Cryptocurrency News Roundup | August 20— August 26
Welcome to the PlayChip blog cryptocurrency news roundup, where you can keep up to date on all of the weeks important cryptocurrency and blockchain related news.
Social Giant Facebook Could be Looking to Implement Cryptocurrencies
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced back in January that he would dedicate time during 2018 for researching cryptocurrencies. The social media mogul believes that the emerging blockchain technology could kickstart efforts by Facebook, which aims to catch up with Chinese competitors WeChat and Alibaba.
Adoption of NFC payments in China has vastly exceeded western adoption rates. China’s largest social media platforms have capitalised on their position to become the preferred payment app for mobile commerce, with WeChat Pay and AliPay enjoying a 92% market share for mobile wallet payments, a market which is estimated to consist of over 500 million users.
Zuckerberg hopes to close the gap on foreign competitors by enabling payment processing and digital currency transactions to be handled within the Facebook ecosystem.
This week the Facebook founders sister Randi Zuckerberg joined The Houbi Cryptocurrency exchange as an adviser. She will sit on the Huobi Chain Expert Advisory Committee which was convened to offer the digital asset exchange counsel with regards to the governance and development matters of Huobi Chain.
VeChain Tamper-Proof NFC Chip and Vaccine Provenance
The DeStift blog detailed a huge new development this week for the VeChain supply chain management blockchain. VeChain have developed and begun testing their Near-Field Communication (NFC) chips in the wild.
Users are able to scan the VeChain NFC chips using a smartphone app which then returns detailed product information. This information includes details about all stages of the products journey from the manufacturer to the distributor and on to retailer.
Supply chain management tokens aim to provide consumers with increased trust by ensuring that products they have purchase are genuinely produced by the manufacturer on the label and to ensure that their products have been brought to market via legitimate distributors.
The VeChain team continues kicking goals, with Nasdaq reporting this week that the Chinese FDA has engaged with VeChain to propose a solution for tracking vaccines to ensure environmental factors, which can potentially render a vaccine impotent, have been sufficiently controlled. The effort is a response to a scandal in July when China’s second largest manufacturer of rabies vaccine was forced to halt production due to violations of standards and practices which could lead to ineffective and even potentially dangerous vaccinations being administered to Chinese children.
If successful the program would likely see increased deployment and could perhaps even be used to give Chinese retail buyers the confidence to source locally manufactured baby formula, leaving some for the rest of us.
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Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
