Ripple’s cross-border technology possibly breaks into China while IOTA hangs out with bankers
- Ripple’s cross-border technology breaks into China?
Ripple recently saw an opening to offer its cross-border payment technological solutions in the land of the red dragon.
The opening is a result of partnership between American Express, US-based payment company and LianLian Group, a Chinese third-party payment service provider.
The partnership just got a whole lot more interesting as American Express won the approval of the Chinese central bank PBoC to clear card payments in China, thus becoming the first American card network to gain access to the massive Chinese card market.
This approval allows the company to process and settle payments in Yuan domestically by setting up its own network with its Chinese joint venture partner LianLian Group.
The joint venture of these two companies is called Express (Hangzhou) Technology Services Co and is required to prepare its operations within a year and also receive authorization from the central bank before running the card clearing business. This approval is now given and this should open up the Chinese market to foreign investors.
Interestingly enough, both American Express and LianLian are members of the Ripplenet, Ripple’s incubator for financial institutions which are interested in using or are already using XRP and related technology. Both entities have shown an interest in Ripple’s xCurrent technology, which is Ripple’s “enterprise software solution that enables banks to instantly settle cross-border payments with end-to-end tracking”. As such, we should expect to see xCurrent involved in this new joint venture.
- More than 4000 Bitcoin ATM’s soon to be available worldwide
As per CoinATMRadar https://coinatmradar.com/data, there are 3989 cryptocurrency ATM’s available worldwide.
These machines are currently made by 40 different producers and spread out across 75 countries of the world, with 513 people/entities registered as Bitcoin ATM operators.
North America dominates the Bitcoin ATM industry with 2,371 in the United States and 677 in Canada.
Europe lags behind considerably, with 248 in Austria, 208 in the United Kingdom, 77 in Russia, 67 in Spain, 67 in the Czech Republic, 42 in Switzerland, 38 in Italy, 35 in Slovakia, 26 in Poland, 25 in the Netherlands, 23 in Romania, 19 in Finland, 18 in Greece, 13 in Slovenia, 12 in Hungary, and surprisingly, only 2 in France and 1 in Germany.
Only 5% of the total Bitcoin ATM number can be found outside of North America/mentioned European countries.
The website notes that the average rate of ATM installation currently sits at 6.29 per day, which implies that we should expect to see more than 4000 Bitcoin ATM’s in existence in just a couple of days.
- IOTA to speak during the European Banking Congress
IOTA will be among the attendees of the Europe’s prestigious European Banking Congress (EBC) held in Frankfurt on 16th of November of 2018.
The congress is a traditional event held since 1991 by some of the Germany’s leading banking institutions, including Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank.
Since 2016, BNP Paribas, Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank have been the co-hosting banks of the congress.
EBC’s website gives a short description of the event:
“The EBC aims at providing a forum for open and forward oriented discussion of European issues, their role in the world of politics and financial markets. The EBC has become an established meeting place for high level representatives from politics, business, finance, and academia. Leading topics and high-level speakers for each year’s event are chosen by the EBC’s steering committee.”
This year’s list of designated speakers does have one name standing out from the traditional names closely related to the banking establishment. The name is Dominik Schiener, IOTA’s co-founder and current Chairman of the project’s Board of Directors. He will likely use this opportunity to present the advantages that cryptocurrencies like IOTA have over traditional finance and hopefully interest the attendees to learn more about the crypto world in general.
- ConsenSys and Amazon to launch an Ethereum marketplace for enterprise blockchains
A marketplace for plug-and-play services which can help blockchain projects develop from a proof-of-concept to a fully functional network is being launched by Kaleido, a subsidiary of ConsenSys.
The platform on offer includes plug-and-play tools from Kaleido, Amazon Web Services, and third-party developers. Native AWS integrations, HD wallets for privacy and ID registries for organizational identity can be found on the marketplace, as well as blockchain tools and services for smart contract oracles, supply chain management, and real-time legal contracts.
With distributed ledger technology growing in popularity (84% of executives claimed that they are “actively involved” in this technology in an August PwC survey), this marketplace – which suggests that the early adopters of its tools eliminated 80% of the custom coding required to build a project – should find increased adoption in the near future.
