Bitcoin News Official TheBitTimes.com

Mainstream commerce and big brands report improved business results and promising loyalty programs through integrations with the wider Solana ecosystem. Web3 tools powered by layer-1 blockchain Solana are driving tangible returns and delivering deep customer data insights, according to prominent mainstream brands and companies that attended Solana Breakpoint. The four day conference hosted in Amsterdam in 2023 attracted a wide variety of businesses and projects from Web2, Web3 and traditional backgrounds. A prominent takeaway was adoption of Solana-based tools and services innovating payments and loyalty programmes. Boba Guys, a growing United States-based bubble tea brand in the mold of Starbucks, unpacked how its pilot programme for a new customer loyalty app delivered insightful data while seemingly incentivizing customers to return to its stores in San Francisco. Related: Visa taps into Solana to widen USDC payment capability The five week programme relied solely on in-store prom...

On Tuesday, Jack Mallers’ Bitcoin-focused payments app Strike responded to a media inquiry about a customer database breach, saying, “There’s no evidence that Strike was breached.” However, within minutes, crypto researcher ZachXBT had posted evidence of the breach in a Telegram channel, and within hours, Strike admitted to customers that its email list was indeed breached by a third party. The incident isn’t the first time that Strike and its CEO Mallers have misled the public about the reality of the company’s operations.  Mallers promised, for example, that customers would be able to use Strike to pay for everyday purchases in bitcoin at Walmart, McDonald’s, Walgreens, and Starbucks. This simply never happened. Then in 2021, Mallers demonstrated international workers sending a USD remittance in their Strike account. In fact, for months, Strike was secretly representing Tether as USD to customers in its app. Good thing Tether’s peg held $1 until Strike disclosed the fu...