The century-old camera brand said Tuesday it is investing in blockchain technology and plans to launch a "photo-centric cryptocurrency" called KODAKCoin.

Kodak (KODK)'s stock surged as much as 125% in trading after the announcement.

With the price of Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ripple and other digital currencies skyrocketing, an eclectic mix of small, unrelated businesses has attempted to ride the wave of investor interest by teasing cryptocurrency pivots.

Long Island Iced Tea Corp. changed its name to Long Blockchain Corp (LBCC). Bioptyx rebranded as Riot Blockchain (RIOT) and shifted its business model from biotech to bitcoin. Rich Cigars, a tobacco company, and Vapetek, an e-cigarette firm, each declared they were suddenly blockchain businesses.

Related: I bought $250 in bitcoin. Here's what I learned

Investors have generally reacted to these announcements by sending the stocks soaring. However, Kodak framed the move as being about more than profiting off a buzzword.

"For many in the tech industry, 'blockchain' and 'cryptocurrency' are hot buzzwords," Jeff Clarke, Kodak's CEO, said in a statement. "But for photographers who've long struggled to assert control over their work and how it's used, these buzzwords are the keys to solving what felt like an unsolvable problem."

Kodak says it will use the blockchain, essentially a digital ledger, for a new platform called KODAKOne to help photographers manage image rights. KODAKCoin will be used for transactions when photographers license their work.

The Kodak news was quickly met with sarcasm on social media. As one reporter joked on Twitter (TWTR), it may only be a matter of time before we see the launch of "PolaroidCOIN" and "SearsCOIN."

-- CNNMoney's Paul R. La Monica contributed to this report.

CNNMoney (New York) First published January 9, 2018: 2:06 PM ET

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In recent weeks, ripple's value has spiked, making it the second most valuable digital currency and bringing it newfound attention.

The relatively obscure cryptocurrency, also known as XRP, is now worth about $2.60 with a market cap of more than $100 billion, according to Coinmarketcap. In early December, it was trading at just 25 cents.

Even with the spike, ripple is worth considerably less than bitcoin. After a tumultuous December, bitcoin was trading around $15,000 late Tuesday with a market cap of more than $250 billion.

Related: Bitcoin boom may be a disaster for the environment

What's different about ripple is its supply is largely controlled by just one company, San Francisco-based Ripple. There are reports of current and former Ripple executives becoming cryptocurrency billionaires from its recent boom.

Ripple launched in 2012 to facilitate global financial transactions. It differentiates itself from other digital currency platforms by its connections to legitimate banks. Companies that use the Ripple platform include Santander (SANPRA), Bank of America (BAC) and UBS (UBS).

In recent weeks, financial services companies in Japan and South Korea have adopted Ripple's technology, helping boost the price of the cryptocurrency.

Related: What the big names of finance are saying about bitcoin

According to Stephen Powaga, head of research at investment firm Blockchain Momentum, ripple and other some other cryptocurrencies have relatively low transaction fees, which made them popular when people began looking for alternatives to bitcoin.

But unlike Bitcoin, ripple isn't created, or "mined," by users. The company has control.

It created 100 billion ripple coins initially, and 38 billion of them are in circulation at the moment. Ripple management can release up to 1 billion coins per month, which Powaga predicts could oversaturate the market.

"It's somewhat concerning for me because if they chose to release them as quickly as possible, within a little over four years, you'd see more than a doubling of supply of ripple," he said.

That could put pressure on its price.

"I'm not certain that some of the newer market participants are fully appreciating the potential for inflation," Powaga said.

Related: Hackers take advantage of bitcoin's wild ride

Cross-border payments that can take hours with bitcoin or days with traditional financial transactions can go through in a matter of seconds with ripple, the company says.

Like bitcoin, ripple's payment network, RippleNet, uses blockchain technology.

A blockchain is a public ledger containing transaction data from anyone who uses the service. Transactions are added to "blocks," or the links of code that make up the chain, and each transaction must be recorded on a block.

-- Seth Fiegerman contributed to this report.

