Bitcoin Daily: Telegram’s SEC Hearing Pushed Until February 2020; University Of Malta Offers Master’s In Blockchain

Telegram’s hearing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been postponed until February 2020.

The judge hearing the case, P. Kevin Castel, ruled that Telegram should not distribute its tokens until the court makes its decision on the case, according to CoinDesk. This follows news earlier this week that Telegram has agreed not to launch its TON blockchain project and gram issuance until April 30, 2020. As a result, Telegram offered investors 77 percent of their funds back if they disagree with the delay.

In other news, the University of Malta is now offering a Master’s degree in Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology. Right now, there are about 35 students enrolled in the program, which is one of the few DLT programs around the world.

Masters Program Director Joshua Ellul, who also heads Malta’s Digital Innovation Authority, told CoinDesk that several companies have already reached out to his students about future employment.

Computer scientist and general manager of WeWork South Africa and former CEO of Google Africa, Stafford Masie, believes that bitcoin will change the future of humanity.

“The third economy is an economy where people don’t have access to electronic forms of distributing value or cash […] Think of the people who live two hours outside Shanghai, China’s central coast. They will use bitcoin to trade and unlock international transactions outside of the existing frameworks in a manner that you and I cannot imagine,” he said, according to Cointelegraph.

And Microsoft is trying to bring Azure to the lead in the blockchain cloud market. While the marketplace currently hosts 63 blockchain apps, and the Amazon Web Service (AWS) marketplace has 60, Azure has recently signed on a variety of blockchain companies, including Swiss startup Insolar.

“There are different options to deploy blockchain platform to the cloud: manually deploy blockchain platform code to the leased Virtual Machine (should be made by client); use the pre-configured Virtual Machine with blockchain platform deployed (available through Microsoft Azure Marketplace); use a part of already deployed and running blockchain environment (Blockchain-as-a-Service),” Insolar co-founder Peter Fedchenkov said, according to Cointelegraph.

Other companies that have signed on with Azure include U.S.-based blockchain startup Kadena, Ethereum-based blockchain scaling platform Nahmii, and Truffle, one of the earliest projects at Ethereum incubation lab ConsenSys.