Innovation can come from unlikely places. Five years ago, few would have guessed that the most widely available mobile wallets would be developed by companies like Starbucks and Google, which built their names in completely different fields. Several more disruptors are joining the scene, with even weirder origins.

Mt. Gox, the Tokyo-based digital currency exchange that filed for bankruptcy protection last month, said it had located about 200,000 of the 850,000 Bitcoins it said had gone missing.

International Bitcoin businesses have been sizing up the African market for some time, but they face massive regulatory hurdles throughout much of the continent.

Treasury's Bank Secrecy Act Advisory Group will include a member of the virtual-currency community to help make regulations "better informed and more effective," David S. Cohen, the undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said today.

One of Bitcoin's scariest traits is the digital currency's chaotic price fluctuations, making many consumers afraid of losing money if the price abruptly plummets.

There's a new Bitcoin wallet and vault provider in town, Xapo, launched by payments veteran Wences Casares with $20 million in funding from investors.

Becoming a licensed money transmitter throughout the U.S. is a time intensive and costly process many Bitcoin businesses are struggling with. But the costs of compliance could be cut substantially with the proactive step of hiring in-house compliance officers.

Digital currency exchanges may soon file formal proposals and applications to operate under regulations set by the New York State Department of Financial Services.

Mt. Gox, the Bitcoin exchange that filed for bankruptcy in Tokyo after millions of dollars' worth of virtual currency vanished from customer accounts, won a temporary halt to lawsuits it faces in the U.S.

The Bitcoin Foundation appointed Jim Harper, a former lobbyist for eBay Inc.'s PayPal service, to be global policy counsel as the group seeks to persuade governments to let people use the virtual currency.

A 64-year-old physicist, identified by Newsweek magazine as Bitcoin's creator, was chased by reporters through Los Angeles and denied any role in the digital currency, saying he first heard of it three weeks ago.

Bitcoin's mysterious inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, has apparently been discovered by Newsweek reporter, Leah McGrath Goodwin. And I'm torn.

Ripple Labs, which facilitates payments in mainstream and virtual currencies, is creating a developer portal and supporting a new accelerator. Already its efforts have made it possible to connect the Ripple payment network to websites that run on Magento's e-commerce platform.

Flexcoin, a Bitcoin bank, was forced to shutdown after hackers stole 896 units of the digital currency, the Guardian newspaper reported.

Pock.io is allowing consumers in the U.K. to buy gift cards from large merchants such as Apple by using Bitcoin and other digital currencies.

Payments played a major role in the 2014 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Here are some of the biggest announcements that came out during the conference, and a few from just before or afterwards that were no less important to the mobile payments community.

Some governments are getting into the digital currency game, offering their own alternatives to cash with traits that differ in meaningful ways from cross-border cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen said today that the central bank does not have the power to supervise Bitcoin, the most widely-recognized digital currency.

The Royal Canadian Mint, which casts coins for the Canadian federal government, has started a pilot test of its MintChip digital currency. Through these tests, the Mint must make clear what this new currency is and what it is not.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) wants federal regulators to ban Bitcoin.