“The functionality will see Mastercard customers’ digital currency payments settled in crypto at participating merchants, a first for the financial giant. The company has not yet disclosed which digital currencies it intends to support, or where.
Previously, Mastercard supported limited cryptocurrency transactions through its cryptocard partners Wirex and Uphold. But those programs only cover payment, not settlement; the coins are converted to fiat currency well before reaching the merchant.
The new initiative promises to upend that dynamic. The payments giant plans to support digital currency transactions directly on network. [Merchants] will be able to conduct their business beyond the bounds of the fiat ecosystem.
The payments space is rushing to support blockchain-based currencies at a pace not seen since Bitcoin pioneered the concept of stateless, peer-to-peer immutable transactions in 2009. PayPal intends to roll out bitcoin payment functionality later this year. Visa’s CEO said the rival company may add crypto payments in the future.”
“Twitter is considering adding bitcoin to its company reserves, according to chief financial officer Ned Segal. The social media giant is also looking at payment options involving the top cryptocurrency by market cap.
We have done a lot of the upfront thinking to consider how we might pay employees should they ask to be paid in bitcoin, how we might pay a vendor if they asked to be paid in bitcoin and whether we need to have bitcoin on our balance sheet.”
See Also: Grayscale CEO: Firms race to buy Bitcoin as mood shifts from ‘why’ to ‘why not?’
“Job postings describe a walled garden-type digital currency that could roll out in emerging economies. The yet-to-be-announced project, which Amazon sketched out across a series of recent job posts, appears to be an effort to keep lucrative Prime customers eternally plugged into Amazon’s platform.
This product will enable customers to convert their cash in to digital currency using which customers can enjoy online services including shopping for goods and/or services like Prime Video.”
“Since mid-January, the Ethereum token swap service within MetaMask wallet has been bringing its developers between $170,000-$440,000 per day in fees. Users have been swapping between $22 million and $30 million worth of Ethereum-based tokens on a daily basis.
The service allows users to swap their Ethereum-based tokens at current exchange rates directly in their wallets. To support these swaps, MetaMask has integrated the largest liquidity pools, such as Uniswap, AirSwap, 0x API, 1inch.exchange, Paraswap, Totle, and dex.ag. For each swap made this way, MetaMask takes 0.875% in fees.”
“Never mind bitcoin on the balance sheet, a subsidiary of Europe’s biggest telco is taking a stake in DeFi.
Deutsche Telekom AG, Europe’s largest telecommunications company by revenue, has begun staking on the Flow Network, the ultra-scalable proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain from CryptoKitties creator Dapper Labs, and has plans to begin staking on several other chains in the near future.
We started roughly five years ago, like everyone else, doing all those enterprise blockchain proofs of concept. But we gradually began to feel we were not focusing enough on public blockchains.This is where digital value will be moved in the future, and it’s really where a telco should be active.”
“A recent report on decentralized finance is bullish about its potential.
DeFi offers exciting opportunities and has the potential to create a truly open, transparent, and immutable financial infrastructure.
The availability of historical (and current) data is a vast improvement over traditional financial systems.
In terms of accessibility, Schär believes that DeFi can level the playing field for access to financial services. Second, the technology allows the quick transfer of tokens using smart contracts, a game changer for efficiency. Composability—the ability to create multiple products and fuse them to create something new—’allows for an ever-expanding range of possibilities and unprecedented interest in open financial engineering.’“
“Today, Bitcoin-on-Ethereum yield vault project BadgerDAO and fellow yield vault platform Yearn.Finance announced a partnership designed to bring Yearn’s sustainable vault expertise to Badger.
Badger will migrate their current synthetic Bitcoin vault balance to Yearn’s, and the Yearn vault will display in Badger’s app. Additionally, the two protocols will work together to build a new WBTC vault. The fees from the vaults will be shared between the Badger and Yearn protocols.
The partnership between the yield vault projects accomplishes two goals: ensures sustainable yield for Badger vaults, and grants Yearn strategists meatier compensation.”
The Disrupt 