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I am thinking about creating a website that will reduce the risk of getting dumped.

This website will let you and your partner submit a relationship deposit into a joint cyptocurrency account. To withdraw your relationship deposit, this account will require that both you and your partner enter your separate private passwords.

From Website will help to reduce risk of getting dumped:

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London’s Volt is the latest to catch the investors’ eye, having raised a $23.5m Series A, led by EQT Ventures, with the aim of aggregating this new payment method into one global network. It’s the largest European Series A round in open banking to date.

Other London-based companies to raise in the space are fellow newcomer Trilo, which just raised a £1m pre-seed round, and Banked, which has raised $12m to date and is currently raising again (largely from US investors) to build out its ‘Pay by Bank’ facility.

Each of them lets users make account-to-account (A2A) payments at the checkout using open banking, following in the footsteps of localised initiatives like Sweden’s Trustly (now a multibillion-dollar frontrunner) and Ireland’s Nuapay.

These newcomers are betting that cards have had their heyday, arguing that they are expensive, clunky, and also risky (card fraud in Europe hit $1.55bn last year).

From Can these payment startups rival Mastercard and Visa? Investors think so | Sifted:

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Competition is heating up elsewhere too. The early open banking players like Tink, Plaid and TrueLayer — who began by offering data connectivity  — have now all quickly begun branching into the payments space.

From Can these payment startups rival Mastercard and Visa? Investors think so | Sifted:

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Leading Chinese banks have introduced digital yuan withdrawals at more than 3,000 ATM locations in Beijing. Residents of the capital city will now be able to exchange their e-CNY funds for cash and vice versa.

From Over 3,000 ATMs in Beijing Offer Digital Yuan Withdrawals – Bitcoin News:

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Shop Pay increases checkout speed by 4x, but that’s not all. We, on the Financial Solutions team at Shopify, love our numbers, so we decided to dive a bit further into Shop Pay and its performance on checkout… Our study showed that checkouts going through Shop Pay have an average checkout-to-order rate of 1.72x times higher than those going through regular checkouts.

From Shop Pay: The Best-Converting Checkout on the Internet (2021):

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the National Crime Agency (NCA) estimates the total annual cost of serious organised crime in the UK economy to be around £37 billion, “so the cost of complying is not too far behind the cost of the crime itself.”

From AML regulations driving up compliance costs across UK:

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For three years until his departure in January, Simon McLaren served as the director of communications for Blade, the urban-aviation startup that went public earlier this year at a valuation of more than $800 million. His work in that time was largely what you’d expect of a company spokesperson — except for the fact that Simon McLaren doesn’t actually exist.

After Insider sought to verify McLaren’s identity, Blade CEO Rob Wiesenthal acknowledged in an interview that McLaren was a made-up persona invented by him and his colleagues and that Wiesenthal masqueraded as McLaren in telephone conversations with news outlets. The ruse lasted for years, duped numerous journalists, and included a puzzling public drama around McLaren’s purported departure from Blade. None of it was real.

From Helicopter App Blade Used a Fake Spokesperson for 3 Years.

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Criminals may have stolen as much as half of the unemployment benefits the U.S. has been pumping out over the past year, some experts say.

From Half of the pandemic’s unemployment money may have been stolen – Axios.

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Dinero Electrónico was a mobile payment system developed by the Banco Central del Ecuador that allowed citizens to transfer USD balances in real-time from person to person using basic cell phones. The program operated between 2014 and 2018. Key drivers of the program were increasing financial inclusion and reducing the need for the central bank to hold and distribute large quantities of USD notes. We discuss reasons why the program was ultimately discontinued, including opposition to the program from private banks, and outline lessons learned.

From Dinero Electrónico: The rise and fall of Ecuador’s central bank digital currency – ScienceDirect:

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I’m certain ransomware victims and their insurers would pay $1 million to a service that would undo a $5 million payment

From How to Start Disrupting Cryptocurrencies: “Mining” Is Money Transmission – Lawfare:

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