In other news, blockchain company Binance has acquired a digital wallet and Visa debit card platform Swipe, according to an announcement. As of now, Swipe supports an array of digital assets that stay in their native format up to the point of a transaction. At that time, the digital asset is changed over to fiat and put through the payment rails of Visa. Binance CEO Champing Zhao (CZ) said in the announcement, “By giving users the ability to convert and spend crypto directly, and have merchants still seamlessly accept fiat, this will make the crypto experience much more satisfying for everyone.” Swipe, for its part, is available in 31 countries in the European Economic Area. Binance said the card lets cryptocurrencies stay in their “native form” up to the time that a point-of-sale (POS) transaction takes place. The company said users who are in places where the card is not available can note their interest via a web page set up for the product.
Regulators are taking in an interest in stable coins, with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) noting in a report the digital currencies need to adhere to norms to offer protection from the terrorism financing and money laundering, Bloomberg reported. As a result, exchanges, and those who help them, will probably need to authenticate user identities and follow other digital asset procedures that FATF put forward in 2019. Stable coins like tether were created in the wake of pronounced swings in the value of digital currencies. The FATF report, for its part, was made for central bank governors and G-20 finance officials. Chainalysis Global Head of Policy and Regulatory Affairs Jesse Spiro said per the report, “My assumption would be that FATF will update guidance in relation to stable coins in the near future.”
In other news, digital asset modeling language (DAML) smart contract language maker Digital Asset has notched VMware as an investor in its Series C round, which had been unveiled in December of last year, according to a blog post. DAML, for its part, is a structure for making connected programs that “span data silos and trust boundaries,” per Digital Asset.
Digital Asset teams with companies to connect DAML smart contracts with their blockchain, cloud, or database infrastructure. The firm’s partners offer business integrations with modern technologies like VMware Blockchain to let teams create new offerings. The news comes more than a year after Digital Asset had unveiled a partnership with VMware in April 2019 to connect DAML with the VMware Blockchain.
Yuval Rooz, co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset, said in the blog post, “Digital Asset’s partnership with VMware provides a truly enterprise-grade blockchain offering that meets the requirements of even the most demanding use cases across a range of markets.”
Digital Asset also announced that Brendon Howe, VMware Block chain’s vice president, and general manager, also became a part of the firm’s board of directors.
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