Weekly news review

🙌🏻Hey, enthusiasts

Today we present you a pre-holiday review of the most interesting news of the week.

💳 Mastercard payment giant is exploring smart contracts and other tools that can be used to expand the capabilities of central banks ‘ digital currencies.
Mastercard President Michael Mibach said the company is working with governments and central banks around the world to help them move forward on this issue.

Mastercard specialists are convinced that smart contracts can simplify the functioning of state-owned stablecoins, so they began to study how they can be better implemented in the payment infrastructure.

💳In turn, the CEO of the payment company Visa, Alfred Kelly, said that they are also actively interested in the cryptocurrency industry and are working on at least five initiatives in this area.

Whether the payment company “Mir” will study crypto-tools is not yet known, besides, it is forbidden to pay for goods and services with cryptocurrencies in our country.

🚕 But in the UK and the Scandinavian countries, even taxis will start accepting payments in cryptocurrencies. For this purpose, a special protocol and gateway using the Ethereum blockchain will be used. Beta testing of the solution is planned for November 2021. In the future, the platform will work with any blockchain that supports smart contracts.
By the way, the DecimalChain blockchain supports smart contracts, but this will not help Russian taxi drivers.

🏫 The University of Wyoming will spend $4 million to launch nodes in three PoS blockchain networks.

The University first uses the proceeds from the stake to cover operating expenses, and then to pay $4 million to the state’s investment fund. After the return on investment, the profits from the stake will be distributed “to support blockchain programs and activities at universities and colleges across the state”.

Russian universities could follow suit and, for example, put a Validator in the DecimalChain network.

👻And a few horror stories: the project of decentralized finance Uranium Finance, working on the Binance Smart Chain, was hacked and hackers stole various tokens for $50 million.

It is suspicious that the code of smart contracts was deleted in the repository of Uranium Finance on GitHub, so that the hacking could be either a planned action by the project organizers themselves, or the work of an insider. Just a week ago, another DeFi protocol called EasyFi was hacked. Hackers received $6 million worth of tokens.

🌱Wish you good news only!