Monthly Archives: June 2021

Visa has broad plans for digital currency, as the payments industry begins to embrace the ... [+] opportunities in cryptocurrency.

Its been brewing for some time, but 2021 is finally seeing established payment companies take the opportunities of cryptocurrency seriously, and among those leading the pack is Visa V .

An industry that was previously plagued by volatility and speculation is beginning to see its enterprise-friendly side blossoming, and according to the card network, the opportunities are abundant.

The world of digital currencies and crypto has moved and evolved quite significantly since the 2009 launch of Bitcoin, explains Nikola Plecas, head of new payment flows,Visa Consulting and Analytics, Europe at Visa.

Visa's strategy is to be a network of networks and really be able to originate and terminate new payment flows outside of card rails. We have made tremendous push into these new flows over the last couple of years with products such as B2B Connect, Visa Direct, Push to Pay and digital currencies naturally fall into that category.

However, this doesnt mean that the worlds most famous cryptocurrency Bitcoin features heavily in the card networks plans. Instead, Visa characterises the industry as made up of two distinct groups: conventional, untethered cryptocurrencies and fiat currency-backed digital currencies, often known as stablecoins, which are attracting greater interest from institutional and government organizations despite currently a smaller part of the overall market.

The former is seen by the company as a tradeable asset with limited industry potential CEO Alfred Kelly described it as digital gold in the companys Q2 2021 earnings call. However, the latter is where Visa sees significant potential for payments.

We see these as having the potential to be used by consumers and merchants in the same way as existing fiat currencies are, says Plecas. And when it comes to areas of opportunity, there are many for organizations such as ours.

While many use the terms cryptocurrency and digital currency interchangeably, Visa has chosen to characterize the area it is focusing on the stablecoin side of the industry as digital currencies.

Visas digital currency efforts currently fall into five areas. Some of these are well-established and already contributing to the companys revenue growth, while others are in the early stages and are unlikely to make a meaningful impact on Visas top line in the near future. However, they together represent a long-term view of the market.

The first is perhaps the most obvious: making it easy for consumers to buy cryptocurrencies, which has involved working with wallets and exchanges drive acceptance. This area earned a mention in Visas most recent earnings call as being the second biggest contributor of growth in its card-not-present excluding travel segment the biggest growth was the surge in ecommerce.

Second is a natural progression from the first: enabling cryptocurrency to be cashed out to fiat.

We want to make sure that you as a consumer, once you exit your cryptocurrency positions in exchanges and wallets can cash onto a Visa credential and then start spending at any of our 70 million-plus merchant endpoints, says Plecas.

While those two are in full swing, a newer development is the third pillar, which is the use of digital currency APIs to enable banks and neobanks to add cryptocurrency options for their clients. This is in the early stages, with US neobank First Boulevard becoming the pilot customer earlier this year, however Plecas highlights that Visa is looking to extend to other markets and regions with the product.

We quickly realized that there's potential to be the next gen of neobanks, he explains. They're also doing a lot of their treasury operations, paying vendors and employees already in stablecoins.

In order to do this, the company needed to enable customers to stay within their ecosystem when they also settled their obligations with Visa, which is where pillar four, settlement in stablecoins comes in. This has seen Visa settle its first transaction in a stablecoin, US dollar-tethered USDC, this year.

Settling in USDC is very similar to settling in USD, he explains.

What we've done is an upgrade of existing treasury infrastructure operations to be able to receive these assets, because actually receiving them is now done through public blockchain rails. And as time evolves, we want to support other stablecoins.

The final pillar, however, is the most long-term: central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). According to the Bank for International Settlements, 86% of the worlds central banks are now considering the launch of CBDCs of one form or another, with more than one in ten currently engaged in pilots.

CBDCs have a variety of benefits, including the potential to better reach the underbanked, and Visa argues that their implementation will require public-private partnerships.

That way, they will be integrated in the right way into the existing payments' ecosystem, says Plecas.

At Visa, we want to make sure that our products and services are acting as a bridge between our existing clients and the new clients and blockchain rails involved with digital currencies.

Visa's areas of focus as it moves into cryptocurrency

While much of this is focused on the consumer side of cryptocurrency and digital currencies, Visa also sees significant potential in B2B payments.

B2B is an area of high growth, high importance and high interest to all of Visa. And we see that digital currencies can supplement and compliment some of the existing solutions that we have in the space, says Plecas.

However, while digital currencies can impact the B2B space, and in some cases are already doing so, broader institutional adoption is likely to take time.

Nevertheless, in areas with poor infrastructure, the potential of CBDCs in particular is strong for B2B.

In some countries the infrastructure is just not there yet, and for these types of countries and regions, digital currencies can complement what we already have.

One of the areas that is often raised in digital currency discussions is cross-border payments, with many citing potential speed and cost benefits. However, Plecas stresses that while there is potential, it is not a simple clean fix.

