Technology

Al Kelly

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During a Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast, Visa CEO Al Kelly announced the company’s intention to support Bitcoin payments. The plan is to make it possible to buy Bitcoin using Visa credentials and work with Bitcoin wallets to allow this cryptocurrency to be converted into a regular currency, the type called fiat in jargon, to be used wherever a Visa credit card is accepted. Al Kelly’s statements come a few weeks after an announcement by Mastercard that it intends to include cryptocurrencies in its payment network.

Denelle Dixon (Photo courtesy Stellar Development Foundation. All rights reserved)

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Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation and the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) have announced an agreement to work together on the development of a digital currency that will be issued by the national central bank. Undersecretary Oleksandr Bornyakov stated that he believes this collaboration will contribute to the development of the virtual asset industry and its integration into the global finance ecosystem. SDF developed Stellar, a free / open source and decentralized protocol for transfers between cryptocurrency and common (fiat) currency. Lumen (XLM) is a cryptocurrency created using this protocol, and its value has grown significantly since this announcement.

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Robotics company Boston Dynamics has released a video to celebrate what it hopes is a better year showing the ability of some of its robots to dance to the tune “Do You Love Me?”. In particular, two humanoid robots demonstrate their balancing skills by remaining on one leg at certain moments. In some parts of the video they’re accompanied by a quadrupedal robot and another robot that moves on two wheels.

Dan Schulman in 2013

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PayPal has announced that from 2021 it will support payments through some cryptocurrencies, which in the initial phase will be Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and Litecoin (LTC). To integrate this new management into its systems, for the legal part it obtained a conditional license for cryptocurrencies, the one known as BitLicense, by the New York State Department of Financial Services, and for the technical part it signed an agreement with Paxos, a known provider of cryptocurrency services and products. Initially, this new support will be limited to customers in the USA, but PayPal plans to extend it to other countries later in the year.

BitMEX's home page

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The founders of BitMEX, a well-known cryptocurrency trading platform, have been formally charged with violating US anti-money laundering regulations. One of them, Samuel Reed, has already been arrested while Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo and Gregory Dwyer are wanted. In fact, the allegations are multiple because BitMEX is also accused of operating in the US without the authorization of the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission). In August, BitMEX announced the introduction of its operators’ identity verification procedures, but evidently, it was too little and too late.