Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey showed his continued dedication to advancing the cryptocurrency industry by leading a $6 million fundraising round for Azteco, a provider of bitcoin (BTC) vouchers.
Azteco was started in 2014, and the company says it has found a big problem with the way people around the world access banking: more than 2 billion smartphone users can’t use normal financial services.
According to reports recently, the digital asset financial services company HashKey Group plans to raise money at a value of $1 billion. People who know about the situation say that HashKey is in talks to raise between $100 million and $200 million.
Read also: Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey launches alternative App on Android, Bluesky
Bitpay Ends Prepaid Mastercard
Bitpay, a cryptocurrency payments startup based in Atlanta, has ended its prepaid Mastercard programme. This means that Bitpay Mastercard users will no longer be able to use their cards after the deadline.
Bitpay sent cardholders an email and sent out a number of tweets on May 18, 2023, to explain the news. The company has set June 1, 2023, as the last day to load a prepaid card. Customers are asked to stop any automatic payments linked to the card.
Bitpay has declared that the card’s final day of operation will be June 15, 2023, after which it will no longer work.
MicroStrategy App Development using Bitcoin Ordinals
Michael Saylor, co-founder and executive chairman of MicroStrategy, said that the company is aware of Ordinals and is also interested in how the system that has upset the Bitcoin community could lead to new software.
Saylor told Decrypt exclusively at Bitcoin 2023 in Miami that the software company is looking at ordinals and figuring out how they could be used for app development.
Ordinals, which are often used to create NFT-like assets on top of Bitcoin, came out in January. The protocol isn’t widely accepted by the Bitcoin community, but it has sparked a new wave of experimentation with crypto’s oldest coin.
A new invention that uses ordinals is an experimental framework for making tokens on top of Bitcoin. Domo, a pseudonymous fan of on-chain data, started it in early March. Since then, thousands of other so-called BRC-20 coins have been created.
Saylor said that the talk about ordinals is important because “Bitcoin miners have to be successful in the long run.” He also said that making apps that use Bitcoin’s features could help more people, businesses, and governments use the coin.
Saylor didn’t say exactly what use cases MicroStrategy could be looking into that involve ordinals. Still, he said that the ability to add information to Bitcoin’s blockchain that isn’t just linked to transactions has many possible uses.
Saylor said, “The idea of burning a piece of data on the blockchain opens up the possibility that I could burn a digital signature, a registration, or a document’s hash.”
Ex-Twitter CEO
Jack Dorsey helped create Twitter and Square. In St. Louis, Missouri, on November 19, 1976. He learned to program at Bishop DuBourg High School. Because he wanted to do this, he made real-time dispatch software for cab drivers, delivery vans, and fleet vehicles. Software is used by taxi companies.
Dorsey went to Missouri University of Science and Technology from 1995 to 1997. He switched to New York University that year and dropped out in 1999. At NYU, he had ideas that reminded him of Twitter.
Jack Dorsey was a masseur and a clothes designer before he made Twitter.