CNNMoney (San Francisco) First published January 2, 2018: 10:31 PM ET

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Cryptocurrency boom: Why everyone is talking about ripple

In the early bitcoin years, proponents promised that you would soon be able to pay for anything and everything with cryptocurrency. Order pizza! Buy Etsy trinkets! Use a bitcoin ATM! While PayPal had existed for more than a decade, frictionless, social payment platforms like Venmo were just first taking off, and cryptocurrency seemed like a legitimate way for digital transactions to evolve.

It didn't happen. Cryptocurrency remains confusing and challenging for the average person to acquire and manage, much less sell. And the protocols that underlie bitcoin and other mainstream cryptocurrencies like ethereum suffer significant scalability and transaction bottleneck issues. Visa currently processes about 3,674 transactions per second; the best bitcoin network might be able to process seven per second.

But now the creator of the dead simple end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal, Moxie Marlinspike, is on a mission to overcome those limitations, and to create a streamlined digital currency that's private, easy-to-use, and allows for quick transactions from any device. And while it may feel like the last thing the world needs is yet another cryptocurrency, Marlinspike's track record with Signaland the organization behind it, Open Whisper Systemsmakes this a project worth watching.

The currency Marlinspike has been working on as technical advisor for the last four months, alongside technologist Joshua Goldbard, is MobileCoin. The two based it on the open-source Stellar Consensus Protocols platform, an alternative payment network that underlies systems like an inter-bank payment network run by IBM in the South Pacific, and the low-fee international money transfer service Tempo in Europe.

'Usability is the biggest challenge with cryptocurrency today.'

Signal Creator Moxie Marlinspike

The Stellar blockchain is also generally regarded as being faster and more efficient than its predecessors; On Wednesday, the mobile messaging service Kik announced that it will move its Kin cryptocurrency platform from Ethereum to Stellar. "We've been using Ethereum to date, and to be honest I call it the dial-up era of blockchain," CEO Ted Livingston said.

MobileCoin wants to leverage an extensive architecture to add simplicity to real privacy protections and resilience against attacks. The ultimate goal: To make MobileCoin as intuitive as any other payment system.

That vision mirrors the animating purpose of Signal, which was developed to make robust end-to-end encrypted communication as easy and straightforward as less secure options, a simple experience that belies the complex cryptographic communication protocols that enable it.

"I think usability is the biggest challenge with cryptocurrency today," says Marlinspike. "The innovations I want to see are ones that make cryptocurrency deployable in normal environments, without sacrificing the properties that distinguish cryptocurrency from existing payment mechanisms."

Usability efforts for older generation cryptocurrency protocols, like bitcoin, have largely been left to services like Coinbase, which centralize everything from currency exchange to your wallet, key management, and processing transactions. These platforms make actually using cryptocurrency more realistic for the average person, but they also consolidate mechanisms that are meant to be kept separate in the private and decentralized concept of cryptocurrency. They generally detail extensive privacy and security protections, but they do require users to trust both their intentions and implementation.

By contrast, the idea of MobileCoin is to build a system that hides everything from everyone, leaving fewer (or theoretically no) opportunities for abuse.

Ideally, there would be a way to fix the structural problems of existing cryptocurrencies, rather than creating another new offering. But Marlinspike and Goldbard concluded that the only way to orient a cryptocurrency around user needs was to start from scratch, and architect everything with that "target user experience" in mind.

To that end, MobileCoin delegates all the complicated and processing-intensive work of participating in a blockchain ledger and validating transactions to nodesservers with constant connectivity that store and work on a fully updated copy of a currency's blockchain. The nodes can then provide software services to users, like apps that seamlessly integrate easy and quick MobileCoin transactions. The nodes also handle key management for users, so the publicand particularly the privatenumeric sequences that encrypt each person's transactions are stored and used by the node. But crucially MobileCoin is designed so the node operators can never directly access users' private keys.

'If you cant look at the ledger, how can you cheat it?'

Joshua Goldbard, MobileCoin

This is where the special features of MobileCoin come in. The currency is designed to utilize an Intel processor component known as Software Guard Extensions, or a "secure enclave." SGX is a sequestered portion of a processor that runs code like any other, but the software inside it can't be accessed or changed by a device's broader operating system. Computers can still check that an enclave is running the right software to validate it before connecting, but neither MobileCoin users nor node administrators can decrypt and view the enclave.

