13 PERCENT: Ethereum development studio ConsenSys is laying off 13 percent of its employees, the company announced Thursday, just days after founder Joseph Lubin told all staff members that the firm was shifting gears to become more sustainable.
Lubin hinted at the layoffs in an interview with CoinDesk earlier this week, telling CoinDesk that some projects might see their staff cut as part of the ConsenSys 2.0 pivot.
The company said in its statement Thursday that "excited as we are about ConsenSys 2.0, our first step in this direction has been a difficult one: we are streamlining several parts of the business including ConsenSys Solutions, spokes, and hub services." Full Story
IDENTITY CONTROL: One of the crypto industry’s biggest players is experimenting with ways to give its users more control of their personal information.
Crypto exchange Coinbase wants to “help people own more of who they are online,” according to B Byrne, product manager of the firm’s identity team.To that end, Coinbase now has 17 staff currently exploring decentralized identity solutions.
Byrne said the team is looking to bridge products – such as its mobile wallet – using a built-in decentralized app explorer, and is is starting by looking at which dapps are most used by Coinbase’s customers. They hope to establish how users might be able to leverage their own personal data, instead of Coinbase collecting and storing know-your-customer information across its products.
Coinbase intends to scale up these efforts over the next 12 months, possibly allowing customers who currently have difficulty accessing some products to more easily gain access in future. “We think it’s an important part of our future and we’re thinking about the tools we need to ship for that,” Byrne explained. Full Story
BITGO'S BANKER: Crypto security startup BitGo has hired retired banking veteran Richard Corcoran to lead its just-launched institutional custody division, the BitGo Trust Company.
Corcoran comes with 25 years of experience leading the trust department at First National Bank in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, from which he retired in 2016. As such, he is already familiar with the state’s regulatory framework – useful expertise, given that South Dakota gave BitGo its trust company license earlier this year.
The addition to BitGo’s team coincides with the firm’s onboarding of its first major clients, and plans to oversee billions of dollars in value. The new CEO told CoinDesk that “from a banking standards view, I think we would be considered well capitalized.” Full Story
FRIENDS AGAIN: Distributed ledger technology provider R3 has launched what it's calling the Corda Settler – an application aimed to facilitate global cryptocurrency payments within enterprise blockchains. And it's added XRP as its first token.
R3 said XRP is the first globally recognized cryptocurrency to be supported by the Settler, bringing the Corda and XRP ecosystems into closer alignment – something of a rapprochement considering Ripple and R3 were previously locked in a legal dispute.
The news “is an important step in showing how the powerful ecosystems cultivated by two of the of the world’s most influential crypto and blockchain communities can work together,” said Richard Gendal Brown, CTO at R3.
The Corda Settler is an open source CorDapp that allows payment obligations arising on the Corda network to be settled via any parallel rail supporting cryptocurrencies and any traditional rail capable of providing cryptographic proof of settlement.
The app will verify that the beneficiary’s account was credited with the expected payment, automatically updating the Corda ledger. In the next phase of development, the Settler will support domestic deferred net settlement and real-time gross settlement payments. Full Story | 
