When America was young, it would take weeks or even months to travel from coast to coast, a journey that was fraught with danger and peril at every turn. These days, the entire trip takes six hours from door to door.
Today, we add yet another name to our list of bankers and financial institutions who’ve recently turned bullish on bitcoin, a firm who has been around for all of America’s greatest innovations. …
One of the world’s most prominent custodians of money has made executive-level decisions to start treating cryptocurrencies just as they might treat any other currency or financial asset. Obviously, this is easier said than done.
Former Acting Comptroller of the Currency Brian Brooks did make some headway during the Trump Administration, making it easier for financial institutions to hold and transfer cryptocurrencies, but of course there’s still lots of work to be done on the regulation side.
At the moment, it’s probably easier for most banks to operate in the old fashioned way, simply because usage of digital assets is a regulatory gray area, especially in the United States, and who wants to consult 13 lawyers before making a simple transaction.
However, the longer these assets are around, the easier it gets to use them. The more financial institutions who pioneer this mindset and plough forward through the red tape, the more convenient it will become for both them and us to transact freely in the digital economy.
Master path beater
One of the companies going to extreme measures to display their agnostic stance on currencies is Mastercard (MA), who was again in the news today with this headline. …
We already know that Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal are all racing to get as many crypto related services online as soon as possible, but I’m not sure what we’re able to learn from this latest announcement.
They already offer a credit card that lets people transact using their digital currencies, so now it seems they’ll make it easier for merchants to accept them. Honestly, this seems like a recycled headline to me. We’ll just need to wait and see exactly how easy they make things and apparently, which cryptos they embrace will also be of some importance.
We can probably infer from the wording of the article that Mastercard will try and play king maker by selecting the cryptos that they like.
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And we all know how much cryptos tend to pump when they’re added to Coinbase.