Google has hired a former PayPal executive to help bolster Google Pay, with plans to expand into the crypto space. Arnold Goldberg has been given the task of running Google’s payments division as part of a company-wide push into financial services, including crypto. Google’s president of commerce Bill Ready told Bloomberg that: “Crypto is something we pay a lot of attention to [...] As user demand and merchant demand evolves, we’ll evolve with it.” Google Pay is an online payment system developed by Google to allow in-app, online and contactless purchases on mobile devices including Android phones, tablets and watches. …

Crypto-focused enterprise payment platform Tribal Credit has concluded a $40 million debt offering that was funded through fiat and stablecoins — giving the company additional capital to expand its business services in Latin America. The so-called hybrid debt round was financed by Partners for Growth, a California-based investment firm, and Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), which is a non-profit organization supporting the growth of the Stellar blockchain. Tribal said it will use the capital to fund receivables from its customer base throughout Latin America, particularly Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru. Tribal COO Duane Good explained to Cointelegraph that funding receivables …

Yat Siu of Animoca Brands Yat is the executive chairman and co-founder of Animoca Brands, which delivers digital property rights to the world’s gamers and internet users, thereby creating a new asset class, play-to-earn economies and a more equitable digital framework contributing to the building of the open Metaverse. “During the course of 2022, growth in decentralized gaming will drive blockchain and crypto adoption into the hundreds of millions of users.” These quotes have been edited and condensed. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the authors’ alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions …

Simon Peters of eToro Simon is a crypto analyst at eToro, the world’s leading social trading platform, which offers both investing in stocks and cryptocurrencies. “While we could potentially see a bear market in 2022, with more countries considering making Bitcoin legal tender, the emergence of CBDCs, and the wider use of stablecoins by households and businesses, the crypto landscape has much more to offer. As the next iteration of the internet comes into effect (Web3 and the Metaverse), we will naturally see greater capital and user inflows to this space. With NFTs specifically, we could see the tokenization of …

Sandra Ro of Global Blockchain Business Council Sandra is CEO of the Global Blockchain Business Council, an industry association for the blockchain technology ecosystem. “ In 2022, it will be ‘corporate career risk’ to not have a baseline understanding of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. From bankers to corporate executives to politicians, it is imperative that they get on board and seriously consider the implications of blockchain. Further, 2022 winners will ‘expect the unexpected,’ and adapt to investing, servicing clients and participating in new trends. In 2021, few expected NFTs to become the killer app, driving mainstream interest and adoption. Web3, …

As 2021 draws to a close, the premier lineup in the DeFi landscape largely consists of synthetic asset platforms (SAPs). An SAP is any platform that enables users to mint synthetics, which are derivatives whose values are pegged to existing assets in real time. As long as oracles can supply a reliable price feed, synthetics can represent any asset in the world and take on its price — be it a stock, commodity or crypto asset. As such, SAPs finally bridge the gap between emergent DeFi platforms and legacy finance, allowing investors to place their bets on any asset anywhere, …

The state of banking and finance today presents a complex labyrinth that even seasoned bankers struggle to navigate. Despite appearances, there is a method to this madness. As Nobel Prize winners like Muhammad Yunus and Joseph Stiglitz have cautioned in the past: central banking, in particular, has morphed to keep the status quo in check. Or, in the words of Mike Maloney, an expert on monetary history and economics: It is “the biggest scam in the history of mankind.” Maloney reasons that giving a small group of unelected individuals the keys to the monetary printing press will undoubtedly rot away …

On Wednesday, Nikhil Rathi, CEO of the United Kingdom's Financial Conduct Authority, or FCA, issued the following statement to the Treasury Committee when asked about the risks of the much-unregulated cryptocurrency sector in the country: When we talk about the compensation scheme, we have to draw some pretty clear lines. I would suggest anything is crypto-related should not be entitled to compensations, and consumers should be clear about that when investing. In the passage, Rathi refers to the FCA's Financial Services Compensation Scheme, or FSCS, which pays out compensation to consumers when certain authorized financial institutions cannot meet claims against …

On Thursday, registered investment adviser and fintech firm Defiance announced it has launched the first NFT-focused exchange-traded fund (ETF) on the New York Stock Exchange Arca. The fund is listed under the ticker symbol NFTZ and has a management fee of 0.65% per year. The fund does not directly buy and hold NFTs to store in wallets. Instead, it tracks an index of companies operating or intending to venture into the NFT space, as well as the Metaverse. The BITA NFT and Blockchain Select Index, which the fund intends to mirror, is maintained by Germany-based fintech company BITA. Notable holdings …

Founded in 2017, OKEx is a centralized cryptocurrency exchange based in Seychelles. According to CoinGecko, OKEx is the world's third-largest cryptocurrency brokerage, with nearly $12 billion in trading volume within the past 24 hours. The exchange lists 312 coins and 518 cryptocurrency trading pairs. It's often difficult for new cryptocurrency enthusiasts to navigate the complex world of trading and finance. OKEx seeks to bring such sophisticated trading methods to everyday users' disposal by building simple user interface. During an exclusive ask me anything, or AMA, session with Cointelegraph Markets Pro Users, OKEx staff discussed trading tools, financial regulation, the OKExChain …

Crypto has seen a rise in novel uses of liquidity mining and rewards through protocols like Uniswap, Aave and Compound. More recently, a new crop of DeFi 2.0 protocols such as OlympusDAO, Alchemix and Abracadabra are exploring new ways of operating without giving up token rewards. For all the innovations happening with decentralized systems in crypto, they are still failing to open new pathways for economic prosperity for the most marginalized. In its current form, DeFi remains open only to people who already have access to the financial system and live in countries with strong financial markets. This is evident …

In a presentation made during the Singapore Fintech Festival, Annerie Vreugdenhil, chief innovation officer of ING, announced the firm is working on a trial of its decentralized finance, or DeFi, peer-to-peer lending protocol with the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets. Vreugdenhil said the following in regards to the development, as reported by Ledger Insights: We are looking into peer-to-peer lending in a DeFi kind of setup. But then not on Bitcoins. What is interesting to us is how you can probably create peer-to-peer lending or open up lending capabilities with different kinds of collateral. So with different ways of …