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'March to independence': Christine Lagarde wants EU to ditch Visa, Mastercard for own platform
(www.businesstoday.in)
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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WERO is coming all over Europe. Germany, France and Belgium are already connected and this year also in the Netherlands. It's happening but ofcourse.... much too slow for many of us :-) www.wero-wallet.eu If they realy want to be innovative they should use blockchain technology to make it happen.
Lol
I can already send money instantly, for free, through SEPA without a singular private company earning a cut or tracking me.
A bank account is needed, but there are thousands to choose from, and in the EU by law they cannot refuse to open a basic account for a private EU citizen.
Why should we use Wero/Revolut/Venmo/whatever instead? Intercompatibility within just one network means another network effect, that does not look like a long term solution to me. Just like Telegram, though very convenient to use with a nice UI, is no solution to Whatsapp.
Wero seems to be solving the problem of copy-pasting our IBAN. What if any bank app would just recognise a standardised QR code with that data? Who would then subscribe to Wero with a phone number and email and risk getting scammed or blocked for any random reason?
Wero would actually be a downgrade in service for people living in Portugal.
This is very slow many countries have done something similar a long time ago:
Mir (Russia)
China UnionPay (CUP)
RuPay (India)
Elo (Brazil)
Interac (Canada)
BKM (Turkey)
Verve (Nigeria)
JCB (Japan)
Mada (Saudi Arabia)
Zapper (South Africa)
Naps (National Payment System) (UAE)
You spell "resume-based design" funny
In Portugal we have an app called MBWAY, it's a national fast payment service. with that we can send money just with phone number, withdrawal from atms an pay using qr code. I've heard they are already interconnected with their counterpart in Italy and Spain
Wero is great for what it does (sending money to other people) and it's going to gain the functionality needed for online commerce.
But that only covers half the functionality provided by Visa and MasterCard. You also need the functionality to pay at a restaurant or in the supermarket. You know, the card part of MasterCard?
Some European countries have their own debit card system (here in Germany for example giropay) but once you cross the border that stops working. Which is why those cards are usually co-badged with one of the big networks to act as a fallback. That's where the EU should act to ensure that the fallback functionality isn't necessary anymore, at least as long you're in the Euro-zone.
You're right, but they are working on it. You cannot build an alternative for VISA/Mastercard just in one day. Step-by-step we'll get there. Every country has his own system, every bank has his own system. The only thing they have in common is VISA/Mastercard. It will take a few years, but the US has started something that is not gonna stop very soon. April 2, 2025 is the day that Europe started to disconnect from US dominance.
Innovation and blockchain do not go in one sentence. Blockchain is a near dead technology. It has its use cases but if you want a fast moving money transactions option, you should look into UPI by India.
Oh, they can go in one sentence, if done right.
Nano offers fast transactions on a decentralized network while using very little energy.
Strictly speaking it's not just one blockchain, but one per account, which only the account owner can update (add blocks to it).
This asynchronous design is what makes Nano so fast, because there's no need to wait for others when updating one's own blockchain.
What it doesn't have (yet?) is a sufficiently large network effect, which it may never acquire.
But it is one example of an attempt at making digital money based on blockchain technology, which is not just a copycat, scam, rugpull or other malicious nonsense.
Monero comes to mind as well and maybe a handful others.
Sadly almost all around blockchain is not just not innovative, but outright evil.
We'll see. I believe in the blockchain technology, but not in the way it is used as today. IMO it's like the early days of the internet. Only for the nerds, until they started to build RWA. But again... we'll see.