Fintech Daily Digest

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has said that the popular messaging platform WhatsApp is not in compliance with the central bank's data localisation norms in India. RBI's comments come as response in an affidavit, reviewed by TOI, filed with the SC on Wednesday after the apex court made the central bank a party to a writ petition in January.

Blockchain payment app MoneyTap, co-developed by Ripple and Japanese financial services giant SBI Holdings, has received investments from 13 local banks, according to an SBI press release published on March 28.

Hong Kong's securities regulator, the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) has issued official guidance on security token offerings (STOs).

Keeping one currency stable against another is easier said than done and algorithms that intuitively seem to work can hide devastating design flaws. Time will tell, but it seems unlikely that these algorithmic stablecoins will be replacing national currencies any time soon.

A global study of 216 exchanges found 69% of them do not have complete and transparent KYC procedures. It also found that only 26% had a "high" level of AML procedures.

EOS, Tron surpass Ethereum in popularity with many developers. Some startups are now issuing tokens on competing networks

Blockchain consortium R3's trade finance platform Marco Polo has completed its first real transactions. Marco Polo, which is built on R3 enterprise blockchain platform Corda, successfully facilitated a trade between Germany and China, involving two German firms.

The Reserve Bank of India is drawing on new technology to support its supervision as it looks to keep up with the proliferation of fintech firms in the country, governor Shaktikanta Das said in recent remarks.

Two cryptocurrency exchange portals, DragonEx and CoinBene, have disclosed hacks this week and have both gone into maintenance mode to investigate and improve their infrastructure. DragonEx is believed to have lost over $1 million worth of cryptocurrency, while CoinBebe's losses are estimated at over $45 million, according to industry observers

WhatsApp Pay is still not compliant with data regulations in India. As per the Reserve Bank of India's norms, payment firms must store all their data locally.

Since ICOs and STOs are clearly here to stay it is worthwhile to take a look at what regulators in Asia are doing in response to this.

Payments giant Western Union (WU) is partnering with Stellar (XLM) collaborator Thunes to enable WU clients to transfer funds directly to mobile wallets globally.

The rise in on-chain transactions per day has been due in large part to VeriBlock (VBK), which secures other blockchains through the "Proof of Proof" (PoP) consensus mechanism.

Coinbase has announced that it is giving away 1 billion Stellar Lumens (XLM) (about $106m) to users that are willing to study the Stellar protocol.

Hong Kong has issued its first batch of digital banking licences, giving a mix of traditional financial institutions and Chinese companies a chance to compete for a $15bn pot of retail banking business in the city.

Bitwise research has found evidence that around 95% of all Bitcoin trading volume has been faked by exchanges. Data from 71 of 81 exchanges exhibited patterns that reflected artificial trading volume.

As Japan moves to shorten its settlement window for cash equities, dealers are hoping that distributed ledger technology can reduce the probability of failed trades between domestic and foreign investors.

"Singapore-based exchange DragonEx says it has been hacked for an undisclosed amount in a number of cryptocurrencies."