Month: September 2021

Elon Musk has performed a sudden U-turn on bitcoin over concerns about its energy usage, and says his electric car firm Tesla will no longer accept the cryptocurrency as payment – but will his decision have an impact, and could Tesla turn to an alternative currency?

Tesla bet big on bitcoin earlier this year with a $1.5 billion investment, and it paid off: Bloomberg estimates that the company made $1 billion on its purchase in the first quarter of 2021.

At the time, Musk was criticised for investing in the cryptocurrency, with many people pointing out that the environmental damage caused by its large electricity usage was at odds with Tesla’s apparent green credentials.

Now, Musk seems to have reached the same conclusion, tweeting on 12 May that Tesla would suspend bitcoin sales because of concerns about “rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel”.

“Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at great cost to the environment,” he added.

Source: Tech Crunch

PayPal has two decades of experience in online payments and manages 403 million user accounts. So, it caused ripples when it announced on 23 August it would allow UK customers to buy and sell four cryptocurrencies: bitcoin prices rose to a three-month high. But will this – and last October’s roll-out in the US – push cryptocurrencies into the mainstream, or is it just another blip in the short but volatile history of decentralised money?

Customers in the US who have bought cryptocurrencies through Paypal log in twice as often as those who haven’t, says Jose Fernandez da Ponte at PayPal. “We expect digital currencies to play an important role in consumer payments over the longer term,” he says.

Public interest in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is certainly growing, but only a minority have bought in. A YouGov survey revealed that by August 2019, just 3 per cent of people in the UK owned any cryptocurrencies. By July 2021 that had risen to 8 per cent.

Giving millions of existing PayPal customers the ability to buy at the click of a button has enormous potential for increasing those numbers, but access to the currency isn’t the only limiting factor. People need a way to spend it.

A handful of large companies, such as Microsoft, have begun accepting bitcoin as payment, and others such as electric car company Tesla have done so at times too. And while several other retailers, including grocery stores, coffee shops and hardware stores, have systems to accept cryptocurrency in some countries, using only this form of payment day-to-day would be no easy task.

Source: Tech Crunch

Mastercard unveiled on Tuesday a buy now, pay later (BNPL) program that will allow consumers to pay for online and in-store purchases through equal and interest-free installments.

The Mastercard Installments program will be available in markets across the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, the company said.

Mastercard says its Installments program builds on Mastercard’s investments in open banking that help deliver a simple and convenient experience for consumers, merchants and lenders.

As an elective option for lenders, with consumer consent, account-level transaction histories can be considered as part of the underwriting process, enabling credit to be safely extended to a greater number of shoppers. Open banking technology also facilitates the consumer’s preferred method of repayment, which may be their checking or savings account, a Mastercard debit card, or another payment product.

Key benefits of Mastercard Installments include:

• Consumers: The Mastercard Installments program enables consumers to choose how and when they pay for items from a brand they can trust. Consumers enjoy a seamless experience before and after checkout through options to access BNPL offers, or secure an offer at the time of checkout, from trusted lenders for use at a variety of merchants interest-free. As consumer protection is paramount at Mastercard, Mastercard Installments provides ubiquitous acceptance backed by zero liability fraud protection, not yet available through most current BNPL offerings.

• Merchants & Acquiring Banks: The Mastercard Installments program helps merchants scale BNPL offerings to consumers to turn convenience into a competitive advantage. BNPL solutions have been shown to increase average sales by 45 percent and reduce cart abandonment by 35 percent post-implementation*. Mastercard Installments provides seamless merchant integration with a streamlined process for millions of merchants who already accept Mastercard. Meanwhile, acquiring banks can offer installments capabilities to their entire merchant base with minimal, simple integration.
• Lenders: Through the Mastercard Installments Program, lenders can offer a flexible, seamless BNPL experience to both existing and new customers, expanding their lending opportunities in one of the fastest growing consumer segments. Mastercard Installments provides an expedited time to market and global expansion opportunities with a responsible lending approach.
• Wallets and BNPL players: Digital wallets and BNPL players can easily integrate Mastercard Installments’ APIs and deploy the solution to consumers and already integrated merchants, extending reach beyond their existing footprint. Mastercard Installments is embedded in the core Mastercard network, which means there is no longer a need for wallets and BNPL players to build direct settlement arrangements with merchants or acquirers. BNPL providers can also supplement their existing networks with additional merchant acceptance.

Fueled by changing consumer spending habits during the pandemic, BNPL adoption continues to accelerate globally. In addition to consumer demand, the momentum is being driven by issuer and merchant desire to deliver new, complementary ways for consumers to shop both in-store and online.