For MobileCoin, the enclaves in all of the nodes of the network hide the currency's indelible ledger from view. Users' private keys are stored and shielded in the enclave, too.

"If you put the cryptocurrency inside of the secure enclave, then people can run the nodes without seeing whats happening inside them," Goldbard says. "If you cant look at the ledger, how can you cheat it?"

Marlinspike first experimented with SGX for Signal as a workaround so users can find people they know on Signal through their address books without exposing all of that data.

Secure enclaves create some technical challenges, because they have limited processing capacity. But MobileCoin is designed with efficiency in mind. The system does as much data processing as possible outside the enclave, and only uses SGX for sensitive computing that needs to be shielded. And not needing to trust the nodesbecause sensitive data isn't exposed on themmeans that more can happen off of a user's device without sacrificing privacy, making transactions quick and easy on mobile devices.

"MobileCoin is designed to be deployable in normal resource-constrained environments like mobile devices, and to deliver a simple user experience along with privacy and security," Marlinspike says. "The design gives you the benefits of server assistance without the downsides of having to trust a server to act appropriately and not be hacked.

The platform has other protections layered with SGX as well. Even if someone compromised a MobileCoin enclave and could view the transaction ledger, one-time addresses and special one-time signatures for each transaction would still prevent an attacker from being able to trace and link events. And a privacy bonus of the Stellar Consensus Protocol is that the nodes don't need to store a full transaction history in the blockchain; they can discard most data after each payment is completed. These components make MobileCoin more resistant to surveillance, whether it's coming from a government or a criminal who wants to track and extort users.

There are lots of potential applications for MobileCoin, but Goldbard and Marlinspike envision it first as an integration in chat apps like Signal or WhatsApp. Here's how it would work in practice: To start using MobileCoin, you would generate a public and private key, and a recovery PIN. Then you would set up your account with an app that incorporates MobileCoin. The app would validate the software running in its service's node, establish an encrypted communication channel to the enclave, and then send your keys and the short, easy-to-remember recovery PIN that you'll use to access your MobileCoinlike a smartphone lock passcode.

To send MobileCoin to your friend Brian within a service that both of you use, your app would look up his public key, generate a one-time key and signature to use for the transaction, and send the transaction to the app's MobileCoin node. The node would sync and validate the transaction, update the ledger, and check the one-time key and signature to prevent spoofed double-spending. At this point Brian's MobileCoin node would take over, receiving and validating the transaction and communicating with Brian's app to generate the one-time private key that will allow Brian to receive the payment. And then Brian gets a notification that you paid him. The messaging app (or whatever service you're both using) doubles as a wallet for each of you.

It's a complicated process to wade through. The point of MobileCoin, though, is that you and Brian don't have to worry about any of it. The complicated parts all take place in the background.

The MobileCoin site, where developers looking to adopt the cryptocurrency will ultimately be able to access the software development kit, currently houses a white paper describing how MobileCoin works in more detail. But Goldbard says that the currency is still six months to a year from release, while he and Marlinspike refine the platform to eliminate potential problems, like the possibility that secure enclaves can inadvertently leak data.

That means there are still plenty of questions to be answered, including one big one: whether MobileCoin will be able to cut through all the noise and hype of the cryptocurrency community to actually be adopted by mainstream apps that could put it in everyone's hands. Currencies, after all, need a critical mass of people to not just be able to use them, but to agree on their worth.

And though speculation has driven bitcoin to all-time-high valuations, most cryptocurrencies don't end up capturing much value, languishing instead in far-flung corners of the internet. Here again, though, MobileCoin's creators hope to emulate Signal. End-to-end encryption was once a fringe feature; then WhatsApp gave it to a billion people at once using the Signal Protocol.

"Nobody actually transacts in cryptocurrency," Goldbard says. "So making something that people can actually use is our first goal. And then we want to find additional ways that people can implement it over time. But initially all we want is to make it so people can actually complete transactions."

If it works, the project will give hope to people who once believed cryptocurrency could truly replace cash in modern societyeven if you're only buying a pizza.

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MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency From Signal Creator Moxie ...

More than $300m of cryptocurrency has been lost after a series of bugs in a popular digital wallet service led one curious developer to accidentally take control of and then lock up the funds, according to reports.

