A library of snippets
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In 2018, Walmart partnered with IBM to start tracking its produce items through blockchain. The effort began with leafy greens, and in the four years since has added just one more item: green bell peppers.
From Blockchain Fails to Gain Traction in the Enterprise – WSJ:
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The US sources 85 to 90 percent of its detection canines from overseas, particularly from European countries like Germany and the Netherlands. Dogs receive advanced training in a number of subspecialties, including bomb and drug detection and search and rescue. But breeding, genetics, environment, and training during early life are all crucial to producing dogs with the mental and physical characteristics to protect them on the job and enable a good quality of life.
“The canine nose is the best technology we have for locating explosives, so we need to have a very consistent and high-quality source of dogs,” says Sheila Goffe, vice president of government relations at the American Kennel Club. “We used to talk about, ‘Well, what if there’s a global crisis or geopolitical issues, we’re not going to be able to get all of these dogs we’re importing from Europe,’ and then it happened.”
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The best current options for cannabis payment processing are compliant point of banking solutions and ACH.
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Marijuana shops across the US are rushing to find alternative ways for customers to pay after networks that supported a popular workaround to the banking system began to shut down last week
From How to Buy Weed? That’s Changing as Cashless ATMs Close – Bloomberg:
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INSTABILL FEATURES
Instabill is a veteran high-risk provider that offers some payment processing services to medical marijuana dispensaries. The company is very transparent about accepting cannabis merchants, and its website includes specific information about which payment methods are available and which particular business types are supported.
The company currently offers the following payment options:
ACH Transfers: You issue cards that your customers can link to their bank accounts to allow in-store or online ACH payments.
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FedNow
R2P
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Cannabis is $30 billion industry, too often forced to operate in cash, or find work arounds due to compliance issues with using traditional payments rails. In this frank talk with Jessica Billingsly, CEO of Akerna, we will be talking about the ins and outs of payments for cannabis, and ways to open those rails to everyone’s benefit.
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Most individuals who transferred money to crypto accounts did so when cryptoasset prices were significantly higher than recent levels, and those with lower incomes likely made purchases at elevated prices relative to higher earners.
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JPM says:
The intensity of transfer activity at certain points in time, correlated with price movements, suggests herd-like behaviour driving a notable share of individuals’ overall transactions with crypto accounts.
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Binance had paused withdrawals of stablecoin USDC from its platform due to inadequate reserves, but has since resumed processing requests. The interesting part here is not that Binance had to temporarily suspend withdrawals just as rumors around its solvency are swirling in an unusually suspicious market. It’s that it apparently could not convert its stablecoin BUSD into USDC without sending funds to a New York-based bank which was not open at the time of need. Assuming this is true, it does detract from the “instant transfer” promise of stablecoins, and reminds us that traditional financial market structure still plays a significant role in the functioning of crypto markets.
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Binance said in a tweet it is working with accounting firm Mazars on “user fund transparency work and Proof of Reserves updates,” and last week published a proof of reserves report showing customer assets and liabilities for one day in November. But media reports highlighted that the report was not comprehensive enough to show a full picture of the company’s finances.
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The data suggests that FTX’s demise hasn’t been investors’ biggest issue this year. Both the depegging of Terra’s UST token and the collapse a few weeks later of Celsius and Three Arrows Capital (3AC) drove much bigger realized losses for investors: $20.5 billion in the case of UST and a whopping $33.0 billion in the case of Celsius and 3AC, versus just $9.0 billion for FTX.
From FTX Investor Impact: Timeline of Realized Crypto Gains, Losses:
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PayPal has amassed 429 million active accounts. Fifty-eight percent of Americans use PayPal, and in 2021, there were 19.3 billion PayPal transactions. It now has a market valuation of $84 billion.
But the company that was meant to liberate countless individuals is becoming something else.
Increasingly, it is becoming a police officer.
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The Deputy Prime Minister Matthew Salvini defends the raising of the limit for accepting payments with the Pos to 60 euros. “I am a liberal, everyone must be free to pay as he wishes. If one wants to pay two euros for coffee with a credit card, he is just a pain in the ass”, he declared, responding to reporters during a break in the Open Arms process. “I try to pay in cash, because I like going to ATMs.”
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