Mario Cotillard

An international bitcoin startup is bringing bitcoin remittances to new countries and demographics with a new enterprise remittance solution leveraging bitcoin.

Bitcoin merchant network Coinify has acquired payment processor Coinzone, for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition makes Coinify one of the leading bitcoin merchant firms in Europe, one of the strongest regions for digital currency adoption.

Swiss multinational bank UBS recently launched the Future of Finance Challenge, “We invite you to take part in a global competition to seek out innovative ideas and disruptive technologies to[ transform the banking industry](https://innovate.ubs.com/challenges/).”

Japanese bitcoin exchange bitFlyer raises  ¥510,000,000 ($4M USD), from investors including the venture capital arm of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc, the second largest publicly traded Japanese company.

Every online store using the ecommerce platform will now be able to accept bitcoin through CoinBeyond’s merchant payment processing solution.

Decentralized prediction market platform, Augur, will launch a 45 day crowdsale for 8.8 million public Reputation (REP) tokens, on August 17.

Cardless payments startup, CodaPay, has partnered global bitcoin firm Luno (formerly BitX), to become the first major company to offer merchants bitcoin processing for merchants in Southeast Asia.

The World Economic Forum’s Innovation Committee named Ripple Labs ‘Technology Pioneer,’  making it the first blockchain or distributed ledger startup to receive the award.

The head of innovation at ABN Amro, a bank owned by the Dutch government, recently stated that the technology behind Bitcoin “won’t be an incremental change. It will be a complete paradigm shift.”

The ex-CTO who helped build Stripe, currently valued at $5 billion, has joined Stellars board. The non profits mission is to leverage distributed ledger technology for the development of emerging economies and underserved populations.