BTC.com Mining Pool

On December 20th, we announced that the BTC.com mining pool added support for Litecoin (LTC), following our mission to provide our users more diversified, profitable and convenient choices. Read more about it on the BTC.com blog.

Events

BCHDEVCON

Education is one of our key priorities, we write basic educational articles and we also take part in events to meet and teach our users about our products.

Under the Bitcoin 101 section of our blog, we discuss common concepts such as what is blockchain or the basics of proof of work. As mentioned, we also participate and organise events to spread more awareness about the cryptocurrency industry. Read more about the events we took part in: Blockshow & The NextWeb, Women in blockchain, BCHDEVCON Amsterdam or the The Web Summit.

The BTC.com Wallet

The BTC.com Wallet offers the safest and most user-friendly digital wallet. Perfect for beginners and advanced users alike! Our wallet is secure-by design, allowing you to be in full control of your funds. Access your wallet on any devices, anytime.

Best features

  • Bitcoin (BTC) & Bitcoin Cash (BCH) support
  • 100% control of your private keys
  • Buy Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) directly from your wallet
  • Dynamic transaction fees — pay optimal transaction fee for the fastest transaction confirmation times at the best price.
  • Accelerated transactions — push your priority transactions directly to the BTC.com mining pool for super fast confirmation times.

Secure & private

  • 2-of-3 multi-signature wallet
  • Master seed backup — one backup keeps your bitcoin safe forever.
  • Enable 2-factor-authentication
  • Create unlimited bitcoin addresses (HD)
  • Transaction history with full transaction details

Contact our support team for any inquiries: support@btc.com

The BTC.com Wallet is available on Web, iOS and Android.

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Founder CryptoCanal, CMO Cyber Capital, Founder and biz dev Satoshi’s Angels