Children’s non-profit organization UNICEF is in talks with the government of Kyrgyzstan to leverage blockchain technology to provide Internet access to every school in the country.

“We are at the early stages of exploring a blockchain-based solution for the Project Connect initiative in Kyrgyzstan where the government is working with UNICEF and the private sector to connect every school in the country to the Internet and provide access to information and opportunity to all young people,” Munir Mammadzade, deputy representative for UNICEF Kyrgyzstan, told CoinDesk this week.

As part of a broader, ongoing initiative called Project Connect, UNICEF aims to engage over 1,500 local schools in Kyrgyzstan and explore the use of a blockchain-based solution for improving and monitoring Internet connectivity levels.

At present, Project Connect has already mapped Internet connectivity levels for over 150,000 schools across the globe. Of these, 1,560 schools are based in Kyrgyzstan – for which close to half are identified as having either no Internet connectivity or simply no data on the matter.

All this work is happening on “an accelerated, crazy crypto timeline,” according to lead personnel of UNICEF Ventures Chris Fabian, who told CoinDesk that “the blockchain piece” of Project Connect would come over the course of the present year.

“Right now, we’re still at a very early modular stage, doing the mapping, getting the connectivity piece and figuring out the accounting,” said Fabian.

Fabian explained:

“You can easily see where the blockchain layers would come in … If you want to pay as a donor – government or company – for a whole section of the country to come online, wouldn’t you rather do that in a way that is authentic and real and accountable as opposed to just sending money somewhere and hoping two years later that something happens?”

Fabian said blockchain could also help “improve the monitoring of the quality of Internet in schools and other vital facilities,” emphasizing that the potential for distributed ledger technology “as accounting, management and monitoring” was, in his opinion, multi-faceted.

Giving a sneak preview of some of the blockchain tools that could be used to help facilitate UNICEF’s plans, Fabian pointed to two blockchain startups that recently received $100,000 each from the UNICEF Innovation Fund last December.

The first, called Utopixar, is a Tunisian startup building a blockchain platform that “enables communities to issue, distribute, and exchange their own impact tokens,” as stated in a blog post from December.

These impact tokens would be gifted to individuals and groups addressing social and environmental challenges in the community (such as Internet connectivity) that can, later on, be redeemed in the form of currency or discount vouchers.

The other startup called W3Engineers is a Bangladesh-based web application development and consulting firm that according to Fabian is “specifically looking at how to parcel out a gigabyte.”

In other words, the team is looking at how to dynamically allow individuals and businesses to purchase and sell units of digital information, which would be particularly relevant to the process of pricing the costs of internet connectivity as it relates to Project Connect.

“As with all of our blockchain work, we are working through prototypes, failures and learnings,” said Fabian.

Just last year, UNICEF launched a charitable donations website that mines cryptocurrencies to raise funds for vulnerable children worldwide. The initiative currently reports close to 28,000 donors.

Yurt in Kyrgyzstan image via Shutterstock.

Coinbase is taking steps to clarify statements made in the wake of its controversial acquisition of blockchain analytics firm Neutrino, a startup subsequently linked to Hacking Team, a group that aided governments known for human rights abuses.

Specifically, Christine Sandler, Coinbase’s director of institutional sales, justified the Neutrino acquisition during an interview with Cheddar last Friday by saying the exchange’s previous analytics provider was “selling client data to outside sources.” Coinbase now says Sandler misspoke.

A spokesperson told CoinDesk Tuesday that the exchange “never shared our customers’ personally identifiable information with any third-party blockchain analysis vendors.”

Although Coinbase declined to specify which former partner Sandler was referencing or what type of data was being commercialized in ways it objected to, it’s important to note that blockchain analytics companies sell aggregate wallet data (without names or identifying personal information) as their core proprietary product.

The standard norm across the industry is for analytics providers to collect anonymous transaction data and commercialize access to that information for customers seeking to investigate suspicious activity.

For example, Chainalysis co-founder Jonathan Levin explained to CoinDesk that firms often receive wallet and transaction information without names or other account information and use it to help customers across the ecosystem identify bad actors. He said they do not receive personal customer data and never sell data to external companies.

The competing analytics firm Elliptic confirmed in a blog post that it worked with Coinbase and wasn’t provided with “any personally identifiable information about their users.” It did provide other exchanges and clients with addresses and transactions associated with financial crimes, according to the blog post.

