CEO of global payment giant Visa Al Kelly stated that cryptocurrency does not pose a challenge to the company’s dominance in the payment sphere in the “short to medium-term,” in an interview on CNBC's Mad Money Oct. 25. When asked if “crypto [is] a real challenge to Visa’s hegemony in this business,” Kelly told Mad Money host Jim Cramer that it was “certainly not in the short to medium-term in any way.” According to Kelly, crypto needs to “move from being a commodity to really being a payment instrument” before it can become a real competitor to the conventional financial …

U.S. actor and producer Johnny Depp is partnering with crypto-powered social entertainment platform TaTaTu, according to a report by film industry media Hollywood Reporter posted Monday, Oct. 22. As a part of the new agreement, the Hollywood star is going to team up with TaTaTu founder Andrea Iervolino in order to create and produce film and digital content together. According to the article, the content is set to be produced by the Infinitum Nihil film production firm owned by Johnny Depp. Andrea Iervolino, co-founder and CEO of the U.S. movies motion picture conglomerate AMBI Media Group, will be cooperating via …

A former executive at financial services giant Fidelity Investments has been appointed Chief Operating Officer (COO) at blockchain infrastructure firm Bloq, according to a press release Oct. 23. Bloq’s new COO, Hadley Stern, spent seventeen years at Fidelity, which administers over $7.2 trillion in client assets. His most recent role was at the helm of the crypto and blockchain incubator within the company’s innovation lab, Fidelity Labs – overseeing the launch last week of its new crypto-business, Fidelity Digital Assets. Bloq’s co-founder and chairman Matthew Roszak characterized the new appointment as emblematic of the increasing entwinement of the world of …

Global ticketing giant Ticketmaster has acquired blockchain-focused live events firm Upgraded, according to an Oct. 18 press release. Ticketmaster, a division of the world’s largest live-entertainment business Live Nation, plans to use blockchain technology through the partnership as a way to provide more transparency and better control ticket distribution. Additionally, the company hopes it will protect clients from fraud associated with the existing ticketing system, which works in the form of printed or PDF-based tickets. The blockchain live events company Upgraded will enable Ticketmaster to digitize traditional tickets into interactive units protected by blockchain technology via encrypted barcodes. The press …

Major global chip manufacturing firm Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) predicts revenue growth in Q4, but expects a counterbalance due to the low demand for crypto mining hardware, Reuters reports Thursday, Oct. 18. TSMC, the world’s largest independent semiconductor foundry, forecasts “modest” revenue growth in the fourth quarter, mainly due to solid sales of high-end chips for premium smartphones. According to Reuters, TSMC is expecting Q4 revenue to increase to somewhere between $9.35 billion and $9.45 billion, as compared to $9.21 billion a year ago. However, the expected growth will be allegedly offset by the low sales of cryptocurrency mining equipment. …

Payment giants MasterCard and VISA will soon group cryptocurrency and Initial Coin Offering (ICO) jurisdictions in a new “high risk” category, financial trading news site Finance Magnates reported Friday, October 12. According to the Broker Complaint Registry, some details of the shortly upcoming classification by MasterCard had already become public in May of this year. The registry notes that binary options, CFDs, forex, cryptocurrency options, and ICOs will fall under a new category of “High-Risk Securities Merchants” starting on Oct. 12, 2018, and will be subject to additional monitoring. According to Finance Magnates, the grouping means that chargebacks could now …

The team of cryptocurrency project TRON (TRX) has reportedly partnered with China's largest Internet search provider Baidu. Crypto market news service Coinness has claimed this in a tweet Thursday, Oct. 11, citing its private correspondence with TRON’s team. Neither TRON nor Baidu have been able to confirm the partnership to Cointelegraph as of press time. Without specifying the details of the partnership, Coinness has claimed that the deal between TRON and China’s Internet giant Baidu will be “officially” revealed by the cloud storage service Baidu Cloud “next week.” While Coinness claims that TRON has exclusively confirmed the partnership in private …

“Big Four” audit and consulting firm Deloitte has outlined five basic areas of development for blockchain technology in order achieve widespread adoption, according to a study published September 28. According to Deloitte, in order to be adopted by enterprises on a mass scale, blockchain technology should overcome five major obstacles – the possibility of time-consuming operations, lack of standardization, high costs and complexity blockchain applications, regulatory uncertainty, as well as the absence of collaboration between blockchain-related firms. Identifying the area that needs the most development, Deloitte singled out the problem of possible operational delays on a distributed ledger network. The …

U.S. software company Intuit has been awarded a patent for processing Bitcoin (BTC) payments via text message (SMS), according to a filing published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) August 7. The patent, which outlines a system through which users can transfer BTC funds via sending an SMS on their cellphones, was originally filed in 2014, the same year that Intuit’s DIY tax solution QuickBooks partnered with BitPay to create a PayByCoin service for business clients to pay their invoices in BTC. As the patent outlines: “The invention [...] includes receiving, by a payment service from a payer …

Cryptocurrency price manipulation is largely conducted by organized “trading groups” using services such as Telegram, the Wall Street Journal claimed in a study released August 5. Unveiling the results of research into cryptocurrency markets, the WSJ suggested that coordinated “pump and dump” schemes have seen traders inflate and crash the prices of various cryptocurrencies this year. As a result, it says, such groups are generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for themselves, while others get stung by losses once the groups sell off a particular asset en masse. In the first six months of 2018 alone, trading groups …

Starbucks has clarified that it will not be accepting Bitcoin (BTC) or other cryptocurrencies as payment, despite misleading reports from mainstream media, a spokesperson told Motherboard Friday, August 3. Earlier on Friday, New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) operator the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) announced plans to create a new “global platform and ecosystem for digital assets,” dubbed “Bakkt,” alongside a group of big name enterprises including Starbucks, BCG and Microsoft. Following the major announcement, a number of mainstream media outlets, including Bloomberg and CNBC, ran misleading headlines –– such as CNBC’s “New Starbucks partnership with Microsoft allows customers to pay for …

Multinational investment bank Morgan Stanley has hired a self-described crypto trading expert and 12-year veteran of Credit Suisse as its new head of digital asset markets, eFinancialCareers reported July 31. The new appointment, Andrew Peel, spent his last three years at Credit Suisse as vice president of sales and trading innovation, in which role he acted as “trading subject matter expert for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies” according to his LinkedIn profile. His page also includes an independent position as “advocate of crypto markets” as of June 2013. Nabbing a crypto enthusiast for its team aligns with Morgan Stanley’s evolving stance towards …