News Roundup — UAE makes first cross-border payment using digital currency

Major news stories this week;

1. UAE makes first cross-border payment using digital currency
2. Visa enables crypto withdrawals on debit cards in 145 countries
3. El Salvador’s Bitcoin-Friendly President Wins Re-Election
4. Circle to Issue Its Stablecoin USDC on Celo Network to Boost RWA Capabilities
5. Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade goes live on Sepolia testnet

Story Summaries;

1. Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Vice-President, Deputy Prime Minister, Chairman of the Presidential Court and Chairman of the Board of the Central Bank of the UAE on Monday made the first cross-border payment for the UAE Central Bank’s digital currency ‘Digital Dirham’ directly with China worth Dh50 million through the “mBridge”, which uses central bank digital currencies (CBDC) for international fund transfers between participating banks, based on distributed ledger technology, also known as blockchain. Sheikh Mansour made the payment while attending a celebration marking the CBUAE’s 50th Anniversary.
2. Global payment giant Visa is doubling down on cryptocurrency adoption by enabling another method to exchange crypto to fiat currencies without using a centralized exchange.Visa has partnered with the Web3 infrastructure provider Transak to introduce cryptocurrency withdrawals and payments through the Visa Direct solution, the firms announced on Jan. 30. The new integration allows users to withdraw cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin directly from a wallet like MetaMask to a Visa debit card. Available immediately, the integration enables one to exchange crypto to fiat and pay at 130 million merchant locations where Visa is accepted. “By enabling real-time card withdrawals through Visa Direct, Transak is delivering a faster, simpler and more connected experience for its users — making it easier to convert crypto balances into fiat,” Visa Direct’s North America Head Yanilsa Gonzalez-Ore said.
3. Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s Bitcoin-friendly president, has won re-election, securing a landslide victory amidst unconfirmed claims he has secured 85% of the votes. Besides adopting Bitcoin as legal tender, Bukele has also been credited with a major crackdown on gangs in the Central American nation. Exit polls show President Nayib Bukele is well on his way to securing a second term in office after securing an overwhelming lead after voting ended on Sunday. The result does not come as a surprise, as Bukele had gained tremendous popularity and had led in pre-election polling by a large margin as well. Following the exit polls, Bukele took to X, tweeting that his party had won the presidential election, securing 85% of the votes.
4. Stablecoin issuer Circle expanded native issuance of its $26 billion stablecoin USDC to the Celo network, the Celo Foundations announced Tuesday in a press release. With the development, the Celo ecosystem looks to boost cross-border payments and peer-to-peer transactions in developing regions, facilitating conversion from local currencies, the press release explained. CLabs, an organization dedicated to Celo ecosystem development, will also propose a community vote to enable paying transaction fees (gas) with USDC stablecoin. The USDC expansion came as Celo increasingly vying to be an important plumbing for tokenized real-world assets (RWA) -- placing traditional investments such as bonds and credit on blockchains in a token form and use stablecoins for settlements. RWA-focused marketplace Untangled Finance and credit platform Huma expanded to the network in the past months.
5. The upgrade, when deployed on the mainnet in the future, is expected to significantly lower fees and increase scalability. Ethereum’s latest major upgrade Dencun went live on the Sepolia test network on Tuesday, leaving just one more testnet before its anticipated “proto-danksharding” feature comes to fruition. Dencun deployment on Sepolia commenced at 22:51 UTC Tuesday and was finalized soon after. “Blobs are now flowing in Sepolia,” Parithosh Jayanthi, DevOps engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, wrote in a post on X. “Uneventful testnet forks are the best ones! Ethereum core developers deployed the upgrade on the Goerli testnet earlier this month. The upgrade’s initiation on the third and final testnet Holesky is scheduled for Feb. 7. Following a third successful testnet deployment, the Ethereum team is expected to establish a mainnet launch date for Dencun.

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And that’s all for last week’s news! Wishing you a great week ahead!

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