据Ripple的博客3月6日报道，日本银行联盟将在2018年秋季使用Ripple的技术发布即时国内支付移动应用“MoneyTap”。
Ripple表示，由SBI Ripple Asia领导的61家银行资产占日本银行资产总额的80％以上。SBI Ripple Asia首席执行官Takashi Okita在Ripple的博客文章中表示：
“有了银行联盟的信任支持，可靠性和覆盖范围，我们可以消除支付方面的问题，为我们的客户创造更快，更安全，更高效的国内支付体验。”
联盟中的三家银行，SBI Net Sumishin Bank，Suruga Bank和Resona Bank将于今年秋季开始使用该应用，其余银行将逐步加入。 MoneyTap将支持用户24小时实时购买。
Ripple一直专注于与银行构建良好关系以使用其支付技术。二月份的时候，Ripple宣布了两个的金融服务合作伙伴关系;一家与沙特阿拉伯金融管理局合作，为该国境内的银行使用其跨境支付技术，另一家与正在测试Ripple基于区块链的交易结算系统的西联汇款。
本月，韩国一家银行还宣布计划使用Ripple的跨境支付技术进行汇款，这是基于日本的Ripple和SBI Group的基于区块链的汇款测试。
Revered UK Bitcoin developer Amir Taaki wants to recruit five “preferably female” developers to live a “quasi-monastic” lifestyle in order to give Bitcoin a “vision,” Wired reports March 6.
In an interview with Wired, Taaki, who is known among the Bitcoin technical community as a central figure in preserving the largest cryptocurrency’s original values, said he even has plans to use the “monk hackers” to effect Bitcoin- and Blockchain-powered political change - beginning in Catalonia.
“It will be like a startup accelerator, only a politicised one. Not driven by profit, but by social change,”Wired quotes him as saying during a speech in the politically troubled Spanish province.
From September 2015, Taaki spent several months fighting Isis terrorists in a Kurdish-controlled autonomous part of Northern Syria before engaging with social reconstruction while introducing inhabitants to Bitcoin.
Now, he says, reviving the spirit of Bitcoin is one step on the road to the “complete collapse of the world state system.”
“Bitcoin doesn't have any vision behind it, any vision of where it's going,” Taaki told Wired.
“All the original ideas about using bitcoin for challenging power - or privacy, or new forms of economic systems - are falling by the wayside. Now it's simply a small community obsessed with the price going up.”
The five prospective hackers, which should ideally be “young and female” for “gender equality” reasons, need not have technical experience - but be willing to work for free in a house with Taaki in Catalonia.