Although, the question of whether Coinbase would adopt a similar model, or look to other ways to monetize user data after its acquisition of Neutrino, was arguably ambiguous.

During an interview in February, Coinbase’s director of engineering and product, Varun Srinivasan, said the Neutrino team would continue serving external customers, turning other companies’ transaction data into a proprietary Coinbase offering.

A Coinbase spokesperson told CoinDesk on Tuesday that it will not “share broad sets of transaction and address information with vendors if it is beyond their immediate scope of work” as part of any offering.

The statements follow Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s blog post Monday in which he said that the company intends to “transition” out Neutrino employees associated with Hacking Team. However, at press time, this appears to have done little to quell user concerns.

Speaking to the widespread backlash over the news, former Coinbase user Eduardo Hernández, CEO of the investment startup Cryptico, told CoinDesk: “The lack of transparency is terrifying.”

While it’s unclear how many users have left the exchange, Hernández is one out of five former Coinbase users who told CoinDesk they closed their account after the Neutrino acquisition.

He said Armstrong’s blog post lacked accountability since the post emphasized the Hacking Team co-founders have “no current affiliation” with the controversial software provider.

Another former Coinbase user, who goes by his Twitter handle @Lowbtc, told CoinDesk he is concerned about his personal data because Coinbase has a track record of allegedly failing to punish misbehaving employees, referring to an ongoing lawsuit in California that claims exchange employees engaged in insider trading.

Fortune reported an internal investigation of the alleged insider trading at Coinbase concluded without any repercussions because leadership asserted no wrongdoing took place.

Speaking to that broader context, @Lowbtc, who opened his Coinbase account in 2013 and closed it promptly after the Neutrino acquisition, said:

“On top of the ethical failure, I also consider this a massive security risk, letting those people have access to customer data. It’s really frightening to think who has gained access to Coinbase customer data over the years.”

Image of Brian Armstrong via TechCrunch

Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of San Francisco blockchain startup Ripple, gave JP Morgan Chase qualified praise Wednesday for creating its own stablecoin, before dismissing the product’s likelihood of adoption by other banks and questioning its usefulness.

During a fireside chat at the Chamber of Digital Commerce’s D.C. Blockchain Summit in Washington, Garlinghouse said he thinks it’s “great” to have major financial players like JP Morgan “leaning in.”

But, he quickly added:

“That’s the only nice thing I’m going to say about this.”

Indeed, Garlinghouse, whose company has been courting financial institutions to use its distributed ledger technology (DLT) for payments – including products that utilize the cryptocurrency XRP – promptly cast doubt on the prospects for the recently announced JPM Coin.

At another conference last week, Garlinghouse recalled, “This guy from Morgan Stanley was interviewing me, I said ‘So, is Morgan Stanley going to use the JPM Coin?’ And he said ‘probably not.’ So, well is Citi going to use the JPM Coin? Is BBVA? Is PNC? And the answer is no.”

Hence, he suggested, a bank creating its own stablecoin risks recreating the very problems that DLT is supposed to solve.

“So, does that mean we’re going to have all these different coins? Are we back to where we are with lack of interoperability? I don’t get it.”

Garlinghouse even started to sound like a blockchain industry critics when he wondered aloud what the point would be of tokenizing fiat currency when it remains on the books of a single entity.

“If you give them a dollar for deposits, they’ll give you a JPM Coin that you can then move within the JPM ledger. Wait a minute, just use the dollar!” he said. “I don’t understand. If you’re just moving within the JPM ledger, and it has to be dollar-to-dollar, one-to-one backing, I don’t understand what problem that solves.”

He wrapped up his comments about the subject on a diplomatic note, however, concluding:

“Now, back to my first answer, if it solves the first [problem] of JPM leaning into crypto, yay. That’s all I got.”

Brad Garlinghouse photo by Nikhilesh De for CoinDesk

ConsenSys-backed media startup Civil finally launched its CVL token today after months of delay.

Many independent newsroom employees and Civil Media partners will now receive the token compensation packages they were promised in 2018, Civil Media CEO Matthew Iles told CoinDesk.

