· March 12, 2018 · 1:30 pm
Controversial Monaco Debit Card Progresses After 2 Years Of Delays
Controversial bitcoin debit card issuer Monaco has finally begun closed beta testing after almost two years of development.
MCO Token Spikes After Months Of Tracking bitcoin
Originally founded in June 2016, Monaco promises cryptocurrency spending at “perfect interbank exchange rates” but faced controversy after failed deals and drastic reworking of its product offering late last year.
Now, the company’s MCO token has regained some of the ground it lost since the time of bitcoin’s own all-time highs in December, reaching $9.10 on Coinmarketcap. It had previously reached almost $19, before dropping to lows of $4.75 February 6 – also in line with bitcoin.
on its sponsorship of the ongoing Money 20/20 event in Singapore, Monaco CEO Kris Marszalek described the unveiling of new products in light of the beta announcement as “revolutionary.”
“Together, they form a complete suite of revolutionary financial products and position Monaco as the first global financial institution built on blockchain, as well as, a destination platform for anyone interested in cryptocurrency,” he said.
A promotional video about the features will be seen by “100 million plus people in 2018,” Marszalek added on .
Dodgy Visa Partnerships And Price Crashes
Monaco’s path to release has been troublesome. In October 2017, Bloomberg in which it debunked the company’s repeated claims it had a partnership with Visa.
While Visa Monaco’s offering to Singaporean residents in November, Monaco had said the partnership had been in place since May.
At the same time, a sudden change to the card’s roadmap saw a key feature in the form of smart asset contracts , causing MCO to crash 40%.
The events led to a round of suspicion among cryptocurrency users, with accusations appearing online the product contained .
The cryptocurrency debit card industry as a whole remains a challenging environment this year. On and off-ramps into bitcoin via exchanges are becoming increasingly cost-effective thanks to SegWit implementation, while cardholders continue to pay for the convenience of spending coins under the guise of legacy payment instruments.
What do you think about Monaco? Let us know in the comments below!
Images courtesy of Shuttesrtock, Monaco
Published at Mon, 12 Mar 2018 17:30:47 +0000
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Sandbox for Public Blockchain Projects Launched in China By Wanxiang Group
On May 12, 2017, Chinese Wanxiang Group, a conglomerate with automotive, real estate and financial services holdings, announced the launch of WanCloud, a new blockchain product under its Wanxiang Blockchain Corporation subsidiary in Shanghai.
WanCloud provides an ecosystem for open-source blockchain protocols to be localized and made easily accessible to the Chinese development community and enterprise users. Initial blockchain protocols included in the ecosystem and supported by WanCloud’s infrastructure of developers and consultants are , and .
Part of Wanxiang’s stated goal is to drive the advancement of China’s blockchain ecosystem of developers, startups and enterprises. Speaking with bitcoin Magazine, WanCloud CTO Haifeng Xi described WanCloud as “not just a technical platform; it’s an open innovation platform. WanCloud is essentially a bridge between [the] global blockchain development community and China. We aim to connect the world to the Chinese developer community, Chinese startups and traditional Chinese businesses.”
WanCloud is unique as an ecosystem in that it allows users to work with open-source blockchains more easily and in one place. Unlike traditional Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) providers that have private networks or build on top of one public chain, WanCloud plans to continually introduce the most useful open-source platforms into the WanCloud ecosystem.
Tom Tao, vice president at Wanxiang Blockchain Corporation and head of WanCloud, told bitcoin Magazine that he hoped to “bring as many fabrics as possible into the Chinese community and to drive interaction and even inter-chain collaboration, improving application level innovation for each participating protocol.”
David Johnston, chairman of Factom, and Jed McCaleb, CEO of Stellar, spoke with bitcoin Magazine about why they chose to be a part of WanCloud and how it aligns with their respective companies’ goals.
“WanCloud platform is acting as a bridge between the advanced tech provided by U.S. entities and the huge market of potential users in China,” said Johnston, “providing them a more transparent and secure use case set in important areas like data management and auditing where Factom has core competencies as a platform.”
Zeen Zhang, CEO of Factom China, added, “This partnership is important for Factom China because it will make it easier for our product to reach and serve the needs of the end users in China. WanCloud is really adding value, helping us localize the platform for enterprise users and the large community of developers in China.”
Fresh off the , McCaleb spoke with bitcoin Magazine about WanCloud’s benefits for Stellar’s development.
“Its an exciting development that makes it much easier for people to integrate with Stellar and will enable more experimentation … China is obviously a huge market and almost every partner that we talk to in the world asks us how they can get money either in or out of China.”
Chainbase Accelerator’s New Cohort
In addition to the launch of WanCloud, Wanxiang announced the opening of the second cohort of its Chainbase Accelerator to startups, in coordination with , an Initial Crypto-Token Offering platform based in Shanghai and headed by James Gong, a leading blockchain intellectual and consultant in China and CEO of . Projects accepted into Chainbase Accelerator will have the opportunity to receive technical support and consulting from WanCloud architects.
Yu Cheng, a partner at Chainbase Accelerator as well as the chief product officer at WanCloud, spoke with bitcoin Magazine about Chainbase Accelerator and said that the first cohort was “made up of experts from traditional industries and they saw blockchain [technology] as a way to solve for problems in their industries. We are looking to bring in businesses whose applications are suited for the distributed nature of blockchain tech.” Cheng has coined the term “distributed commercial value” in China to refer to new capabilities that blockchain tech enables.
WanCloud joins a burgeoning group of blockchain subsidiaries for Wanxiang Group under Wanxiang Blockchain Corporation, including consulting and research interests Wanxiang Blockchain Business Innovation Consulting and Wanxiang Blockchain Labs, as well as Chainbase Accelerator and VC arm Fenbushi Capital.
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