The cross-border space is highly complex, and it has a large number of actors who are trying to solve for consumer experience in terms of end user price and time efficiency, he says.

It's not easy to solve for this, even if you're trying new technologies that would give you some advantages theoretically with this aspect.

However, he says Visa sees particular opportunities in global marketplaces that bring together buyers and sellers from different currencies.

In those instances, potentially digital currencies can help them reach some of these markets in a more time and cost efficient way.

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Visa And The Cryptocurrency Opportunity: Inside The Card Networks Digital Currency Plans - Forbes

Two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), called on Sunday for greater regulation of cryptocurrencies in order to crack down on ransomware payments from cyberattacks.

Why it matters: Last month's hacking of the Colonial Pipeline underscored the nation's vulnerability to large scale ransomeware attacks and increased attention to the importance of cybersecurity.

Be smart: Cryptocurrencies allow users to make payments anonymously and can make cybercriminals harder to trace. Ransomware payments through cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have also been on the rise.

What they're saying: Warner, the Intelligence Committee chairman, acknowledged that there can be some benefits to crypto, but noted that "we are seeing now some of the dark underbelly."

Blunt argued that cryptocurrency regulation is needed to ensure these types of transactions don't remain "behind the scenes" of the U.S. financial system.

Go deeper: U.S. plans crypto crackdown.

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Senators call for greater regulation of cryptocurrency - Axios

Cardano (CRYPTO:ADA) has seen one of the most significant price jumps of any leading cryptocurrency in 2021 so far. Priced at just $1.85 as of this writing, the coin is more than 10 times more valuable than it was on January 1 and currently sits in the top five cryptocurrencies by market cap.

The recent crypto market crash has erased much of Bitcoin's (CRYPTO:BTC) recent gains (although it's still up about 32% since January 1), and at least temporarily dampened Ethereum's (CRYPTO:ETH) electrifying surge -- it's down about 35% from its recent all-time high. However, Cardano has kept more of its upswing action intact amid increased market volatility.

Image Source: Getty Images.

Cardano isn't as well-known as Bitcoin or Ethereum, and its market cap and daily transaction volume are a fraction of those leading coins. But that's part of the appeal: cryptocurrency investors see vast potential in the so-called "Ethereum killer," which is on the verge of a massive blockchain network upgrade that could help it live up to that moniker.

Here are five reasons why investors are so bullish on Cardano right now.

Cardano will soon implement "smart contract" functionality, which essentially means adding code that enables automated, self-executing contracts. Smart contracts allow developers to build apps on top of blockchain platforms, such as Ethereum's enormously popular Uniswap decentralized exchange. The entire decentralized finance (DeFi) industry is built on smart contracts, much of it on Ethereum, and Cardano is about to join the party.

Ethereum's blockchain can only handle a very limited number of transactions right now -- around 15 per second -- which has led to immense congestion on the network. That means longer waits to complete transactions and high "gas fees" (or transaction fees) that you'll pay to send them through.

Future network upgrades should ease that pain, but Cardano is already primed to handle much larger volumes of transactions. It has been tested at up to 257 transactions per second, but Cardano developer Input Output is looking into much vaster tallies -- potentially as many as 1 million or more transactions per second.

Both Bitcoin and Ethereum are based on energy-intensive "proof-of-work" systems, which require miners to use powerful computers to solve complex math equations -- all in the hopes of winning some cryptocurrency for their efforts. In fact, it's part of the reason why the crypto market is down so much lately, after Tesla decided to stop accepting Bitcoin due to the outsized environmental impact of mining.

Luckily, Cardano has a much more eco-friendly "proof-of-stake" system, in which validators hold their coins within the network to participate and earn rewards. According to Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, the network is "1.6 million times more energy efficient" than Bitcoin. That might seem like an impossible figure, but it really speaks to the overwhelming amount of energy needed to power Bitcoin's network. It's something that crypto newcomers are surely keeping in mind as they plot potential investments, and Cardano offers a better path forward.

As a third-generation blockchain network, Cardano has learned from the missteps of its predecessors to try and create a more effective, economical, and energy-efficient system. On top of that, it's also based on peer-reviewed scientific research, with ample time and energy put into exploring the technical possibilities within. You might call it the opposite of Facebook'sclassic "move fast and break things" motto. Some would say that's why Cardano has been slow in implementing features like smart contracts, but it could assuage some investors' fears given the already volatile nature of cryptocurrency.

