Zumo’s virtual card ‘provides crypto comfort’ – Daily Business
Modulr partnership
Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have boomed
Zumo, the Edinburgh-based crypto wallet, has launched a virtual card allowing users in the UK to make purchases at any online retailer which accepts Visa.
The virtual card is the result of a partnership between Zumo and digital payments platform Modulr which provides the underlying payments infrastructure upon which Zumo builds and enhances its services.
The partnership with Modulr was announced last year and allowed Zumo to develop a seamless cash-to-cryptocurrency payments system complete with sterling functionality.
Later this year, Zumo will also release a physical convertible contactless debit card which can be used at shops or any other place which accepts VISA.
The release of the card comes during a cryptocurrency boom and a worldwide societal shift towards online shopping. In the UK alone, online sales grew by 74% year-on-year in January 2021.
The Zumo app converts Bitcoin or Ether to pounds sterling – or vice versa – whilst the virtual Visa card lets clients in the UK spend their pounds. The Zumo wallet is non-custodial, which means that only customers have access to their private keys.
Speaking about this landmark moment for the brand, CEO Nick Jones said the launch of the virtual card was a “huge step forward” that will help people get comfortable with crypto.
“Our customers can now easily buy, hold and exchange cryptocurrency in the Zumo app, whilst spending cash using a Visa debit card.
Nick Jones: ‘a huge step forward’
“We hope that the familiarity of a debit card will help to introduce new people to cryptocurrencies and help their ascent into the mainstream. Zumo’s Virtual Card bridges the old world of traditional money with the new world of smart money.”
Nick Adams, chief customer officer at Modulr said, “Modulr is proud to be the payments partner of choice for Zumo. We’re excited to work closely and collaboratively with Zumo to support their innovation and look forward to working with them to expand consumer choice in the marketplace with their Zumo Virtual Card.”
Modulr is authorised and regulated by the FCA as an Electronic Money Institution, and so can issue sterling accounts with dedicated account numbers and sort codes. As a direct participant of the Faster Payments and Bacs schemes, they hold and settle funds at the Bank of England.
Bitcoin vs. Ethereum: Which crypto is the better 2021 investment?
National Review
A peer-reviewed study published this month in the academic journal Sociology of Religion finds a paradoxical correlation between the growth of Christianity on the one hand and the support given to it by the state on the other. As the study’s authors detail in a piece for Christianity Today, their “statistical analysis of a global sample of 166 countries from 2010 to 2020 [finds] that the most important determinant of Christian vitality is the extent to which governments give official support to Christianity through their laws and policies.” But, they say, the relationship between the two is the opposite of what Christians might expect: “As governmental support for Christianity increases, the number of Christians declines significantly. This relationship holds even when accounting for other factors that might be driving Christian growth rates, such as overall demographic trends.” It turns out that Christianity spreads most successfully in countries with a legal commitment to religious pluralism and countries that actively discriminate against the Christian faith. In their piece for Christianity Today, the authors, Nilay Saiya and Stuti Manchanda, provide a list of the nations in which Christianity is spreading at the quickest rate: Top 10 Fastest-Growing Christian Populations (Low/no official support for Christianity in bold) 1) Tanzania 2) Malawi 3) Zambia 4) Uganda 5) Rwanda 6) Madagascar 7) Liberia 8) Kenya 9) DR Congo 10) Angola Many religious thinkers on the American right have expressed grave concern over the past decade about the decline of Christianity nationwide. Most of them seem to believe that the increasing indifference and/or hostility toward Christians and their values on the part of the federal government has been a cause, and not just a symptom, of Christianity’s decline. The small group of reactionary academics warming their hands around the fires of Catholic integralism, for instance, argue that the failure to marry the power of the church with the power of the state is, in fact, the main cause of the decline. But the list above would appear to suggest otherwise. Those who favor a closer relationship between Christianity — or at least “Christian values” — and the state might reply to Saiya and Manchanda by pointing out that the countries listed above are in such a fundamentally different situation than Western nations that they don’t have much to tell us about the fate of Christianity in the West: These are pre-Christian countries undergoing mass evangelism, not post-Christian countries that were evangelized centuries ago and are falling away from the faith of their fathers. Perhaps then, the exercise of government power in defense of Christianity is necessary in the West to arrest the decline of an already-established faith? This appears to be the view of thinkers such as Rod Dreher. Mr. Dreher has made the study of Christianity’s decline in the West his life’s work. He’s also written often of his admiration for the Orbán regime in Hungary, which aligns itself very self-consciously with a muscular, conservative Christianity and often uses state power to defend Hungary’s “Christian values.” He’s not the only prominent Christian thinker in the West to express sympathy for Orban’s Fidesz party, either: The British theologian John Milbank has argued that “we too readily accuse Poland and Hungary of authoritarianism. Liberals underrate the degree to which their leaders have to take a strong approach both to resist the residual power of corrupt ex-communist crony networks and to prevent their cultures being undermined by consumerism.” Given the Christian bona fides that these men and others like them attribute to Orbán and his party, it’s interesting to note just how quickly Christianity is declining in Hungary. Here, per Saiya and Manchanda, are the countries in which Christianity is shrinking at the fastest rate: Top 10 Fastest-Declining Christian Populations (Moderate/high [official] support for Christianity in bold) 1) Czech Republic 2) Bulgaria 3) Latvia 4) Estonia 5) Albania 6) Moldova 7) Serbia 8) Germany 9) Lithuania 10) Hungary What are we to make of Hungary’s inclusion on the list? Even without considering the nature of Christianity in and of itself, there are several possible explanations for the negative correlation between state support of Christianity and the growth of the faith. It’s long been known by economists, for instance, that government subsidies to industries or companies often make their recipients less dynamic and productive by reducing the need to compete for customers. Similarly, state sponsorship of or support for a given religion might tend to make that religion less competitive in the market of creeds than it would otherwise