The company also said it will work on the BNPL program with banks and fintech firms, including Barclays’s U.S. unit, Fifth Third Bancorp, Marqeta, and SoFi Technologies, in the United States, and Qantas Loyalty and Latitude in Australia.

Source: Tech Crunch

As Merck and Pfizer prepare to report clinical trial results for experimental COVID-19 antiviral pills, rivals are lining up with what they hope will prove to be more potent and convenient oral treatments of their own.

Enanta Pharmaceuticals, Pardes Biosciences, Japan’s Shionogi and Novartis said they have designed antivirals that specifically target the coronavirus while aiming to avoid potential shortcomings such as the need for multiple pills per day or known safety issues.

Infectious disease experts stressed that preventing COVID-19 through wide use of vaccines remains the best way to control the pandemic. But they said the disease is here to stay and more convenient treatments are needed.

“We need to have oral alternatives for suppression of this virus. We have people who aren’t vaccinated getting sick, people whose vaccine protection is waning, and people who can’t get vaccinated,” said Dr. Robert Schooley, an infectious diseases professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

Pfizer and Merck, as well as partners Atea Pharmaceuticals and Roche AG have all said they could seek emergency approval for their COVID-19 antiviral pills this year.

Rivals are at least a year behind. Pardes began an early-stage trial last month, Shionogi plans to start large-scale clinical trials by year-end, Enanta aims to start human trials early next year and Novartis is still testing its pill in animals.

Enanta Chief Executive Jay Luly said re-purposing drugs originally developed for other viral infections is not an unreasonable approach. But it is not known how potent they will be against COVID-19 or how well they can target lung tissue, where the virus takes hold.

The risk is “if it’s not a great effort …you’ll end up losing time,” Luly said.

Antivirals are complex to develop because they must target the virus after it is already replicating inside human cells without damaging healthy cells. They also need to be given early to be most effective.

Currently, intravenous and injected antibodies are the only approved treatments for non-hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

An effective, convenient COVID-19 treatment could reach annual sales of over $10 billion, according to a recent Jefferies & Co estimate. Merck has a contract with the U.S. government that implies a price of $700 for a course of treatment with its antiviral molnupiravir.

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Several classes of antiviral drugs are being explored. Polymerase inhibitors such as Atea’s drug – first developed for hepatitis C – aim to disrupt the ability of the coronavirus to make copies of itself. There are also protease inhibitors, like Pfizer’s pill, which are designed to block an enzyme the virus needs in order to multiply earlier in its lifecycle.

We are trying to halt the processes “that allow the virus to set up a replication factory,” said Uri Lopatin, CEO at Pardes, which is also developing a COVID-19 protease inhibitor.

Merck’s molnupiravir, developed with Ridgeback Therapeutics, was at one point envisioned as a flu drug and works by introducing errors into the genetic code of the virus.

“The broad spectrum activity of molnupiravir against RNA viruses, including other respiratory viruses, suggests that it should be a durable, useful molecule,” said Jay Grobler, who oversees infectious disease and vaccines at Merck.

Merck said data shows the drug is not capable of inducing genetic changes in human cells, but men in its trials have to abstain from heterosexual intercourse or agree to use contraception.

Until reproductive toxicology study results are available, “we don’t know if there’s any potential effect of drug on sperm,” said Merck research executive Nicholas Kartsonis.

Both molnupiravir and Pfizer’s pill are taken every 12 hours for five days. Pfizer’s drug must be combined with older antiviral ritonavir, which boosts the activity of protease inhibitors but can cause gastrointestinal side effects and interfere with other medications.

“It is a nuisance to add a drug you don’t need to have a drug you want to take be effective,” Schooley said.

Pfizer said a low dose of ritonavir will help its protease inhibitor remain in the body longer and at higher concentrations.

Enanta, which gets most of its revenue from a hepatitis C deal with AbbVie Inc, scanned its library of antiviral compounds early in 2020. It instead chose to design a new protease inhibitor that targets an enzyme vital to the ability of the coronavirus, and its variants, to replicate.

The drug will be tested at once daily dosing with no ritonavir boosting, Luly said.

Lopatin said Pardes is assessing once- and twice-a-day dosing and whether its drug needs to be combined with ritonavir. “We do not anticipate that we will need to use a booster,” he said.

Pardes received funding from Gilead Sciences, which gave up on an inhaled version of its remdesivir, an intravenous polymerase inhibitor approved for hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

Gilead is still working an oral remdesivir, which was also first developed for hepatitis C and is currently the only antiviral approved for treating COVID-19.

Source: Tech Crunch

China’s Alibaba has begun offering payment services from Tencent’s WeChat on a number of its apps, after the government ordered major tech firms to stop blocking each other’s services and links.

