POWER UP: The computing power dedicated to mining bitcoin has hit another new high, suggesting as many as 600,000 powerful new machines may have come online in the last three months. According to data from crypto mining pool BTC.com, bitcoin’s two-week average hash rate reached 85 exahashes per second around 19:00 UTC last Friday. Meanwhile, mining difficulty also adjusted to a new record of nearly 12 trillion. Both metrics have jumped 60 percent since June 14, the data shows. Full story LIBRA RESPONSE: The head of Facebook’s Calibra – the entity created by Facebook to provide financial services including a digital wallet for the planned Libra cryptocurrency – has tried to “debunk” claims the project poses a threat “monetary sovereignty.” In a Twitter thread Monday, David Marcus said the creation of money will “strictly remain the province of sovereign nations” and that, during rollout, Libra would continue to work closely with regulators. Full story BROWSER THREAT: Browser plugins can help scammers steal your crypto, Casa CEO Jeremy Welch warned at a conference this weekend. “Browser extensions impose major risks, and these risks haven’t been discussed until this point,” he said. Extensions can gather a wealth of data, which can be leaked, stolen, and used by scammers. “Make sure you don’t expose your bitcoin addresses anywhere,” Welch warned. Full story TOKEN PIVOT: Harbor has pivoted from helping companies issue security tokens to helping them tokenize existing securities. The startup has created tokens on the ethereum blockchain representing the shares of four real estate funds worth $100 million. The move is intended to ease trading of the private securities, which are held by 1,100 investors along with 17 broker-dealers and 17 placement agents that work with the funds’ manager, iCap Equity. Full story JPM COIN: JPMorgan’s blockchain-based payments initiative has added Deutsche Bank as its latest member. The addition brings the total number of banks signed up to the Interbank Information Network (IIN) to 320, according to the Financial Times. Takis Georgakopoulos, managing director of treasury services at JPMorgan, said that, since IIN would have “very big natural limitations” if members were drawn only from the bank’s client pool, the addition of Deutsche Bank “is going to help us drive towards ubiquity.” Full story | 