Solana hits all time high: GoSats launches bitcoin reward card

Transcript

Welcome to The Daily Forkast, August 16th, 2021. I’m Justin Solomon of Forkast.News, covering all things blockchain, filling in for Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau.

Coming up, Solana price hits an all time high. India’s GoSats launches a Bitcoin Reward Cashback card and a new survey shows Asia leads the way on crypto ownership.

Now let’s get you up to speed from Asia to the world.

First up, Solana’s prices surged in the last 24 hours. The spike follows the launch of a new NFT project on Solana’s blockchain – The Degenerate Ape Academy NFT.

Forkast.News, Lucas Cacioli has more.

The Degenerate Ape Academy sold out its collection of 10000 unique ape NFT in just eight minutes over the weekend and added to that Wormhole 2.0, communication bridge between Solana and other top DeFi networks was launched on main net just last week.

It allows tokenized assets to move seamlessly between blockchain. One expert told Forkast.News, such moves are key to the future of DeFi.

“I’m a big believer the long term and interoperability between lots of different chains. I think we will see bridges. So again, it’ll be like users will, will kind of seamlessly kind of transact and migrate between change between chains and my actual long term view as users won’t even know what base layer they’re using.”

Both those moves, saw Solanas price begin to surge that continued into the beginning of the Asian trading week, hitting an all time high of $US64.48 before falling slightly as of 3 p.m. Hong Kong time on Monday.

Solana has now flipped UniSwap to claim tenth spot on the Coin Marketcap crypto rankings. For Forkast.News. I’m Lucas Cacioli.

Meanwhile, in India, a bitcoin cash back rewards card has been launched.

The prepaid debit card allows shoppers in the country to spend rupees but receive rewards in bitcoin.

It’s another move towards wider adoption of crypto assets in India. And it comes at a time when government discussions on cryptocurrency regulations remain at a standstill.

There’s Forkast.News‘ Monica Ghosh with more from Pune, India.

In a tweet, GoStas said the card will allow shoppers to own up to 100% of their spend as bitcoin cash back with the premium gold card, as well as offering the chance to win one full Bitcoin with every transaction on all cards.

GoStats will release 5,000 cards in the first batch, allowing payment with major brands online, including Amazon, Flipkart and Starbucks.

The card is being produced in partnership with the National Payments Corporation of India or NBCI.

The NBCI introduced rupee cards in India, which are similar to Visa or MasterCard, but geared to the local market.

That partnership is interesting, as the NBCI is a non-profit organization that was launched by the Reserve Bank of India and the Indian Banks Association.

The RBI has stated that while crypto currencies are not illegal, it has major concerns over them.

And when the government remains undecided on the future of crypto currencies, Indian companies continue to make strides towards greater adoption. As we saw last week with the introduction of Unocoin crypto gift vouchers.

For Forkast.News I am Monika Ghosh, Pune, India.

And finally today, it looks like Asia rules the school where cryptocurrency adoption is concerned.

According to the latest crypto report from independent product comparison platform Finder, the top five countries for crypto ownership are all in Asia.

Finder survey asked over forty thousand people in 27 countries around the world whether they own crypto, and Vietnam proved to be the runaway winner.
41% of respondents there said yes, they do own crypto.

Interestingly, while the Vietnamese government asked the country’s central bank to study the use of cryptocurrency in July, the state Bank of Vietnam previously stressed they are not legally recognized.

Indonesia, India, Malaysia and the Philippines made up the remainder of the top five, with ownership rates between 28% and 30%. While in the US and UK, those levels are less than 10%.

In a blog post, Binance says drivers for adoption include the ability of stablecoin and the rise of DeFi and NFTs.

But first, South Asian nations international remittance could be the key.

The World Bank says such remittances are larger than all other capital inflows combined. And with digital fund transfers becoming cheaper and more accessible, they are only on the increase.

That suggests crypto could prove a great tool for alleviating poverty.

And that’s The Daily Forkast from our vantage point right here in Asia. For more, visit Forkast.News. I’m Justin Solomon. Until next time.