A library of snippets
xxx
Sweden-based BNPL provider Klarna has chosen UK-based fintech GoCardless to offer bank debit payments to its US customers.
Klarna will use GoCardless for its Pay in 4 offering and its financing solution.From Klarna partners with GoCardless to facilitate expansion in the US – ThePaypers:
xxx
With all the exciting talk about the metaverse and web3, I am sure that many organisations are beginning to adjust their medium-term strategies to see how they might take advantage of the opportunities afforded by this emerging infrastructure and the genuinely new economy that it promises.
Personally, I don’t think it takes that much of the crystal ball to determine the valuable positions in the downstream value network. This is not because I am a forecasting genius with an unimpeachable track record of mystic metaverse prognostications but because the key players have already told us what it is going to be and since they are billionaires and I have not, I’ve been listening to them.
Nicola Mendelsohn, Meta’s VP of Global Business, talked about virtual shopping during at the 2021 Bloomberg Technology Summit saying that a limitation of commerce today is that “you actually have to go to the shop” to see the clothes whereas in the metaverse you could being able to “actually try on those different things, albeit virtually.”. This doesn’t strike me as particularly innovative vision of future commerce: After all, people having been trying on virtual clothes for years. But as Kurt Wagner pointed out when commenting on this, what is actually exciting in this new kind of commerce that will emerge: not buying clothes for yourself but for you avatars. Not digitised commerce, like buying clothes online instead of in a store, but digital commerce. He goes on to say (correctly, in my opinion) that the opportunities will expand as people begin to create a digital identity that travels with them across different experiences and that “it’s very likely that Facebook could be the place users create and maintain that virtual identity”.
In an economy where the existence of property and the ownership of the property are the crucial enablers, there should be no surprise that managing the fundamental link between them should be so critical. That link is identity. In the pre-industrial world we went from an identity based on personal relationships, kith and kin, into in Industrial Revolution and urban anonymity that demanded an identity provide by public and private institutions. This led to the business environment founded on the state provision of identity (and, as a corollary, the exclusion of those without a state identity) that we have today. But in the future reputation economy, we’ll go back to identity based on relationships. Hence it’s no wonder that Meta expect to play a key role there.
If we look at some of the other people selling shovels in the web3 gold rush, we see a similar vision of the future. Coinbase wants a piece of the metaverse just like everyone else. But how interesting it is to see that instead of building its own virtual world, it is focusing on how to manage people’s identities within this immersive internet and building “an identity on-ramp” into the metaverse through its work with the Ethereum Name Service (ENS). ENS is a protocol based on the Ethereum blockchain that allows you to obtain a unique username (think “vitalikbuterin.eth”) that can be linked through their digital wallets.
(Linking these identities with standardised verifiable credentials will, I think, really radically change the way we live and work online. Imagine being able to configure your world so that your avatar would only see other avatars of real people and not bots!)
It’s almost as if identity in the metaverse is the new money in the metaverse.
I was listening to the “Pomp” podcast in which he interviewed David Marcus. Mr. Marcus is an experienced and innovative player in the digital finance game who most recently had led Meta’s push into a digital currency. That project, initially called Libra, was later rebranded Diem after facing pushback from regulators and later abandoned, but there’s a lot to learn from it (and from David). Anyway, it was an interesting discussion and I have to say that I was surprised when at one point in the interview Mr. Pompliano said he thinks that people have “underestimated” the importance of the wallet.
(I have certainly never fallen into this category and my analysis of the launch of Facebook’s “Libra” initiative, as it was initially called, was that the play was all about the wallet: the day it was announced I said that “identity is at the heart of the Libra proposition, if you ask me”.)
xxx
e were not, and are not, as good as AWS at running infrastructure. Once upon a time, we all ran our own data centers, and they went down a heck of a lot more often than Amazon’s do today. AWS is sufficiently excellent at the operational side of its business that significant outages are rare enough to be headline news around the world. This is a good thing!
The caveat, however, is that your risk is now concentrated. When your bank’s data center went down, that used to be a bad day for your bank, but it was survivable because the other banks in town probably weren’t affected. Today, when AWS has a bad day, it’s not just your bank or my bank—it’s all the banks everywhere.
xxx
xxx
ointing to China’s experience, she said Russia needed a further adjustment of cryptocurrency regulation.
In September, China intensified its crackdown on cryptocurrencies with a blanket ban on all crypto transactions and mining, hitting bitcoin and other major coins and pressuring crypto and blockchain-related stocks. read more
Meanwhile, the Bank of Russia is planning to issue its own digital rouble, joining the global trend to develop digital currencies to modernise financial systems, speed up payments and counter a potential threat from other cryptocurrencies.
From Russian central bank to seek ban on investment in cryptocurrencies | Reuters:
xxx
xxx
JPMorgan is nearing a deal to pay a $200m fine and admit that it failed to properly monitor employees’ messages
From JPMorgan nears $200m settlement over failure to monitor traders’ chats.
xxx
xxx
The partnership will connect over 30 Dutch banks, accounting for 99.5% of all online payments in the Netherlands, and 114 French banks accounting for more than 90% of French bank accounts.
David-Jan Janse, CEO of SurePay, says: “Since implementing our Iban-Name Check for banks and corporates in the Netherlands in 2017, our customers have witnessed an 81% drop in reported scams and a 67% drop in misdirected payments. The natural next step was to make our solution available for cross-border payments.”
From Confirmation of Payee goes cross-border for Dutch and French banks.
xxx
xxx
Default passwords for internet-connected devices will be banned, and firms which do not comply will face huge fines.
From Huge fines and a ban on default passwords in new UK law – BBC News.
xxx
xxx
Amazon Web Services (AWS) was down for tens of thousands of users worldwide on Wednesday morning, which took down several popular websites including Netflix, Doordash and Hulu, marking the second time in a week the cloud hosting service has failed.
xxx
xxx
The article goes on to talk about how common these sorts of attacks are. The basic problem is that the code is the ultimate authority — there is no adjudication protocol — so if there’s a vulnerability in the code, there is no recourse. And, of course, there are lots of vulnerabilities in code.
To me, this is reason enough never to use smart contracts for anything important. Human-based adjudication systems are not useless pre-Internet human baggage, they’re vital.
xxx
xxx
200,000 tonnes of state-supplied foodstuffs were pilfered using fraudulent ID numbers, diverting rations away from the needy and on to the open market.
From Is the UK ready for the future of digital ID? – Raconteur:
xxx
Snippings