Asian Search Engine & Chat App Giants to Use Blockchain-based IDs + More News

Adoption Bitcoin Bitcoin Cash Blockchain Coronavirus DeFi

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Sead Fadilpašić

Journalist

Sead Fadilpašić

About Author

Sead specializes in writing factual and informative articles to help the public navigate the ever-changing world of crypto. He has extensive experience in the blockchain industry, where he has served...

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Last updated:

June 26, 2023 06:55 EDT

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Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.

Blockchain news

• South Korean internet giants Naver and Kakao will begin accepting blockchain-powered digital driver’s licenses as a form of ID and authentication on their platforms. Per Media SR, the Ministry of Science and ICT has granted both companies “temporary permission” to use the police force-issued, blockchain-based PASS platform in conjunction with their offerings under regulatory sandbox rules. Naver is the biggest search engine in the country, with a range of other business interests, while Kakao operates KakaoTalk, the nation’s largest chat app, in addition to banking, blockchain and financial services.
• Haidian District, Beijing, has unveiled the nation’s “first blockchain-powered governmental affairs terminal,” per China’s Securities Daily. The media outlet stated that the touchscreen device is still something of a prototype, but allows residents of the district to access blockchain-powered government services using a blockchain network. In the future, the terminal – and others like it – will allow citizens to apply for agricultural business licenses, renew their passports, access healthcare-related services, and change their legal addresses.

COVID-19 news

• More coronavirus cases in South Korea have been linked to crypto events, reported KDF News. City authorities in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, said on September 3 that a 50-year-old individual was infected with the virus after attending a “bitcoin investment lecture” held at a building near Bucheon Station, also in Gyeonggi Province, on August 28. A number of cases in the country have been traced back to public crypto-related social gatherings in recent weeks.

Exchanges news

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a privacy-focused civil liberties group, asked major crypto exchange Coinbase to release regular transparency reports on government requests for user data and the exchange’s responses, adding that these decisions shouldn’t be made in the dark. Per a blog post, “EFF has become increasingly concerned that payment processors are being asked to turn over information on their customers, without any mechanism for the public to know who is making those requests, or how often.”
• An early Binance investor, Weixing Chen, is looking to to sue this major crypto exchange, claiming that it’s mispricing his equity valuation, undervaluing its shares to avoid making a large payment, reported WuBlockchain. Allegedly, Chen purchased 5% of Binance’s shares, investing over USD 3.5 million, when the company was starting in 2017, and when Binance marked itself at a USD 70 million valuation.
• LedgerX, an exchange for bitcoin (BTC)-based derivatives, has received approval from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission to clear fully collateralized futures and options in addition to the previously authorized swaps, on products besides digital assets. This marks the exchange’s move into a more traditional financial area.
• Singapore Exchange Ltd. is creating two new cryptocurrency indexes – SGX’s iEdge Bitcoin Index and iEdge Ethereum Index – “with the goal of setting the pricing standard for Bitcoin and Ethereum in Asia,” wrote Bloomberg. The two indexes will use inputs from exchanges determined by provider of the crypto market data CryptoCompare, while the aim for them is to become reference points for trading in BTC and ETH during Asian hours.

Crypto adoption news

• Bitcoin has “no connection at all to money” and “is unsuited to the world of payments, where certainty of value matters”, according to Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England. However, he added that “stablecoins could offer some useful benefits” and “they must have equivalent standards to those that are in place today for other forms of payment types and the forms of money transferred through them.”
• The US version of banking app Revolut has announced that it now supports litecoin (LTC) and bitcoin cash (BCH). This means that US customers of Revolut can now trade four cryptocurrencies, including BTC and ethereum (ETH).

DeFi news

• Major decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Aave announced the arrival of RealT market to the Aave Protocol. Per the blog post, following the last week’s launch of Aave V2, the colaboration between Aave and RealT, a project tokenizing real estate on Ethereum, is one of the new features that will bring mortgages onto Ethereum.