be. It’s also true that a close alignment between Christianity and a given nation-state can often obscure the difference between the two. To say that Hungary is “officially Christian” is to create a semantic space in which it’s easy to mistakenly see being a Christian and being a Hungarian as the same thing. In this respect, it’s worth noting just how many of the countries on the second list above are officially Eastern Orthodox. In the Orthodox countries of Eastern Europe, the intertwinement between church and state is so deep that it’s common for the religion itself to be referred to as “Russian Orthodoxy,” “Serbian Orthodoxy,” or “Romanian Orthodoxy.” In such an environment, Christianity might come to seem like nothing more than an accessory to one’s national identity, at which point the faith can easily be discarded as a relic of nationalism in an increasingly globalized world. And, of course, there is the sense in which state support for Christianity binds the religion’s credibility to that of the government that claims to represent it. Last year, I wrote about the consecration of the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces in Moscow as the supreme example of this kind of “Christian nationalism.” In that piece, I argued that Christianity and political power are, or should be, as oil and water to one another: The passion of Jesus Christ as presented in the four gospel accounts is the ultimate overthrow not only of the power of the Roman Empire or of Second-Temple Judaism, but of power itself. It destroys the idea at the heart of all the world’s great empires: that salvation for the human race is found at the tip of the sword, in the coercive exercise of one will over and against another. Christianity makes the willing and submissive execution of a criminal at the hands of the state the center of the universe. And it sees in His resurrection the founding of another country from which all coercion is excluded, of which all people are citizens, and upon whose claims on human conscience, action, and belief no earthly magistrate can infringe. Christianity claims that the power of God is a power that excludes coercion. State power, by contrast, is nothing other than coercion. This is why the great Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev described the Kingdom of God as being characterized by “anarchy,” meaning the absence of domination. It should not surprise us that whenever Christian churches forsake the way of the cross for the way of the sword, their witness withers on the vine. It was with this kind of political apostasy in mind that Dostoevsky, the greatest of all Christian writers, lamented the kind of Christian who “has fallen for Satan’s third temptation,” embracing the idea “that Christ cannot reign without an earthly Kingdom.” All earthly states are, ultimately, destined to sink beneath the sands of time. Churches that anchor themselves to these states for salvation and survival are sure to sink along with them.
Dogecoin gives away the crypto game
It has often been hard to make sense of financial markets in 2021. First there was the 1,500 per cent rally in flailing video game retailer GameStop, then there was the $100m valuation of a New Jersey deli, and then there was a 15,000 per cent surge in dogecoin, a cryptocurrency designed as a joke.
“Do you want Tesla to accept Doge?” the electric car company’s chief executive and self-styled “technoking” Elon Musk asked his Twitter followers on Tuesday. The tweet was just the latest of several Musk shout-outs to the digital coin, which is based on a meme showing the face of a Shiba Inu dog overlaid with an imaginary inner monologue: “Wow”; “so scare”; “keep ur hands away from me”.
Dogecoin functions the same way as bitcoin — it’s a digital token underpinned by a decentralised network of computers that process and keep track of transactions via a digital ledger called a blockchain. But unlike the original cryptocurrency, whose backers use highbrow arguments to justify and shore up its value, dogecoin has been a joke from the outset.
Yet while few people are claiming that dogecoin will “democratise finance”, or become “the global reserve currency”, or fundamentally change the world, since its creation in December 2013 it has hugely outperformed bitcoin. While the latter has climbed a remarkable 7,700 per cent during that period, dogecoin has rocketed by an almost unfathomable 200,000 per cent.
In other words, if you wanted to make some money on crypto over the past seven-and-a-half years and chose to buy bitcoin rather than dogecoin, the joke’s sort of on you.
Dogecoin gives the lie to the idea that we should take bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies terribly seriously. While crypto evangelists might want everyone to buy into the notion that bitcoin is going to take over from the dollar one day, and that we all need to hold some of it in order to protect ourselves from the evil central bankers who want to inflate away the value of our money, the reality is that their arguments are largely just a self-interested attempt to boost the price of cryptocurrencies.
Much like a pyramid scheme, those who got in early on bitcoin have a huge financial incentive to draw in others by any means necessary. But while getting rich is clearly the main motivating factor — and some people have indeed managed to become incredibly rich from crypto — it is not the only one.
Buying into crypto should be considered akin to gambling and, like gambling, people get into it not just because they might make money, but also because it’s entertaining. It’s no coincidence that cryptocurrencies and “meme-stocks” have surged in a year in which much of the world has been locked up indoors. It is the result of what Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine has called the “boredom markets hypothesis”.
Crypto trading is often more accessible than gambling, particularly in places where betting is heavily regulated, such as in the US. It allows buyers to feel like they’re in some kind of tribe. And while the “LOL” factor might not be considered a traditional metric for working out the value of an asset, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be: clearly, the extent to which it is fun to buy into something has an impact on how much it is bought, and nowhere can that be seen more clearly than in dogecoin.
The joke-coin makes a mockery of the idea that crypto investing should be considered a serious pursuit. Its very existence undermines the notion that bitcoin derives value from its scarcity. While bitcoin’s total supply will eventually be capped at 21m, as written into its original source code, there is no limit to the number of copycat cryptocurrencies that compete with it — there are now almost 10,000, and dogecoin itself has no hard supply cap.
Dogecoin’s success makes just as much sense as the rest of the crypto market — people buy into these coins because doing so is exciting, it gives them something to do and discuss with their friends, and of course because it can allow them to make a quick buck. But perhaps it can also allow us to stop taking the crypto project quite so seriously. While we’re at it, we might do the same with the stock market.