With just two weeks left in office, President Donald Trump has sent out a new executive order targeting Chinese payment apps. The Tuesday order bars United States citizens or people located in the U.S. from using nine Chinese payment apps. It continues the White House's earlier efforts to cut off the U.S. market from Chinese-owned apps like TikTok. Yesterday's order repeats earlier concerns of data collection by the Chinese Communist Party: "The continuing activity of the PRC and the CCP to steal or otherwise obtain United States persons’ data makes clear that there is an intent to use bulk data …

Online payments giant and Cash App owner Stripe is stepping into a new realm of financial services for vendors. Per a Wall Street Journal exclusive on Thursday, Stripe is looking to offer customers bank accounts and debit cards. However, these financial products will be limited to vendors and merchants for now. The new initiative will also involve collaboration with banking giants Goldman Sachs and Citi, which is part of a broader push from both to incorporate online business services and new technologies. In 2015, Stripe was an early payments platform to onboard Bitcoin (BTC) functionality, which it dropped three years …

Africa is the home to 1.2 billion people and what has been described as the world’s largest trade area — the African Continental Free Trade Area. Africa is forging a new path to driving development, and access to financial services will play a significant role in its economic growth. The need to provide improved systems for poverty reduction, if not alleviation, is further accentuated when one considers that 416 million Africans live in extreme poverty, and access to financial services is right at the heart of the solution. In a review of the impact of financial inclusion on economic growth, …

A Bitcoin (BTC) peer-to-peer exchange made on the HodlHodl platform went awry as a scammer appears to have used a SIM spoofing attack to make the seller believe he was about to receive the money. The episode was reported on June 2 by a Reddit user going by the name of Gandeloft. According to the victim, he wanted to cash out his Bitcoin savings of 0.1747 BTC, worth $1677 as of press time. Through the HodlHodl platform, he found a merchant willing to offer 1650 Euro, or $1848, for the Bitcoins. This appears to have been higher than the going …

A major digital asset platform is making it even easier to order that double espresso with an extra shot. Starbucks mobile app users will soon be given the option to pay for their drinks with “Bakkt Cash.” Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), parent company of the Bitcoin derivatives provider, had declared back in August 2018 that the coffee giant was looking at retail applications for crypto payments. Today, Bakkt President Adam White announced the new payment integration with Starbucks on Twitter: We're also reducing payment costs for merchants which improves their bottom line. Open your @Starbucks app to see our first direct …

Further developments to blockchain technology are being tackled every day. One of the biggest challenges is how best companies working on blockchain can make their services not only accessible but also practical for users in different countries. The Carrier Blockchain Study Group (CBSG) Consortium is one such collaboration doing just that. Launched in September 2017, the group provides a secure way for telecom customers to make digital payments directly with their carriers using blockchain technology. Blockchain platform TBCASoft, a founding member of the CBSG, announced in a Feb. 18 press release that Taiwan-based Asia Pacific Telecom Co. Ltd. (APTG) and …

The government of Hubei, the Chinese province at the epicenter of the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak, issued a report on Feb. 18 detailing measures taken against the disease. The officials revealed that they tracked both offline and online purchases of fever medicine to organize relief efforts. As the emergency situation shows no signs of slowing down, provincial officials have taken a set of measures to better control the outbreak. Pharmacies and medical institutions are now required to ask for valid ID from anyone purchasing fever medicine, presumably to treat the virus. In addition to newly enacted measures, the government began an …

Congress clearly has crypto on the brain, with the question of regulation being a matter of when. At a Jan. 30 hearing before the Fintech Task Force, a body within the United States House of Representatives, lawmakers were focused on bringing crypto into the conversation. The basics The hearing — entitled “Is Cash Still King? Reviewing the Rise of Mobile Payments” — featured testimony from witnesses with backgrounds spanning payment providers, consumer advocates and financial inclusion non-profits. While some of the written testimony provided by the witnesses before the hearing mentioned cryptocurrencies, the degree to which the industry occupied the …

Blockchain platform TBCASoft, technology behemoth IBM and telecommunications conglomerate SoftBank announced on Oct. 22 a collaboration to adopt a cross-carrier telecommunications blockchain payment solution. New cross-carrier system Per the release, the partnership aims to allow carriers to use blockchain through the Carrier Blockchain Study Group (CBSG) Consortium — founded by TBCASoft and SoftBank. TBCASoft reportedly already created a cross-carrier blockchain with 18 participants. The first application that CBSG intends to launch is the Cross-Carrier Payment System (CCPS), which aims to enable mobile service users to use their phones for payments with local merchants abroad. Founder and CEO of TBCASoft Ling …

Samsung Pay, the mobile payments service of South Korean tech giant Samsung, has partnered with payments platform Finablr, Ripple’s RippleNet member, to offer cross-border payments feature Money Transfer to its app’s users. Finablr announced the partnership on Oct. 3, claiming that the new feature “offers users seamless and secure cross-border payments to 47 countries through a variety of payout methods, all within Samsung’s native mobile wallet.” Furthermore, United States-based Samsung Pay’s clients reportedly can use their debit or credit cards to send money via the service. Tokenized credentials Per the release, all the fees and exchange rates are included upfront, …

The Android version of major web browser Opera now integrates a function that lets its users purchase Ethereum (ETH) through the browser, a press release shared with Cointelegraph on Feb. 6 reveals. According to the press release, the new service is available to users based out of Sweden, Norway and Denmark due to Opera’s new partnership with brokerage firm Safello. Safello, according to Opera, is registered with the Financial Supervisory Authority (FSA) in Sweden. Julia Szyndzielorz, senior PR manager at Opera, told Cointelegraph in an email that Opera’s addition of ETH purchasing through its browser allows users to immediately buy …

If bitcoin acceptance reaches a critical mass where necessities of food, shelter, and clothing can be bought with it, it will likely have reached a tipping point where it displaces national currencies. In this scenario, many areas of the world would be leapfrogging banking infrastructure and traditional money wire transfers. Most notably this would describe the financial landscape in developing economies such as the nations of Africa. Bitcoin Leapfrogging Banks Leapfrogging is described as a theory of economic development, which skips inferior or obsolete technologies in order to move directly to advanced ones. Take, for example, phone coverage in African …