MONEY: Walmart and Amazon are going to “mint” Stablecoins

Thursday, June 19, 2025

https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/walmart-amazon-stablecoin-07de2fdd?st=Uj2rA8&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink&utm_source=tldrnewsletter

Walmart and Amazon Are Exploring Issuing Their Own Stablecoins

  • Corporate coins could take payments activity away from banks and the traditional financial system

By Gina Heeb, AnnaMaria Andriotis, Josh Dawsey
Updated June 13, 2025 4:51 pm ET

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FROM TLDR 2025-06-16

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Walmart and Amazon Are Exploring Issuing Their Own Stablecoins

Several multinational giants, including Walmart and Amazon, are discussing potential efforts to issue stablecoins. Whether these initiatives will go ahead depends on a bill still yet to clear the Senate and House called the Genius Act, which establishes a regulatory framework for stablecoins. Stablecoins could allow merchants to bypass traditional payment rails, which cost them billions of dollars in fees each year. A regulatory framework for stablecoins would enable an alternative payment type for merchants that could significantly lower their expenses and create competition against Visa and Mastercard. 

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To me this is BIG (<synonym for the act of procreation in real time>) deal.

I never understood why Walmart was allowed to establish its own bank.  The politicians and bureaucrats are always whining about the “poor unbanked”.  But Walmart could solve that problem quickly, cheaply, and easily.  So could Amazon.

Stablecoins by either of them could serve the same purpose as a bank without the regulatory hassle.

Let’s wait and see.  Competition in the “traditional financial system” for JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Visa, and Mastercard could certainly be good for the consumers.

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INNOVATION: Preventing dead birds is too easy for Bank of America; shame on them

Thursday, November 23, 2023

https://www.biographic.com/city-of-glass/?utm_source=join1440&utm_medium=email

Solutions
10.31.2023
City of Glass

  • Meet the dedicated cadre of experts and volunteers working to protect birds from glass in the window-strike capital of the United States.

Story by Ben Goldfarb

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The film seemed to be working: Collisions at the Kellogg Hub had declined by half, and for 20 minutes I watched red-winged blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) alight easily on its railings and roof. Even better, at the nearby Frances Searle Building, whose windows the university had covered with faint horizontal stripes, bird deaths had virtually ceased. Yet the projects had been neither cheap nor perfect. The Searle Building alone had cost the university $250,000 to retrofit, and large swaths of the Kellogg Center remained unprotected. Retrofitting existing buildings is crucial, no doubt; Chicago isn’t about to dismantle its existing skyline for the sake of birds. Still, “the best solutions are the ones that are designed into the building from the beginning,” Claire Halpin, a landscape architect who sat on the board of the Chicago Ornithological Society until her recent death, told me later.

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Not everyone was so receptive. During our rounds, Prince and I passed the Bank of America Tower, where three trees beckoned to birds from behind glass so clear it was surprising more humans didn’t hit it face-first. Prince had begged the building’s sustainability officer to put up a patterned film, or move the trees, or even hang a temporary banner during migration season — to do literally anything. “The answer,” she told me, “was ‘no, no, and no.’”

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Maybe we all can put some political pressure on BOA to address the problem?

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