Blockchain

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.

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.

Paystand's Zero Card leverages its proprietary blockchain-based bank-to-bank payments network in combination with a virtual Mastercard.

Cross-border payments do not and should not exist in a vacuum, says Veem's Marwan Forzley.

The best intentioned efforts to bridge racial or gender gaps, or to create a more inclusive market for a financial project, will likely fail unless there’s careful attention paid to a lack of diversity at the onset.

The Bank of England is reviewing whether it should create a central bank-backed digital currency, according to governor Andrew Bailey.

As a cryptocurrency entrepreneur who helped launch Stellar and Dogecoin, Marshall Hayner has long been interested in finding a way to use blockchain — the digital ledger technology originally developed for Bitcoin — to solve some of the data privacy issues relating to payments.

A blockchain-based digital dollar deserves serious consideration if only because its adoption would mark the beginning of a modern, more efficient government payment structure, says Polyient Labs’ Jeff Hinkle.

For the next several decades, more and more assets will be managed through blockchain, and the world of digital assets will thrive, says DeFiner.org's Jason Wu.

We need to think more systematically about monetary structures and the control of monetary policy, says Cosmos co-founder Ethan Buchman.

Fully decentralized digital currencies have far greater protection against total mismanagement and corruption of capital. Blockchain technology makes it practical for even state-controlled blockchains to make inflationary measures fair, says Nash's Fabio Canesin.

Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology embodies a unique set of properties that enable a rapid response toolkit for governments in times of crisis, says CoinFlip's Daniel Polotsky.

Avivah Litan, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, explains the evolving role blockchain has taken during the coronavirus pandemic. Blockchain, originally developed for use with bitcoin, provides a way to bring trust and order to the chaos of the current crisis, but it's no silver bullet.

Katie Haun, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said that in 10 years money will be digital, the same way books and music are today -- and that efforts such as Libra, which the venture-capital firm has invested in, will be key to getting there.

Visa’s proposed serialization of the digital dollar will further intensify the debate over privacy issues raised by central bank digital currencies, says Seccurency's Patrick Campos.

As the idea of central bank digital currencies starts to gain traction, the U.S. in particular needs to pay attention or risk losing a major aspect of its geopolitical power, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co.

A transparent, decentralized ledger will speed up payments while mitigating the inevitable next round of federal mismanagement, says Polyient Labs' Jeff Hinkle.