All the earnings from this ongoing token sale will go to the nonprofit Civil Foundation, led by former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller. Participants from nearly 100 newsrooms joined the CVL community and Schiller took the helm of community growth last summer, thanks in part to additional token grants and fiat funding for the foundation from ConsenSys, the venture studio bankrolled by ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin.

Civil Media also launched a membership program today with perks such as tickets to quarterly events, an exclusive newsletter and forum access where members can interact directly with journalists at participating news organizations.

All newsrooms are welcome to join as long as they own CVL and abide by the Civil Constitution of journalism ethics. Civil Media’s token curated registry is meant to allow stakeholders to challenge (or expel) unethical content creators or upvote trustworthy news sources.

Speaking to the distinction between the relatively new foundation, tasked with overseeing governance, and the Civil Media startup now providing software-as-a-service to both news outlets and readers, Iles said:

“It’s absolutely our intention to start generating revenue as a for-profit company this year.”

This may prove to be a daunting task for a notoriously cash-strapped media industry. However, Iles is confident his 17-person startup can sell services to these newsrooms through partnerships with organizations such as the Associated Press.

“Tipping and revenue generating tools are on the roadmap coming soon after this launch,” Iles said, adding his startup is focused giving token holders the ability to own their own data and content platform.

Based on user feedback from the previous attempt at launch, Civil members can now donate to the foundation with a credit card and aren’t required to own CVL to access content. For token holders, these members will have a crypto wallet associated with their subscription account in order to provide opportunities for monetizing audience data and insights.

“Wherever you are on the web, we can kind of follow you with that Web3 injection,” Iles said, referring to the ConsenSys vision of blockchain use cases applied to standard web traffic monitoring procedures.

“As long as [readers] are in control of [their online identity] and aware that this newsroom is in good standing, we think that’s going to lead to some pretty cool outcomes,” he added.

Crypto tipping

So far, the CVL token is being used for membership – not payments on the network.

In the meantime, Popula founder Maria Bustillos put her fiat Civil grant to work by hiring an independent developer and designer to enable ether tipping using ConsenSys’ in-browser MetaMask crypto wallet on Popula’s WordPress site.

The first week this feature went live, on Feb. 14, Bustillos told CoinDesk several dozen readers used the tipping feature.

“You can tip as little as a few cents and there’s no limit to how much,” she said, declining to specify how much value those tips contained or how much the original ConsenSys grant to Popula was worth.

Popula’s freelance designer, Matt McVickar, told CoinDesk the crypto tips feature was still under development and is “certainly not ready for wider adoption yet.”

Many critics remain skeptical regarding how CVL might add value to journalism business models. However, while Bustillos said it’s “really hard to say” how CVL plays into to her business model, she is still hopeful this asset could provide utility for newsrooms.

“It will have network effects. Where people reading one publication will be naturally led to another,” Bustillos said. “We’re all kind of guinea pigs in this great experiment. So we’re going to try it and see.”

Early days

Until these experiments come to fruition, newsrooms like Popula generally rely on a combination of fiat subscriptions and crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter to stay afloat.

Bustillos expressed gratitude at not needing to turn a profit in the short-term due to faith in Lubin’s backing and broader industry efforts to help establish compliant guidelines for token projects.

According to Bustillos, regulatory pressure from the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018 dampened enthusiasm for CVL even though these tokens were designed for business usage and not investment. (The original CVL sale was canceled in October 2018 due to lack of buyer interest.)

Regardless of regulations for niche tokens like CVL, Bustillos said newsrooms won’t be able to rely on cryptocurrency as a core pillar of their business models for the near future.

“We don’t expect to make any money on the tipping, at least not for a very, very long time,” Bustillos said. “But it’s a key dimension of what we think the future of journalism should look like.”

Image of Civil staffers via Nick Himmel

You’re not sure where it will end up exactly or who will actually read it. But you type up a message, pay a couple of cents in bitcoin and click the “send” button. Your message zips through space – yes, space – then is broadcast out of a satellite, blanketing the world.

The result? A cosmic “message in a bottle” that’s become the latest novelty in the bitcoin technical community.

It’s all possible with the help of Blockstream satellite, an eccentric project released over a year ago with the goal of making bitcoin accessible for people without internet access. Sending messages has gotten easier since then, with the launch of spacebit.live, a simple website that allows users to pay a small fee (the default of which is 3 cents in testnet bitcoin) to send a message via those satellites across the world.

