Facebook Launches Mobile Payments in Indonesia / Bitcoin Powered Venmo of Africa / U.K., China, and Dutch Digital Currencies

6 min readMay 15, 2020

April 29, 2020

This week in the landscape…

💸 Facebook, three fintech firms in talks to launch mobile payments service in Indonesia

Facebook has planned to collaborate with three digital FinTech firms from Indonesia named Gojek’s GoPay, Grab-backed Ovo, and state-owned LinkAja, aiming at applying for regulatory approval to launch mobile payments in the country. It would become the first such service under the social media giant’s Facebook Pay application allowing users to make payments through various platforms, including WhatsApp and Instagram, if approved by the country’s financial regulator…read more

🇬🇧 United Kingdom’s Open Central Bank Digital Currency Project

The approach towards central bank digital currencies (CBDC) by 235-year-old Bank of England (BoE) outlines an entirely different picture rather than as a stodgy and stuffy institution. However, different emerging payment channels like Facebook’s Libra entering the marketplace, the Bank of England grows concerned that these developments will impact its mission of maintaining monetary and financial stability…read more

📖 8 top fintech VCs discuss COVID-19 trends, signals and opportunities

FinTechs VCs recently surveyed on the state of the FinTech industry, market signals tracking, and opportunity areas within the already-crowded pool of financial services during the COVID-19 pandemic. The collection of themes noted from the investors being followed is investing pace, flight to quality, varied impacts, and uncertainty…read more

📖 Binance Spinoff Aims To Be Bitcoin-Powered Venmo Of Africa

Global tech giants like Facebook compete to bring cryptocurrency-enabled financial services to Africa, a rising tide of indigenous projects, including bitcoin payments app Bundle and musician-entrepreneur Akon’s akoin, are taking steps of their own to leap-frog traditional finance altogether. Bundle joins numerous tech giants working on ventures in Africa…read more

🇨🇳 China’s Digital Currency To Be Given A Test Drive By U.S. Companies

McDonald’s, along with coffee giant Starbuck and Subway, have been named as one of the 19 retail firms and restaurants that will be first to try out China’s Digital Yuan in the new district of Xiong’An. The pilot project is considered to be the next step in China’s DCEP plan, and the PBoC as state-owned commercial banks have already begun developing digital wallet applications and designing the Digital Yuan…read more

📖 Distributed Networks and Finance 2020: Blockchain Grows Up

The hype of blockchain has ebbed in the past few years but its promises are still very real. Cost savings, transparency, and new paradigms for financial services (i.e. new sources of revenue) are closer than most people would imagine — even though countless, over-hyped proofs of concept have led to more reluctance than revenue…read more — by John Wu of AVA

📖 How Blockchain Projects Are Helping In The Fight Against COVID-19

There are groups of blockchain projects that are coming together to fight the battle against COVID-19 and bring back ‘normalcy’ to our world. The different projects are like MiPasa blockchain consortium launched to track COVID and identifying hotspots; COVID-19 Credentials Initiative (CCI) to verify the citizens with blockchain-powered ‘Immunity Passes’; Stanford University’s Folding@home distributed computing project to pool GPU power to search for a COVID-19 cure, and many other projects…read more — by BLOCKDATA

DeFi (Decentralized Finance)

📖 AVA Labs Launches Framework for ‘Internet of Blockchains’

The AVA blockchain protocol has reportedly introduced the framework for a public testnet, mainly referred to as “the internet of blockchains. The key feature of the framework is “empty framework,” allowing interoperability between AVA and any blockchain networks. The main motto is to create an open ecosystem where things of value can be currencies, can be assets, can be gold, can be whatever it may be, are created and shared, and moved around freely.…read more

Source: YouTube

📖 Crypto lender Dharma now allows sending money to any Twitter handle

Dharma has just launched new functionality that allows people to send money to any Twitter handle, even if recipients don’t have a Dharma account. The recipients will start earning interest on it as soon as the money arrives. The company enables users to tap into the Compound’s liquidity pool rather than offering a platform built on its proprietary smart contract…read more

📖Bloom Integrates with Chainlink to Bridge Traditional & Decentralized Finance

📖 DForce Loses 99.95% of Funds in Latest Test of DeFi’ Resilience

📖 Introducing oracles.club — by Ashwin Ramachandran & Tom Schmidt

📖 DeFi Is Exposing Inadequacies of Cold Storage, Says Crypto Custodian

📖 The oracles in the DeFi world — by DeFi.cx Staff

📖 Launching DeFi Smart Account — by Sowmay Jain of InstaDApp

Digital Currencies / Stablecoins

Continuing the expansion of highlighting the activity around Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and Stablecoins. While this section may not always appear, this week had a lot of activity.

💸 Dutch Central Bank ‘Ready to Play a Leading Role’ with Digital Euro

The Dutch central bank has released a report stating that it was “ready to play a leading role” with research and development into its own digital currency as well as a Europe-wide digital currency. The bank considers money as a risk both physically due to the transmission of COVID-19 and financially with an uncertain economic future as the race for CBDCs accelerates…read more

🇨🇳 Bank of China Expands Tests of New Fintech Regulation to Six More Cities

💸 The Stablecoins Movement — Toward Stability in Crypto Assets

📖 Facebook-backed digital currency project Libra has a new member- Checkout.com

More For Your Week:

📖 Ottawa student’s money-transfer app making waves in fintech world- Dunia Payment

📖 AVA Labs Will Splash Millions to ‘Brain Merge’ DeFi and Traditional Finance- AVA

📖 How Blockchain Projects Are Helping In The Fight Against COVID-19- BLOCKDATA

📖 Third Time’s the Charm? First Came ICOs, Then Came The DAO, and Today It’s The LAO

📖 Coinbase Custody to support Celo Gold (cGLD), Filecoin (FIL), Keep Network (KEEP), NEAR Protocol (NEAR) & Polkadot (DOT)

📖 Artificial intelligence can take banks to the next level

📖 7 VCs look into the future of fintech

📖 Bancor’s Upcoming V2 Upgrade to Solve ‘DeFi’s Dirty Little Secret’

📖 Bitcoin Stock-to-Flow Cross Asset Model — by PlanB

📖 First Public Bitcoin (BTC) Fund in Toronto Trades 163,716 Shares in One Day

📖 BitPay broadens crypto payment options with Binance stablecoin

🎙️ State of the Blockchain Industry Q1 2020:

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