After numerous government studies have been carried out upon bitcoin criminality, law enforcement agencies have chosen to remain vigilant, to foresee any events before they happen.

With this in mind, recent reports indicate that European officials believe that bitcoin can be and is used to fund terrorist groups, due to the currency’s anonymous state. Based on this, the European Commission (EC) wants to put an end to anonymous trading with digital currencies.

Less than two weeks ago, Bitcoin exchange Kraken announced the purchase of U.S. Coinsetter and the Canadian CaVirtex exchanges, in what may just be, one of the biggest acquisitions in the bitcoin sector.

Prior to this purchase, Kraken focused on their European market, where they traded around 5000-7000 bitcoin per day. Now, that the companies have all integrated into a single one, the traded amounts have increased considerably.

Well, recent reports indicate that a new deal has been made. With this in mid, Kraken, the global bitcoin exchange has managed to secure a multi-million dollar agreement with the folks behind SBI investment, which is the venture capital arm of the SBI Holdings department. For those who do not know, this represents the world’s first web-based financial conglomerate, uniting financial firms from all around the world. The company has also reported that they have an operating revenue of around $2bn, thus placing them in the same list with some of the top world’s companies.

The Bitcoin status in Russia has been unclear ever since bitcoin came out and started gaining in popularity. According to recent reports, it seems like Russia went ahead and blocked one of the largest bitcoin exchanges: BTC-e.

If you’re not yet aware, trading platform BitStamp decided to voluntarily ban Russian IPs, in order to avoid legislative issues with the country, which is getting considerably more hostile towards bitcoin and other digital currencies. In fact, these developments represent the first effects of a couple of bills, meant to criminalize cryptocurrencies, and other money substitutes on the Russian financial market.

Recently, bitcoin value slid back over 10% due to an interesting event, when Mike Hearn, one of the cryptocurrency’s lead developers, decided to end his involvement with the digital currency, and sell all of his current holdings.

According to him, bitcoin has failed. To put things better into perspective, Hearn was one of the five senior developers, and he has spent over five years working on the currency. The announcement was made via a blog post, over on Medium, where he also stated that: “Despite knowing that bitcoin could fail all along, the now inescapable conclusion that it has failed still saddens me greatly”.

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Cryptsy, also popularly known as the new Mt Gox, an exchange that people have been seeing as scammy for a good period of time, has finally come out and admitted that they have been hacked, and lost most of the user’s funds.

In fact, the Cryptsy team now has a total liability of roughly 10,000 BTC, which equals to around $3.8 million. Suspicions started appearing once customers using the platform begun experiencing issues when trying to withdraw their funds. Numerous reports have been made, with Cryptsy refusing to respond to most of them. Things became serious a couple of days ago, when an anonymous source confirmed that Cryptsy’s offices have been emptied, with no hint of the team. Once this happened, numerous lawsuits were filed against the company, and members of the community started bashing it.

As you may already know, Bitcoin is not the only manner of sending digital money across the Internet. Some other options include Stellar, Ripple, Litecoin, and Ethereum alongside with many others.

While Bitcoin is by far the most popular option out of these, there is always a way of creating something better. An interesting idea has recently begun taking shape, and it aims to allow all these ledgers to talk to one another. To put things better into perspective, the platform would allow people to send money between the systems via the same protocol. This can be accomplished by creating a single worldwide network that can easily unite all digital currencies and their afferent networks, together with the actual cryptocurrency users. In technical terms, the platform builds a system where two ledgers can exchange money through something known as a third-party connector, or validator machine. However, thanks to cryptographic algorithms, an escrow of the funds is created, and the exchange is only made when both parties agree that the right sum is available, thus getting rid of trust issues. In the case of domestic transactions, ledgers participating also have the possibility of choosing domestic validators, which means that only the ledgers which are involved in the transaction can track it, thus hiding the particulars of the transaction from the validator.

In the last couple of months, banks and other financial institutions have shown a growing interest in bitcoin and its underlying technology, the blockchain. In fact, NASDAQ has recently reported making their first share sale transaction with the help of the technology.

For those who are not yet aware, the blockchain is basically a public ledger which records and transmits a series of digital events, while also using cryptography to verify blocks of data. Once this is done, they are then distributed among the parties, thus enabling transactions to take place, be verified and relayed. Perhaps one of the main benefits of the system is the fact that transactions take place nearly simultaneously, instead of requiring people to wait for hours or days. Together with this, all afferent data is stored publicly, where it can be verified by anyone interested.

This Christmas, as a way of supporting the Bitcoin ecosystem, mining giant and bitcoin exchange BTCC decided to donate and deploy 100 full nodes across a total of five continents. So far, this move has been applauded by many members of the community.

The year of 2015 has been representative for Bitcoin, due to the fact that the currency’s price more than doubled, and is bound to surge even higher in 2016.

Perhaps the main reason behind this is the fact that investors and simple bitcoin users have managed to regain confidence in the system, following the collapse of the Mt. Gox exchange back in 2014. At this moment in time, bitcoin is trading at the sum of $447, which is over $200 when compared to the beginning of the last year.