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And so if you are a regional or national retailer who wants to offer gift cards, you have a choice. You can dedicate a team of internal lawyers and operations specialists to understanding both what the laws of the several states require with respect to gift cards, which are a tiny portion of your total operations, not merely today but as a result of the next legislative session in Honolulu, because you absolutely must order the software written to calculate the payment to remit accurately several quarters in advance of the legal requirement becoming effective. Or you can make the much more common choice, and outsource this to a specialist.

That specialist, the gift card program manager, will sell you a Solution™ which integrates across all the surfaces you need: your point-of-sale systems, your website, your accounting software, the 1-800 number and website for customers to check balances, ongoing escheatment calculation and remittance, cash flow management, carefully titrated amounts of attention to other legal obligations like AML compliance, etc. Two representative examples: Blackhawk Network and InComm Payments. You’ve likely never heard of them, even if you have their product on your person right now. Their real customer has the title Director of Payments at e.g. a Fortune 500 company.

From: The gift card accountability sink.

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Currently, prediction markets are under the jurisdiction of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is in charge of issuing federally regulated licenses to them (event contracts are considered a form of derivatives, which the agency is in charge of regulating). Sportsbooks are regulated by states, where they typically face broader, stricter rules such as supporting the prevention of gambling addiction.

(Sports contracts make up 70% of Kalshi’s trading volume.)

From: Sports Betting Everywhere: Prediction Markets Explode — The Information.

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Global payments network and shopping assistant Klarna has launched the Agentic Product Protocol, a new open standard designed to bridge the gap between e-commerce retailers and the rising wave of artificial intelligence (AI) agents.

For merchants, the protocol is designed to minimize technical uplift. Through Klarna’s hosted API, businesses can integrate their product data once and make it accessible to any AI agent or platform that adopts the standard.

Crucially, the system is compatible with existing feed formats, including Google Merchant, Shopify, Amazon, Facebook Catalog, and standard CSV/JSON files. This means retailers do not need to reformat their data or create new listings to participate.

From: Klarna Launches ‘Agentic Product Protocol’ to Make 100m Products Readable by AI | The Fintech Times.

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Moreover, open digital societies are more exposed to outside manipulation than those that shelter behind an internet firewall. Is Big Brother better suited to exploiting the era of Big Data, AI and social media?

From: SpyGPT will shake James Bond’s world.

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DraftKings, one of the two largest online sportsbooks in the U.S., launched its own prediction market yesterday, with rival FanDuel pledging to do the same this month. Crypto exchange Coinbase launched a prediction market on Wednesday, joining its peers Robinhood and Crypto.com, which introduced their own prediction markets in late 2024.

Not everyone is thrilled about the explosion of prediction markets. Operators of traditional casinos believe the markets are undercutting their business and skirting state and tribal regulations. And some sports leagues are spooked by the looser federal oversight of prediction markets compared to other forms of betting, which could increase the risk of point shaving by players or other potential scandals.

From: Sports Betting Everywhere: Prediction Markets Explode — The Information.

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They broke into the couple’s home wearing balaclavas during the night of December 17-18. In Dompierre-sur-Mer, a town near La Rochelle ( Charente-Maritime ), three assailants forced a cryptocurrency investor and his partner to transfer approximately 8 million euros in cryptocurrencies to them, according to the Rennes prosecutor’s office on Friday.

More specifically, according to our information and that of the specialized media outlet The Big Whale , the assailants broke into the home around 5:00 a.m. There, they tied up the woman and her partner, beating the latter for nearly two hours. The group then achieved their goal: the couple finally agreed, under threat, to transfer cryptocurrency, an amount estimated at 8 million euros by the prosecutor’s office.

Once the attackers had left, the two occupants, “very shaken,” finally managed to free themselves and alert emergency services, according to a statement released by the Rennes prosecutor’s office on Friday. The man was hospitalized, but his condition was not life-threatening. His potential inability to work has not yet been assessed.

The facts suggest that this is “a structured criminal team,” according to the prosecutor’s office. The investigation, which includes charges of “organized extortion” and “kidnapping,” has therefore been entrusted to the Specialized Interregional Jurisdiction (JIRS) of Rennes, responsible for combating organized crime in western France.

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The man worked in the cryptocurrency sector, a police source indicated. An electronic wallet containing cryptocurrency was also stolen, according to the same source.

From: Eight million euros in cryptocurrency stolen: what we know about the kidnapping of a couple near La Rochelle – Le Parisien.

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China is enthusiastic about stablecoins and keen to exploit the advantages of token technology, such as programmability, transparency and efficiency, but only within closed and permissioned systems. It wants stablecoins, but only stablecoins that it can control. The result, as Dr. Monique Taylor (a Lecturer in World Politics at the University of Helsinki) notes in her article in the East Asia Forum is a sophisticated digital finance infrastructure that is “advanced in design but constrained in reach”.

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Discussing the final volume of his masterpiece The City of London, which deals with the period 1945-2000, David Kynaston has observed that the City people in that book are more boring than in earlier volumes because all they do with their lives is work in finance.

From: John Lanchester · For Every Winner a Loser: What is finance for?.

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On Friday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) approved five national trust charter applications:

First National Digital Currency Bank – a subsidiary of Circle, issuer of USDC
Ripple National Trust Bank – issuer of RLUSD
BitGo Bank & Trust – offers white-label stablecoin issuance
Fidelity Digital Assets – back in March, the Financial Times reported that Fidelity was “in the advanced stages” of testing its own stablecoin
Paxos Trust Company – issuer of USDP as well as PayPal’s PYUSD and the Global Dollar USDG; offers white-label stablecoin issuance.
The last three are conversions from state charters.

From: New charters and banking upheaval – by Noelle Acheson.

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Translation: lots of companies will issue stablecoins. Most won’t matter.

What matters is the infrastructure that makes those stablecoins useful. The custody layer. The conversion layer. The compliance layer. The API layer. The settlement layer that connects to existing banking infrastructure. The prefunding layer that eliminates capital inefficiency.

From: Stablecoins’ Infrastructure Moment.

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