Digital Currency

• The Home Depot Inc. filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. for alleged lax security practices and a preference for higher-margin signature authentication with EMV chip credit cards over more secure PIN authentication, according to the Associated Press. A MasterCard spokesperson told the AP that …

Long-time payments players who like to scoff at Bitcoin as an unproven payments instrument will have to reckon with the robust vote of confidence buyers and sellers of the 7-year-old digital currency have given it over the past few days. Bitcoin’s U.S. dollar value breached the $700 level late Sunday …

• Visa Inc. said the European Commission, the competition authority of the European Union, approved its planned acquisition of bank card association Visa Europe Ltd.; the $23-billion-plus deal has now received all regulatory approvals, and Visa Inc. expects it to close by June 30. • Visa debuted a payment ring for Team …

Venture funding for payments companies may have slowed dramatically in recent months, but that’s not the case across the board. Bitcoin and blockchain startups in particular uncorked a geyser of cash in the first quarter, with dollars invested totaling $173 million on 39 deals, according to data released this week …

Payments startup Payzing Inc. is banking that a digital-currency integration with Uphold, a virtual funds and commodity platform, will lead to e-commerce success. San Francisco-based Payzing uses Uphold’s blockchain technology to offer online merchants an alternate payment method to traditional credit and debit cards. Consumers use their Uphold accounts to …

BitPay Inc. made its name signing up merchants to accept the bitcoin digital currency, and now it’s adding a reloadable Visa prepaid card to its consumer-facing products. The card will enable users to make purchases at the millions of Visa-accepting merchants as well as the relative handful that accept bitcoin, …

While the payments industry has been buzzing lately with talk about the blockchain, Bitcoin has been reaching pricing levels it hasn’t seen in more than a year. The rally comes amid fresh optimism for a solution to a vexing capacity problem and for the blockchain itself, the distributed ledger that …

· Technology-testing provider UL says its cloud-based payments test suite has been approved by MasterCard Inc. It is used to test MasterCard mobile-payment applications. UL also says it now supports a new type approval program for mobile devices against an EMVCo standard. · TD Bank Merchant Solutions will offer small …

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has skidded about 8% since the end of 2015, putting a scare in investors and prompting talk of everything from a market correction to another recession. Unnoticed, however, is that the price of the digital currency Bitcoin has followed an almost identical path, dropping approximately …

Toronto-based loyalty-services and payments start-up nanoPay Corp. has acquired the MintChip digital-currency platform from the Royal Canadian Mint, the organizations announced Tuesday. The purchase price wasn’t disclosed, but nanoPay says it could be revealed at a later date. MintChip gained fame in 2012, just as Bitcoin and other virtual currencies …