Month: January 2020

Stablecoins may represent crypto’s best chance of achieving mainstream success and recognition from the traditional financial systems. Just recently, the president of the European Central Bank nourished this viewpoint by stating that the institution should be proactive when it comes to digital assets. On Dec. 12, Christine Lagarde tweeted:   “My personal conviction on the issue of stablecoins is that we better be ahead of the curve. There is clearly demand out there that we have to respond to.” The value of stablecoins Being ahead of the curve and responding to…

Over the last 10 years, the Bitcoin ecosystem has attracted developers to dedicate thousands of hours to improve and revamp most of its underlying codebase. Yet, Bitcoin (BTC) is largely the same. The reason for this is that its core set of consensus rules that define its monetary properties, such as its algorithmic inflation and hard-coded supply, remain unchanged. Time and time again, factions have attempted to change these core properties, but all hostile takeovers thus far have failed. It’s often a painful process but one that highlights and solidifies…

In the latest from U.S. Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) ongoing lawsuit against Telegram for its offering of Gram tokens, the commission bashes the messaging service’s blockchain and related token. In a lengthy filing with the court of the Southern District of New York the SEC responded to Telegram’s earlier motion for summary judgment. In it, the SEC disparaged the Telegram Open Network (TON) — Telegram’s blockchain — as well as the operation’s Gram (GRM) token.  “Telegram Has Put Forth No Evidence Regarding the TON Blockchain’s State of Development at…

Financial services and mobile payment company Square thinks it has found a way to turn fiat into crypto in real-time point-of-sale transactions.  How it works  On Jan. 21, the United States Patent Office awarded Square a patent for a technology that the team argues cracks a present barrier in merchant transactions:  “All cryptocurrencies face the same drawback in that they are not widely accepted. Presently, cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, are not accepted by most retail merchants, or even by most online merchants.” The team cited a number of drawbacks to current…

It’s funny what business leaders can and can’t tell the press. Cointelegraph caught up with Alexander Drummond, co-founder of crypto-enabled payments company GatePay, at the 50th edition of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week. Drummond was one of several crypto entrepreneurs presenting his company on stage at the CV Labs event on Tuesday. Drummond’s pitch for GatePay goes something like this: retail customers should be able to pay for products with any means of exchange they want, and retail stores should be able to handle it. Offering…