Bitcoin Daily: China Says Blockchain Can Authenticate Evidence, Australia To Closely Monitor ICOs, Crypto

Crypto payments startup Wyre has acquired Hedgy, a venture-backed bitcoin smart contract development firm.

While Wyre already provides cross-border payments using bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and other cryptocurrencies, the deal enables it to expand its services to crypto startups, the company’s co-founder and COO Ioannis Giannaros told CoinDesk.

With that in mind, Wyre will utilize Hedgy’s ability to “navigate” the regulatory space.

“This is a really highly regulated area, and in this sense Hedgy generally has been extremely ahead of the time. They were doing smart contract derivatives when at the time Ethereum wasn’t even there yet,” added Giannaros.

Hedgy co-founder and CEO Matt Slater will join Wyre as an advisor as part of the deal, which is for an undisclosed sum.

In other news, China’s Supreme People’s Court has ruled that blockchain can now be legally used to authenticate evidence in legal disputes, as long as parties can prove the legitimacy of the technology being used.

“Internet courts shall recognize digital data that are submitted as evidence if relevant parties collected and stored these data via blockchain with digital signatures, reliable timestamps and hash value verification or via a digital deposition platform, and can prove the authenticity of such technology used,” the Supreme Court said in an announcement.

According to CoinDesk, the ruling is in response to questions that came after the establishment of the country’s first internet court, which handles disputes around internet-based issues, specifically digital data.

And the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has announced its plans to continue “monitoring threats of harm from emerging products” such as ICOs and cryptocurrencies.

ASIC added that it is developing a new framework for 2018-2019 that will apply “the principles for regulating market infrastructure providers to crypto exchanges” and will get involved when “there is poor behavior and potential harm to consumers and investors,” according to CoinDesk.

The agency added that it has already implemented supervisory approaches such as placing staff onsite in financial institutions that work with cryptocurrency.