Prosecutors suspect Wirecard was looted before collapse
German prosecutors suspect Wirecard was looted before its collapse in June, with $1bn funnelled to opaque partner companies even as the payments group fought allegations of accounting fraud. The embezzlement is suspected to have taken the form of unsecured loans, which Wirecard claimed were for advance payments to merchants processing card transactions through its partners in Asia. These loans, made to partner companies in Dubai, Singapore and the Philippines, are a focus of the investigation against former chief executive Markus Braun and other senior ex-employees.
Mobile DeFi and the Shift Toward Self-Sovereignty
“Adoption of cryptocurrencies thus far has been in spite of — as opposed to because of — user experience. For example, hardware wallets like Ledger and Trezor were groundbreaking first steps in user custodianship, but they are intended for use with a desktop or laptop computer. In a world becoming rapidly more and more mobile, what good is a USB-like hardware wallet for storing private keys offline if users will be regularly transacting on a mobile device? Hardware wallets should be as simple as a card kept in a pocket, perhaps even resembling a familiar product like a credit card.”
Decentralized Tech Will Be Ready for Humanity’s Next Crisis
“The global need for scalable, usable decentralized information technologies has never been more acute than right now, mid-pandemic. Forced digitalization is driving most of the world’s population further into the grip of big tech companies. As more of life goes online, more of the world’s data goes into their hands, and a higher percentage of human thoughts and behaviors are guided by their self-serving algorithms. We should have a global, decentralized system for collecting medical, movement, interaction and lifestyle data from everyone on the planet – and methods to analyze it in a secure, anonymous way. Statistical and AI analysis should be guided democratically by everyone contributing data. While policy could be set by sophisticated agent-based modeling leveraging this data, without sacrificing privacy.”
Posted from Diigo: https://www.diigo.com/user/kiffmeister/Fintech