Unlike most cryptocurrency hacks, however, the money wasnt deliberately taken: it was effectively destroyed by accident. The lost money was in the form of Ether, the tradable currency that fuels the Ethereum distributed app platform, and was kept in digital multi-signature wallets built by a developer called Parity. These wallets require more than one user to enter their key before funds can be transferred.

On Tuesday Parity revealed that, while fixing a bug that let hackers steal $32m out of few multi-signature wallets, it had inadvertently left a second flaw in its systems that allowed one user to become the sole owner of every single multi-signature wallet.

A cryptocurrency is a form of digital asset, created through a canny combination of encryption and peer-to-peer networking.

Bitcoin, the first and biggest cryptocurrency, is part of a decentralised payment network. If you own a bitcoin, you control a secret digital key which you can use to prove to anyone on the network that a certain amount of bitcoin is yours.

If you spend that bitcoin, you tell the entire network that you've transferred ownership of it, and use the same key to prove that you're telling the truth. Over time, the history of all those transactions becomes a lasting record of who owns what: that record is called the blockchain.

After bitcoin's creation in 2009, a number of other cryptocurrencies sought to replicate its success but taking its free, public code and tweaking it for different purposes.

Some, such as Filecoin, have a very defined goal. It aims to produce a sort of decentralised file storage system: as well as simply telling the network that you have some Filecoins, you can tell the network to store some encrypted data and pay Filecoins to whoever stores it on their computer.

Others are more nebulous. Ethereum, using the Ether token, is now the second biggest cryptocurrency after bitcoin and essentially a cryptocurrency for making cryptocurrencies. Users can write "smart contracts", which are effectively programs that can be run on the computer of any user of the network if they're paid enough Ether.

Of course, to many, the purpose is secondary. The only really important thing is that the value of an Ether token increased 2,500% over 2017, meaning some are hoping to jump on the bandwagon and get rich. Bubble or boom? That's the $28bn question.

The user, devops199, triggered the flaw apparently by accident. When they realised what they had done, they attempted to undo the damage by deleting the code which had transferred ownership of the funds. Rather than returning the money, however, that simply locked all the funds in those multisignature wallets permanently, with no way to access them.

This means that currently no funds can be moved out of the multi-sig wallets, Parity says in a security advisory.

Effectively, a user accidentally stole hundreds of wallets simultaneously, and then set them on fire in a panic while trying to give them back.

We are analysing the situation and will release an update with further details shortly, Parity told users.

Some are pushing for a hard fork of Ethereum, which would undo the damage by effectively asking 51% of the currencys users to agree to pretend that it had never happened in the first place. That would require a change to the code that controls ethereum, and then that change to be adopted by the majority of the user base. The risk is that some of the community refuses to accept the change, resulting in a split into two parallel groups.

Such an act isnt unheard of: another hack, two years ago, of an Ethereum app called the DAO resulted in $150m being stolen. The hard fork was successful then, but the money stolen represented a much larger portion of the entire Ethereum market than the $300m lost to Parity.

The lost $300m follows the discovery of bug in July that led to the theft of $32m in ether from just three multisignature wallets. A marathon coding and hacking effort was required to secure another $208m against theft. Patching that bug led to the flaw in Paritys system that devops199 triggered by accident.

Parity says that it is unable to confirm the actual amount lost, but that the $300m figure is purely speculative. The company also disputes that the currency is lost, arguing that frozen is more accurate. But if it is frozen, it appears that no-one has the ability to unfreeze the funds.

The Parity vulnerability was the result of an incorrectly coded smart contract used by the Parity wallet to store tokens on the Ethereum network, said Dominic Williams, founder of blockchain firm DFINITY. The vulnerability made it possible for anyone to freeze the tokens held by that smart contract, making them immovable. At this time, the only method we are aware of to unfreeze tokens held by the vulnerable smart contract would be to create a new hard fork Ethereum client that deploys a fix. This would require every full node on the Ethereum network to upgrade by the date of the hard fork to stay in sync, including all miners, wallets, exchanges, etc.

Ethereum has rapidly become the second most important cryptocurrency, after Bitcoin, with its price increasing more than 2,500% over the past year. One token of Ether is now worth a little over $285, up from $8 in January.

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