Bitcoin Daily: Hdac, CertiK Partner For Blockchain-Powered IoT; Tezos Expected To Settle Securities Lawsuit With $25M Settlement

CertiK, an auditing firm, wants to bring Internet of Things (IoT) devices onto blockchain through its new partnership with Hdac, CoinDesk reports.

Hdac’s blockchain platform will work to combine the tight authentication, seamless mapping and machine-to-machine transactions with a network containing IoT devices. The new network, which saw CertiK engineers collaborating with Hdac’s team, will be released in the “near future,” CoinDesk reported.

The partnership was born out of a previous transaction where Hdac hired CertiK to audit it, and CertiK, seeing Hdac’s plans to work more with blockchain, sought out a longer-term partnership later on.

Connie Ngo, CertiK’s marketing manager, told CoinDesk in an email that the companies agreed “it would make sense to formally partner with one another as a public promise of Hdac’s focus on security and a symbol of CertiK’s ability to support larger enterprise-level solutions such as Hdac’s.”

Meanwhile, Tezos is looking likely to avoid action by Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by settling a lawsuit with a $25 million settlement.

The lawsuit involves Tezos’ 2017 initial coin offering (ICO), which was seen as a form of illegal securities offering. The SEC, according to Cointelgraph, contends that many ICOs are unlicensed securities offerings. But stakeholders have pushed for a bigger range of tokens to be exempt from securities legislation recently.

The lawsuit goes back to October 2017, when Boston law firm Block & Leviton said it was looking into securities fraud by the Tezos ICO. Block & Leviton, which specializes in securities cases, sued the firm, and it wasn’t the only entity to do so — cases were filed in California and Florida courts around the same time.

But as of May, Tezos has looked to settle the suit, stating that it “believes it is in the best interest of the Tezos project and community as a whole to resolve all pending lawsuits. The Foundation continues to believe the lawsuits were meritless and continues to deny any wrongdoing. But lawsuits are expensive and time-consuming, and the Tezos Foundation decided that the one-time financial cost of a settlement was preferable to the distractions and legal costs associated with continuing to fight in the courts.”

Telegram also recently settled a suit with the SEC, agreeing to pay $18.5 million in a lawsuit.