More The US regulatory body for state banking has filed a lawsuit against the federal government for granting bank charters to fintech companies. The complaint calls into question the leniency of fintech “sandbox” charters. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), an arm of the US Department of the Treasury, has awarded these special charters to many blockchain- and cryptocurrency-centric companies. The body states that the suit is an effort to protect consumers from “predatory...

More IBM has won two patents for a system that verifies the integrity of a blockchain, certifying that it has passed certain audit requirements at particular periods in time. Both patents were approved on May 31 and are related in that they describe certified, audit-able “checkpoints.” The main goal of the checkpoints is to allow businesses to satisfy regulations for data verification and retention when connecting to the network. The first patent explains the single point of a checkpoint and...

More Bitbond, an online bank founded in Germany in 2013 by German Radoslav Albrecht, has found an innovative use case for bitcoin’s borderless nature: international loan payments. It was the first to use bitcoin to transfer credit in currency internationally, not only as loan collateral, and it’s currently processing about $1 million in loan payments per month. As the company explains on its website: “By innovating in the fields of payments and credit scoring, Bitbond makes financial...