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European trip
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WeChat has attracted enough merchants in Europe to make the continent the next key market for WeChat Pay's cross-border payment business, reports
Outbound travel has also increased, with 149 million Chinese tourists traveling abroad in 2018, of which 11% traveled to Europe, reports UKTechnews, attributing those numbers to China's Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
Facebook's crypto
Libra is also the name of Project Libra, Facebook's blockchain initiative that has been widely reported to be the center of Facebook's pending cryptocurrency. Project Libra is largely secretive, so most of the news has been speculative.
In Switzerland, Libra Networks will focus on activities that are consistent with a cryptocurrency, including payments technology, blockchain, data analytics and investing, reports
Cash drain
Russians are also embracing the move away from cash, with nearly half of all Russian payments now digital.
Non-cash payments in the first quarter were more than 49% of the total transaction volume, according to Sberbank, which notes that's 5.5% higher than the prior year. More than 54% of the payments in St. Petersburg were cashless, and 53% of the transactions in Moscow.
Cashless payments were higher in all regions of the country, with the rate of growth higher in smaller cities and rural areas, the bank added.
New course
ABN Amro is changing its blockchain strategy, halting its work on a possible cryptocurrency wallet while building a blockchain platform for trade inventory management.
The Dutch bank is in talks with financial institutions to partner in the trade blockchain product, called Forcefield, reports
But the bank has soured on its crypto wallet, believing crypto assets are not properly regulated and too risky for the bank's clients, Coindesk reports.
From the Web
CCN | Mon May 20, 2019 - Around the world, the majority of searches related to cryptocurrency involve the word “Bitcoin,” a new report by ConsenSys concludes. Excepting a few Asian countries, most of the world wants to find information about Bitcoin.
CCN | Mon May 20, 2019 - The cryptocurrency market has been awash in bearish sentiment on Monday, with Bitcoin failing to maintain the $8,000 mark and most of the other top 20 coins moving in a sideways or downward trend. Nonetheless, one lesser-known crypto token isn’t intimidated by the market gloom, and it took advantage of one concrete announcement and one wild rumor to surge more than 75% in a single day.
TechCrunch | Mon May 20, 2019 - A massive database containing contact information of millions of Instagram influencers, celebrities and brand accounts has been found online. The database, hosted by Amazon Web Services, was left exposed and without a password allowing anyone to look inside.
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