So far, the results make an interesting study.

One message features a journal of some unknown person’s whimsical thoughts about life and bitcoin. “So here I am, left my job, I have some money to keep me up and I’m building my first raspberry pi lightning node, and broadcasting messages from satellites. Still feels surreal at times,” the diary reads, as retrieved by Twitter user “Grubles,” a Blockstream satellite user who frequently tweets about the technology.

“Still hard to grasp the fact, that I’m blanketing a big part of the Earth with my message, on demand, instantly. I wonder, does anybody [read this message]?” the same person wrote the next day.

“Love you,” they wrote on day 4.

What might be more surprising than the content, though, is the number of messages.

“Yo that’s crazy AF,” reads a message from another unknown user. Someone else sent a poem dedicated to the lightning network, and another sent an encrypted “rare pepe,” a limited edition card featuring the politically inflammatory frog meme.

Another user sent a note filled with gibberish with the handle of a popular Twitter user who left the social media site, “Dandarkpill,” tagged at the end.

“Back when I can find the light,” the cryptic message reads, implying Dandarkpill is planning to come back some day and chose to communicate this by satellite.

“We can’t be sure if it was him or if the message was broadcast from the ‘memecave’ but we remain hopeful that this is a signal to say he is fine and will return one day,” pseudonymous Spacebit.live creator “MediumSqueeze” told CoinDesk, calling them one of “our fallen soldiers.”

Space equipment for all

If Blockstream’s website is any indication, users are sending a lot of messages using the system, and more messages could soon be on their way. Today, the technology is testnet, but MediumSqueeze hopes it’ll move to bitcoin’s live network soon, meaning it will be used with real bitcoin.

Either way, the way it works is pretty neat.

In December, Blockstream released an update to its software. One of the lesser-known features is that with its new application programming interface (API) people could use their satellites to send messages.

To send a message, users pay a fee in lightning, the new payment network now being built on top of bitcoin. The platform is still experimental, but people have been eager to use it anyway. The fee should correspond to how much data the message contains. An image, for example, might require more data, and thus might be more expensive than if you broadcast just a sentence.

“Blockstream made available an API which takes a message and returns a lightning network invoice, upon receipt of the invoice the message is sent to the satellite teleport then the payload is broadcast to the satellite array,” MediumSqueeze explains.

While spacebit.live and the Blockstream API make it pretty easy to send a message, a user needs a satellite receiver (for now) to retrieve them.

In theory, anyone could run a satellite. It costs about $100 to buy the necessary equipment.

Long-time Bitcoin Core contributor and former Blockstream CTO Greg Maxwell, for example, posted photos of his satellite receiver setup to Bitcoin Talk, giving other users tips on putting it together.

Image via bitcoin developer Greg Maxwell on bitcoin forum Bitcointalk

But, why?

So, what’s the point? Is it just a novelty or is there actually a reason to use bitcoin to send messages through space? It’s perhaps a bit of both.

“Right now, it’s just for fun,” MediumSqueeze told CoinDesk.

But some developers think the technology opens up new avenues. Bitcoin podcast host Ansel Lindner sees it as having potential for whistleblowers, people who expose the unethical actions of governments or corporations to the rest of the world. That’s because they can use it to broadcast anonymous messages that can’t be censored, which he doesn’t think is possible any other way.

“It could be used anonymously to broadcast a message to the world. It can’t be stopped by a mainstream media outlet, Internet Service Provider (ISP) or government, ” he told CoinDesk, adding:

“Posting it on a third party site like social media is censorable, even with an anonymous account. Your own website would be less so, but they can find you more easily. Encrypted message/email or whatever would be censorable by going after a few people. Broadcasting it globally would be very hard to stop.”

Still, others see it as a way to continue to further voice bitcoin’s ethos.

“This kind of network is not for posting WhatsApp messages, this is strictly 21st-century cypherpunk,” MediumSqueeze said, referencing a group of technologists from the 1990s who advocated for the use of cryptography to bring about political change.

So far, this seems to be the most well-developed application as the unknown diarist from our introductory section would go on to prove with his fifth message.

“Without bitcoin I wouldn’t have too much faith for the future,” it reads, adding:

“I think I will tell this tale for my grandkids one day. Maybe in a post-civilization wasteland, but still.”

Satellite image via Shutterstock