• People walk outside of Ria Money Transfer office in Brussels, Belgium on Nov. 10, 2018 (via Shutterstock).
    Technology

    Blockchain must solve last-mile problem to dominate remittance business

    Sending money to relatives in developing countries is growing into a half-trillion-dollar business

    Blockchain-based money transfer services can dominate the international remittance business as it grows into a half-trillion-dollar industry over the next five years. That is the result of a study released Monday by Juniper Research, predicting blockchain technology will revolutionize money transfer if it can solve it’s “last-mile” problem—getting cash to recipients in low and middle-income countries. Those countries currently account for $332 billion in money transfers, much of it sent through traditional firms like Western Union and MoneyGram to unbanked people in third world countries, Juniper said. That will grow to $525 billion by 2024. (The World Bank said that number was much higher, reaching $528 billion in 2018.) According…

  • World Economic Forum sign sticking out of the snow in Davos. Clearly, the party got wild (via WEF).
    Technology

    World Economic Forum puts blockchain at center of ‘fourth industrial revolution’

    Its new Global Blockchain Council is one of six designed to influence the growth of technologies poised to change the world

    Blockchain is one of the six emerging technologies the World Economic Forum believes will change the world so dramatically that they will be a “fourth industrial revolution.”

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    Alt coins,  Asia & Australia,  Bitcoin,  Europe,  Latin America,  Media,  Politics

    Must-reads for August 23, 2018

    Here are the crypto stories you should be watching today

    SEC rejects bitcoin ETFs (CNBC) Crypto bros are used to getting a lot of rejections, especially on Tinder. Now it’s the Securities and Exchange Commission turn, rejecting seven bitcoin-based exchange-traded fund. Bitcoin prices remain above $6,000, perhaps because it was mostly priced in. Obviously, everyone read the Modern Consensus piece about why the SEC shouldn’t approve such ETFs in the first place. A cryptocurrency is making huge inroads in Venezuela as inflation runs wild — and it’s not bitcoin or the petro (Business Insider) Spoiler alert: The cryptocurrency they’re talking about is Dash. Hey, maybe one of the upsides to a regime marked by terror, failed financial planning, corruption, persecution…