The former SoFi chief’s latest startup, Figure, has created what it says is a transparent marketplace for buying and selling assets. Some banks have embraced the technology, but other blockchain projects have stalled because lenders don't want rivals to see their data.

A CBDC has the potential to be a real game changer for the payment industry if one condition is met: central bank digital currency has to be built as an open and shared infrastructure for the private sector to easily build on top of it, says ConsenSys' Matthieu Saint Olive.

By slicing clutter out of international payments, Ripple managed to turn rivals into partners once before. It hopes a hunger for sharable authentication can make that happen again.

Appearing to support decentralized systems, the acting comptroller of the currency said on a podcast that "the ultimate public ownership of the payment rails is when you have a network, like the internet, of interconnected institutions and computers."

The Trump administration has dismantled digital campaigns by al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups that used social media to obtain cryptocurrency for carrying out terrorist attacks, the Justice Department said Thursday.

Major payment companies have long looked on at cryptocurrencies as too risky to touch, but too tempting to ignore. Mastercard's latest move indicates that the card brands are ready to make a firm pitch for crypto spending.

It was an attention-grabbing decision when Facebook hired PayPal's president, David Marcus, in 2014. At the time, Facebook didn't have much of a dedicated payments business to speak of; when people thought of spending money on Facebook, they typically thought of in-app purchases in Farmville.