If bullish cryptocurrency analysts are correct, then the entire market may have plenty of room to grow in the years and decades to come. But the days of buying a single BTC or ETH for a few dollars and watching it grow into the thousands (and beyond) are long gone. Could Cardano's value ultimately lift off into the stratosphere like those coins did? There's no telling for now. But the fundamentals behind Cardano appear to be strong, and given the current low price per coin, many investors see it as a worthy long-term bet on a promising cryptocurrency project.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Were motley! Questioning an investing thesis -- even one of our own -- helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

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Why Cryptocurrency Investors Are Excited About Cardano - Motley Fool

While the auto industry is still working on perfecting self-driving cars, one marque is high-tailing it toward self-mining cars. Canadian outfit Daymak has just announced its building the worlds first automobile that can mine cryptocurrency.

The new light electric vehicle (LEV), dubbed the Spiritus, will be equipped with high-tech mining hardware and blockchain technology that will allow it to mine all kinds of crypto, from Bitcoin to Dogecoin, while its charging.

For those unversed in crypto lingo, mining is a way of earning cryptocurrencies by solving cryptographic equations and algorithms through computers. You can mine via any computer, including the one onboard this pioneering ride.

The Spiritus mines all kinds of crypto, from bitcoin to dogecoin, while its charging.Daymak

The Spiritus will include a GPU (processor) that supports a patent-pending system known as the Daymak Nebula. The Nebula comprises a miner that collects the coins and a digital wallet that stores them for future use. Naturally, theres also an app that displays all the crypto info on your smartphone.

We envision a future where your highway tolls, your parking and your drive-thru order will be paid directly on the fly with crypto. Your online bills and your banking can be handled through the same software platform paid in crypto, Daymak president Aldo Baiocchi said in a statement. And whereas most vehicles are depreciating while they sit in your garage, the Nebula Miner will make you money while your Spiritus is parked.

The Nebula Miner can collect the coins using solar power.Daymak

According to the automaker, the emissions-free daily driver is also fitted with solar panels, which means the mining could be carried out using renewable energy rather than traditional fossil fuels. Recently, there has been some criticism regarding the environmental cost of mining crypto, but using solar power prevents all of that.

As for the car itself, it has a decidedly futuristic aesthetic with sleek lines and a sculpted rear end. Though it only has three wheels, its certainly no slouch. The range-topping Ultimate model features an 80 kWh battery that delivers up to 150 hp. Daymak says this allows the svelte two-seater to go from zero to 60 in a breakneck 1.8 seconds and reach a top speed in excess of 130 mph. The company also claims the car can cover some 300 miles and charge in under two hours.

You can access the Nebula Wallet and crypto info via your smartphone.Daymak

The Spiritus is the fifth model in Daymaks Avvenire Series. This line-up includes everything from e-bikes to electric flying vehicles and has already garnered more than $350 million in pre-orders in less than two months. The Spiritus, which is expected to launch in 2023, has received more than 4,000 pre-orders so far.

As for price, the base Deluxe model starts at around $20,000 while the luxe carbon-fiber Ultimate version will set you back $149,000, but, hey, it might just pay for itself.

Check out more images of the car below:

Daymak

Daymak

Daymak

Daymak

Daymak

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The Daymak Spiritus Is the Worlds First EV That Mines Cryptocurrency - Robb Report

New Delhi: Major Cryptocurrencies slipped back into the red after a brief recovery as of 10.45 am (IST). Investors took some money off the table from recent gainers such as Dogecoin and Polkadot, which were down up to 13 per cent at that point.

Tesla boss Elon Musk tweeted late Thursday hinting at a breakup with bitcoin, spooking investor sentiment. Bitcoin and Ether slipped over 3 per cent, but recovered half of the losses later.Musk has been a major promoter of cryptocurrencies, but has of later turned critical of bitcoin because of its immense energy use.Despite speculative action in 'meme' equity counters, pushing them to new highs, the crytpo market is lagging behind. However, the performance of meme-based digital tokens, like Dogecoin, has improved, though the upside remains limited.

"The king pair of Bitcoin and Ethereum are slowly yet steadily moving out of their consolidation phase. It is a good sign for the markets as most of the other Altcoins tend to follow the price movements of bitcoin and Ether," Edul Patel, CEO and Co-founder, Mudrex. "The major decline came from Dogecoin, as it finally shed its steam after three days of a fierce uptrend. This correction in DOGE was imminent. The coming week is poised to be interesting for the cryptocurrency market," he said.

ZebPay Trade Desk's Tech ViewThis week the top 3 assets by market capitalization -- Bitcoin, Ethereum and BNB -- have seen a recovery. BTC has now started its journey upward, trading between $36,000 and $39,500. This week, the asset saw a rise of 10% and hit $39,000 level.

Time is in UTC and the daily time frame is 12:00 AM - 12: 00 PM UTC(Views and recommendations given in this section are the analysts' own and do not represent those of ETMarkets.com. Please consult your financial adviser before taking any position in the asset/s mentioned.)

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Top Cryptocurrency Prices Today: Bitcoin, Ether slip; Dogecoin tanks 13% - Economic Times