Local tech blog 36Kr reported on Tuesday that users of Alibaba’s food delivery app Ele.me, luxury goods app Kaola and e-book app Shuqi can now purchase goods via WeChat Pay, one of China’s most popular online payment options.

Alibaba’s used-goods marketplace app Xianyu and supermarket app Freshippo have also applied for WeChat Pay integration, the tech blog said.

Alibaba confirmed the contents of the report to Reuters. Previously, the main way users could make payments on those apps was via Alipay, from Alibaba’s financial affiliate Ant Group.

Earlier this month, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said it had asked internet companies to end a long-standing practice of blocking each other’s links and services on their sites. Such practices prevented app users from seamlessly jumping to services between rival companies.

Days later, Tencent’s WeChat messaging app started allowing users to access links to rival platforms. Previously, it had not allowed users to click on links sent via chat to, for instance, product listings from Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace.

The changes come as authorities continue to tighten regulation in the internet sector.

In April, antitrust regulators fined Alibaba a record $2.75 billion for anti-competitive behaviour.

Source: Tech Crunch

A small-scale clinical study of the combined use of the AstraZeneca and Sputnik Light vaccines against COVID-19 has shown strong antibody growth in a majority of the study’s participants, the Russian Direct Investment Fund said on Monday.

The data was collected from 20 people who took part in a 100-person study in Azerbaijan that began in February. They first received the AstraZeneca shot followed by the one-dose Russian-made Sputnik Light shot 29 days later, RDIF said.

“According to the results of the interim analysis, a fourfold or higher increase in neutralising antibodies to the spike protein (S-protein) of the SARS-CoV-2 was found in 85% of the volunteers on the 57th day of the study,” RDIF said.

Source: Tech Crunch

When one thinks of vampire bats, friendship and cooperation may not be among the qualities that come to mind for these blood-feasting creatures of the night. But maybe they should.

Scientists have provided a deeper understanding of social relationships among vampire bats, showing how those that have forged bonds akin to “friendships” with others will rendezvous with these buddies while foraging for a meal.

Researchers attached small devices to 50 vampire bats to track nighttime foraging in Panama, when these flying mammals drink blood from wounds they inflict upon cattle in pastures. The study involved female bats, known to have stronger social relationships than males.

Among the bats were 23 wild-born individuals that had been kept in captivity for about two years during related research into bat social behavior. Social bonds already had been observed among some of them. After being released back into the wild, the bats were found to often join a “friend” during foraging, possibly coordinating the hunt.

“Each bat maintains its own network of close cooperative social bonds,” said behavioral ecologist Gerald Carter of the Ohio State University and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, who led the research published in the journal PLoS Biology.

Social bonds among vampire bats as they roost in trees include grooming one another and regurgitating blood meals for hungry pals. The study showed that the social bonds formed in roosts extended into the hunt.

“This study opens up an exciting new window into the social lives of these animals,” Carter said.

The researchers suspect that the bats, while almost never departing on foraging forays with their “friends,” link up with them during the hunt – perhaps even recognizing one another’s vocalizations – for mutual benefit. They hypothesize the bats might exchange information about prey location or access to an open wound for feeding.

Vampire bats, which inhabit warmer regions of Latin America and boast wingspans of about 7 inches (18 cm), are the only mammals with a blood-only diet. They reside in colonies ranging from tens to thousands of individuals.

“People’s first reaction to vampire bats is usually, ‘Uh, scary.’ But once you tell them about their complex social lives, they are quite surprised that we can find such behavior that is somewhat similar to what humans do – and which one would maybe expect in primates – in bats,” said study co-author Simon Ripperger, a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute post-doctoral researcher.

Ripperger called them “amazing creatures” for several reasons.

“Even besides their social lives, vampire bats are quite special: specializing in a diet of 100% blood is already quite rare among vertebrates,” Ripperger said. “They are amazing runners, which you wouldn’t expect in a bat. They have heat sensors in their snouts that help them find a spot to make a bite. They have a protein in their saliva that prevents blood from coagulation, which is actually being used in medical trials to help prevent blood clots in patients who suffered a stroke.”

The bats attack prey from the ground, using their sharp teeth to open a wound, lapping up blood with their tongues.

Carter said there is reason to fear vampire bats because they can transmit rabies to livestock and people.

“But I do think they are beautiful and interesting animals in their own right,” Carter added. “In this way they are a bit like grizzly bears, sharks, rats and venomous snakes: animals that might not help people in any way and might even endanger them, but should still be appreciated for their own sake.”

Source: Tech Crunch