Another major innovation being made by crypto companies is the removal of exchange fees, which have been roundly criticized as too high. Traditional banks are also famous for hitting users with costly fees. According to a recent MyBankTracker study, the average checking account fee per month at leading US banks is $9.60.

On Jan. 28 digital money platform Uphold introduced zero-commission trading on 30 cryptocurrencies, but only on through iOS and Android mobile apps.

According to Uphold CEO J.P. Thieriot, removing fees will ensure affordable access to cryptocurrency for millions of retail investors. He told Cointelegraph:

    “Cryptocurrencies were one of the more expensive asset classes for retail investors to trade, with fees north of 200 basis points on some mainstream platforms. The goal here is to create something useful for people around the world and in everyday context, while differentiating us from our competitors. Ultimately, the internet of money is likely to evolve in ways that banks haven’t been able to do a good job with.”

Bloomberg also recently reported that zero-fee trading is coming to crypto, just as it has come to traditional exchange-traded funds and to online stock transactions. Global financial technology co-head at ConsenSys Lex Sokolin told Bloomberg:

    “Free trading has become a feature of all fintech direct trading offerings, from Robinhood to SoFi and even JPMorgan. So it’s not surprising that in a digital race to acquire the most users, execution prices are starting to collapse.”

Yet without exchange fees, crypto companies will likely be earning smaller amounts of revenue. Thieriot is confident this model will be beneficial overall, though, saying:

    “In moving to lower fees, Uphold expects the typical tradeoff between higher volume and lower margin. The good news is that unlike incumbent banks and brokerages, our cost structure is a fraction of theirs. We are crypto-native and technology-led, which imbues important structural advantages.”

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 The leading provider of Bitcoin (BTC) and cryptocurrency payment services, BitPay, announced on Feb. 4 that the company will soon allow invoices to be paid from any Bitcoin wallet or exchange.

BitPay CEO Stephen Pair told Cointelegraph that the decision to enable merchant payments from any Bitcoin wallet was driven by merchant feedback, putting control back in the hands of over 30 thousand active merchants currently using BitPay:

    “BitPay’s customers want to support all the Bitcoin wallets, just like they want to support all cryptocurrencies for payments. The company has decided to re-enable support for all wallets, which is referred to as plain vanilla peer-to-peer transactions.”

Pair mentioned that a phased rollout to support all Bitcoin wallets has already begun. Once the feature has been implemented, merchants will be able to decide which wallets they will accept payments from, while consumers would be able to use any wallet to make purchases from those merchants. 

Pair also noted that merchants can take advantage of peer-to-peer transactions without any required technical development or implementation, explaining:

    “We are going to automate the whole process for merchants, since we already have experience doing this already. It’s very important for merchants to support all Bitcoin wallets, as this will greatly expand their potential to grow sales and acquire new customers.”

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     We'd be the first to tell you: No, a blockchain wouldn't have prevented the voting debacle in Iowa.

The question is inevitable, if at this point cringe-inducing. Inevitable because the problems that delayed the results of Monday’s Democratic presidential caucus are, conceptually, some of the same ones that blockchains (and distributed ledger technology broadly) seek to solve: a lack of transparency, centralization and inefficiency. Cringe-inducing because blockchain’s record with political elections has been iffy at best.

As of early Tuesday afternoon, the voting results, normally revealed after the caucus that night, were still unknown. The state party says the delay is necessary as it performs “quality control” and verifies digitally reported results against the underlying paper trail.

This year held some notable changes for the notoriously manual and highly decentralized caucusing process, with the introduction of an app for individual local gatherings to report their results back to the Iowa Democratic Party.  Traditionally, this was done with a phone call; while that process has its flaws, this year's results make them seem almost enviable.

From all appearances, it is this new results-reporting app that is at the core of today’s chaos. 

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Ripple's technology will form the basis of a new XRP-based remittance service from International Money Express (Intermex).

Ripple announced Tuesday that it had partnered with Intermex, which will leverage RippleNet – a network of institutional payment providers using Ripple's several payments solutions – to develop "faster, transparent cross-border remittance services" between the U.S. and Mexico.

The new partnership is expected to reduce settlement time and cut some of the costs. It will also give Intermex access to Ripple's On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) service, which uses XRP as a real-time bridge between sending and receiving currencies, speeding up settlement times and lowering costs to "fractions of a penny."

It's unclear when Intermex will put the RippleNet integration into production mode. CEO Bob Lisey said the firm is looking forward to "implementing new solutions on RippleNet and ODL to help drive growth and deliver greater efficiency.”

The U.S.-Mexico remittance corridor is the largest in the region, and one of the largest in the world. Mexico received more than $36 billion in remittances in 2019, mainly coming from the U.S. Intermex processes more than 30 million transactions a year from over 100,000 locations in this corridor, according to the announcement.

MoneyGram, which first piloted XRP at the beginning of 2018, announced in November it would expand its ODL service into more of its remittance corridors. The firm's CEO, Alex Holmes, announced at Ripple's 2019 Swell Conference that more than 10 percent of remittances from its U.S.-Mexican corridor had been processed using ODL.

The same month, Ripple completed its acquisition of a $50 million equity stake in MoneyGram.