Bitcoin News Today TheBitTimes.com

Circle recently announced its Circle Payments Network, which leverages USDC for cross-border payments. If that pitch sounds a lot like Ripple’s XRP-based payments network, RippleNet, that’s because it’s meant to. The giant crypto incumbents are direct competitors for the world’s most valuable settlement rails: sending USD value between banks using cryptography. Circle has its $61 billion USDC, and Ripple has its much smaller, albeit equally compliant, RLUSD. Both companies also have partnerships with banks and payment providers, with Circle boasting over 500 alliances and Ripple claiming to work with thousands . Crypto exchanges report about $55 million worth of RLUSD volume over the last 24 hours. That is 99.4% less than Circle’s $9.8 billion for its much larger USDC. Tearing a page right out of Ripple’s XRP marketing playbook, Circle bemoaned cross-border payments taking “longer than one business day to settle and costing more than 6%.” Just like Rippl...

The co-founder of Aptos (APT) believes that the layer-1 crypto project is on the verge of massive mainstream adoption. In a new interview with crypto influencer Scott Melker, Aptos CEO and co-founder Mo Shaikh says that the speed of the Aptos network makes it a highly attractive blockchain for payments. He also says that Aptos’ new cold storage wallet card designed to hold a user’s digital asset portfolio could make crypto payments more mainstream. “I think in one to two years we would love to see card and mobile wallet penetration increase to greater than 20% of all cardholders or mobile phone devices. That would be something we would be incredibly proud of, and we’re very close to that.” He compares the Aptos project to the early days of technology companies that later became giants in the tech industry. “No different than Facebook grew like wildfire to competitors like TikTok grew like wildfire, we’re right there, rig...