It’s been said that new year predictions are little more than “mental junk food.” They’re designed for publicity—the bigger and more outlandish the better—and people who make them are seldom held accountable. A long time frame allows the prognosticator to repeat the same bold forecast for years. So let’s have a look at a bold call that was published a year ago: 80% of incumbent financial firms will be “irrelevant” by 2030, a Jan. 29, 2018 report by the global research firm Gartner claimed....

Shares of Square, the increasingly bank-like tech company run by part-time Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, have been on a blistering run over the past year, gaining more than 200%. The stock was soaring even before the news in November that Square Cash app users would be able to buy and sell bitcoin; this week, it blew past those earlier highs and set a series of new records. The company’s growth has also been powered by bank partnerships that perhaps resemble what JPMorgan and Amazon (paywall) are...

Swift is pretty much the opposite of a hip, fintech company: The banking cooperative’s services went live some 40 years ago and are part of the global payment system that some crypto entrepreneurs and investors are seeking to disrupt. A looming rival is Ripple, which has signed up more than 100 members and is testing its blockchain-inspired technology with financial institutions around the world. As the competition grows, last year Swift launched what it says is its biggest overhaul in...

There’s a lot of debate about whether governments will eventually adopt the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. Venezuela—reeling from US and European sanctions, collapsing oil exports, and hyperinflation that could climb to 13,000%—may be the first to actually try it. The South American country is due to launch a first phase of its state-created cryptocurrency today (Feb. 20), and President Nicolas Maduro’s government has said the “petro” will help Venezuela raise cash...

Silicon Valley’s dream of a stateless digital currency for payments goes back to the early days of internet entrepreneurship, just before the turn of the century: Peter Thiel has said PayPal, the highly successful payment company he co-founded, fell short when it comes creating the “new world currency” it once envisioned. Bitcoin comes closer in some ways to realizing that goal, yet one of the technology sector’s most ambitious startups says the cryptoasset still has serious...