Bitcoin Daily: Some Starbucks App Users Can Now Pay In Bakkt Cash; Russia’s Central Bank Says Bill Would Ban Cryptos

Select Starbucks mobile app customers are now seeing a payment choice of “Bakkt Cash,” CoinDesk reported.

A spokesperson for Starbucks told the outlet, “We are currently conducting a limited test for our customers, using the Bakkt payment method. Customers can see Bakkt as an option but the test is only available at this time.”

Intercontinental Exchange, the parent firm of Bakkt, had first made it known in the summer of 2018 that Starbucks was eyeing the retail use of digital currency payments. Bakkt President Adam White posted, in part, on Twitter, “Open your @Starbucks app to see our first direct integration and select @Bakkt to sign up for our Early Access Program.”

In other news, a new iteration of a digital assets bill in Russia will reportedly come with a prohibition on the sale and issuance of digital currencies, CoinDesk reported.

Alexey Guznov, the Bank of Russia’s head of legal office, said in an interview with a news agency in the country that the institution didn’t think the trading and issuance of digital currency should be legal in its borders.

Guznov said per reports, “We believe there are big risks of legalizing the operations with the cryptocurrencies, from the standpoint of financial stability, money laundering prevention and consumer protection.”

The Bank of Russia, however, reportedly supports the idea of digital financial assets and had gone so far as having an experimental tokenization project.

On another note, a staffer at China’s Baidu has gone to jail for mining cryptocurrency on approximately 200 servers of the company, Cointelegraph reported.

The individual received a penalty of $1,570 and jail time of three years. The senior engineer reportedly downloaded as well as installed scripts to make the Monero digital currency. The company had notified police when it saw surprising activity levels throughout many of its computers. But the individual had already made and sold Monero for an amount equal to $14,300.

Authorities in the country had taken bitcoin mining off of a listing of undesirable industries, but bitcoin and digital currency trading was prohibited there.