Technology

Coinbase may be one of the most-lauded crypto exchanges, but it supports just four coins right now which is far fewer than most others. Thatabout to change a little after it announced plans to add Ethereum Classic(ETC), an alternate version of Ethereum, to its service &in the coming months.&

Ethereum Classic was created in June 2016 following a major hack on The DAO, a fundraising vehicle for the project. In short: the Ethereum Foundation created a new version of Ethereum — known today as Ethereum —that rescued the lost funds, while those who opposed continued on with the original chain which was known as Ethereum Classic.

Ethereum is the second-highest valued token after only Bitcoin while ETC is number 19, according to Coinmarketcap. The value of ETC jumped is up nearly 20 percent over the past 24 hours after spiking following Coinbaseannouncement.

A date for the introduction of ETC will be communicated via Coinbase blog and Twitter account in due course, according to the company.

Coinbase is announcing its intention to list Ethereum Classic ahead of time so that it can test integrationsas part of its new policy on adding new tokens, but that move is also in response to concerns that around inside trading when the exchange added Bitcoin Cash last December.

Coinbase went so far as to investigate the incidentwhich saw service outages and wild price fluctuations for Bitcoin Cash right after its addition to the exchange.

Indeed, the price hit a high of$8,500 on Coinbase and its GDAX service for professional investors,which wasalmost three times higher than the $3,500 priceon all other exchanges. That led to speculation that Coinbase staff and insiders could have profited by buying BCH on other exchanges in the knowledge that it was about to be added to Coinbase, thus raising the price significantly.

This time around with ETC, Coinbase will hope that its statement of intent to list the token further down the line will avoid the potential for foul play.

This listing could be the first of many for Coinbase this year.

In todayannouncement, the company again reiterated its intention to add support for ERC20 tokens — the type that are generated by an ICO — and Bitcoin forks in the future.

Outside of adding new tokens, Coinbase is exploring how it can work with new blockchain technology including atomic swaps, sharding, proof of stake and more, according to CTO Balaji Srinivasan who joined earlier this year.

More generally 2018 is seemingly a year for growth and development at Coinbase. Beyond hiring Srinivasan as its first CTO through the acquisition of his startup Earn.com, the firm has introduced an investment arm and begun doing deals.

On the services side, itadded services for institutional investorsand recently bought a securities dealer that it hopes will eventually allow it to trade ICO tokens. Other acquisitions this year alone have included decentralized browser and wallet service Toshi, trading platform Paradexand Memo.ai.

Update: The original version of this story was corrected with details about the creation of Ethereum Classic. Hat tip @ciscoguru.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

If you had trouble accessing Netflix earlier today, you weren&t alone. Netflix tweeted that it was &aware& of streaming issues, but said soon afterward that they had been resolved.

We are aware of members having trouble streaming on all devices. We are investigating the issue and appreciate your patience.

— Netflix CS (@Netflixhelps) June 11, 2018

The streaming issues we reported earlier have now been resolved. Thank you for your patience, and as always, happy streaming!

— Netflix CS (@Netflixhelps) June 11, 2018

A map from Outage.Report shows that Netflix was down for users around the world, with outages going on for a couple of hours.

Outage.Report map

TechCrunch has contacted Netflix to ask what caused the issues.

Facebook hundreds of pages of follow-ups to Senators make for decidedly uninteresting reading. Give lawyers a couple months and they will always find a way to respond non-substantively to the most penetrating questions. One section may at least help put a few rumors to rest about Facebookrole in the 2016 Presidential campaigns, though of course much is still left to the imagination.

Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), whose dogged questioning managed to put Mark Zuckerberg on his back foot during the questioning, had several pages of questions sent over afterwards. Among the many topics was that of the 2016 campaign and reports that Facebook employees were &embedded& in the Trump campaign specifically, as claimed by the person who ran the digital side of that campaign.

This has raised questions as to whether Facebook was offering some kind of premium service to one candidate or another, or whether one candidate got tips on how to juice the algorithm, how to target better, and so on.

Here are the takeaways from the answers, which you can find in full on page 167 of the document at the bottom of this post.

• The advice to the campaigns is described as similar to that given to &other, non-political& accounts.
• No one was &assigned full-time& on either the Trump or Clinton campaign.
• Campaigns did not get to hand pick who from Facebook came to advise them.
• Facebook provided &identical support& and tools to both campaigns.
• Sales reps are trained to comply with federal election law, and to report &improper activity.&
• No such &improper activity& was reported by Facebook employees on either campaign.
• Facebook employees did work directly with Cambridge Analytica employees.
• No one identified any issues with Cambridge Analytica, its data, or its intended use of that data.
• Facebook did not work with Cambridge Analytica or related companies on other campaigns (e.g. Brexit).

Itnot exactly fire, but we don&t really need more fire these days. This at least is on the record and relatively straightforward; whatever Facebooksins during the election cycle may have been, it does not appear that preferential treatment of the two major campaigns was among them.

Incidentally, if you&re curious whether Facebook finally answered Sen. Harrisquestions about who made the decision not to inform users of the Cambridge Analytica issue back in 2015, or how that decision was made — no, it didn&t. In fact the silence here is so deafening it almost certainly indicates a direct hit.

Harris asked how and when it came to the decision not to inform users that their data had been misappropriated, who made that decision and why, and lastly when Zuckerberg entered the loop. Facebookresponse does not even come close to answering any of these questions:

When Facebook learned about Koganbreach of Facebookdata use policies in December 2015, it took immediate action. The company retained an outside firm to assist in investigating Koganactions, to demand that Kogan and each party he had shared data with delete the data and any derivatives of the data, and to obtain certifications that they had done so. Because Koganapp could no longer collect most categories of data due to changes in Facebookplatform, the companyhighest priority at that time was ensuring deletion of the data that Kogan may have accessed before these changes took place. With the benefit of hindsight, we wish we had notified people whose information may have been impacted. Facebook has since notified all people potentially impacted with a detailed notice at the top of their newsfeed.

This answer has literally nothing to do with the questions.

It seems likely from the companycareful and repeated refusal to answer this question that the story is an ugly one — top executives making a decision to keep users in the dark for as long as possible, if I had to guess.

At least with the campaign issues Facebook was more forthcoming, and as a result will put down several lines of speculation. Not so with this evasive maneuver.

Embedded below are Facebookanswers to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the other set is here: