India's homegrown digital payments ecosystem, anchored by two systems, is challenging Visa and Mastercard's dominance in the world's most populous nation. The backbone is UPI, a nine-year-old bank-to-bank payment network that processes over 13 billion monthly transactions through QR codes and phone numbers, accounting for 71% of all transactions and 36% of consumer spending, according to Bernstein. RuPay, India's domestic card network, has leveraged its exclusive right to process credit card transactions through UPI to double its volume to $7.43 billion in fiscal 2025's first seven months. It now represents 28% of credit card transactions, up from 10% last year. Small merchants are adopting the system as RuPay only charges fees on transactions above $23.3. India's central bank has also mandated banks let customers choose their card network, ending exclusive deals with global providers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MicroStrategy's bitcoin holdings and a tech investment fund are commanding extraordinary premiums in U.S. markets, highlighting unusual price anomalies reminiscent of past market distortions. MicroStrategy shares are trading at more than double the market value of their main asset -- bitcoin holdings -- while closed-end fund Destiny Tech100 recently traded at 11 times its net asset value, down from 21 times earlier in 2024. Similar market irregularities have emerged throughout history. In 1923, investor Benjamin Graham profited from a disconnect between DuPont and General Motors shares. During the 1929 bull market, closed-end fund Capital Administration Co. traded at a 1,235% premium to its net asset value. WSJ adds: The PalmPilot during the 1990s and early 2000s was a hand-held device and personal assistant that came with a touch-screen display and a stylus. Palm was the biggest maker of hand-held computer devices, with 70% market share, and it held its initial public offering in March 2000, about a week before the Nasdaq Composite Index's peak during the dot-com bubble. Palm's shares jumped 150% on their first day of trading, giving Palm a stock-market value of about $53 billion. Palm was still 94%-owned by parent 3Com at the time. Yet on Palm's first day of trading, 3Com's shares fell 21%. The funny part: According to the stock market, 3Com was worth about $23 billion less than the value of the Palm shares that 3Com owned. This made no sense, yet the valuations remained out of whack for months. In time, both stocks came down to earth, sanity prevailed and the world eventually moved on to smartphones.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Solana JavaScript SDK "was temporarily compromised yesterday in a supply chain attack," reports BleepingComputer, "with the library backdoored with malicious code to steal cryptocurrency private keys and drain wallets." Solana offers an SDK called "@solana/web3.js" used by decentralized applications (dApps) to connect and interact with the Solana blockchain. Supply chain security firm Socket reports that Solana's Web3.js library was hijacked to push out two malicious versions to steal private and secret cryptography keys to secure wallets and sign transactions... Solana confirmed the breach, stating that one of their publish-access accounts was compromised, allowing the attackers to publish two malicious versions of the library... Solana is warning developers who suspect they were compromised to immediately upgrade to the latest v1.95.8 release and to rotate any keys, including multisigs, program authorities, and server keypairs... Once the threat actors gain access to these keys, they can load them into their own wallets and remotely drain all stored cryptocurrency and NFTs... Socket says the attack has been traced to the FnvLGtucz4E1ppJHRTev6Qv4X7g8Pw6WPStHCcbAKbfx Solana address, which currently contains 674.86 Solana and varying amounts of the Irish Pepe , Star Atlas, Jupiter, USD Coin, Santa Hat, Pepe on Fire, Bonk, catwifhat, and Genopets Ki tokens. Solscan shows that the estimated value of the stolen cryptocurrency is $184,000 at the time of this writing. For anyone whose wallets were compromised in this supply chain attack, you should immediately transfer any remaining funds to a new wallet and discontinue the use of the old one as the private keys are now compromised. Ars Technica adds that "In social media posts, one person claimed to have lost $20,000 in the hack." The compromised library "receives more than ~350,000 weekly downloads on npm," Socket posted. (Although Solana's statement says the compromised versions "were caught within hours and have since been unpublished."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Coffee beans hit their highest price in 47 years, driven by bad weather in Vietnam and Brazil, the biggest producers of robusta and arabica beans respectively. Brazil saw its worst drought in 70 years this year followed by heavy rains, raising fears that next season's output will drop, further pinching already tight global supplies. Vietnam has itself had three years of low output. Arabica beans hit $3.18 a pound on Wednesday, leading Nestle, the world's biggest coffee company, to increase prices. As well as climate concerns, future prices are being raised by worries about tariffs: Roasters "will try to import now, because otherwise you will be paying tariffs later," one trade analyst told the Financial Times.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Silicon Valley's venture-capital firms are having an easy time finding promising startups to back. The hard part is cashing out. From a report: Last year, U.S. venture firms returned $26 billion worth of shares back to their investors, the lowest amount since 2011, according to the data provider PitchBook. Startup investors say 2024 has continued the trend, with high levels of investment and few acquisition deals or initial public offerings. "We've raised a lot of money, and we've given very little back," Thomas Laffont, co-founder of investment firm Coatue Management, said at a recent conference. "We are bleeding cash as an industry." Last year, U.S. venture firms invested $60 billion more than they collected, the highest such deficit in PitchBook's 26 years of data. As a result, the investors that back VC firms, such as university endowments and pension funds, aren't seeing the type of profits the industry has long delivered. The decline is particularly notable because the past three years have been the highest three on record for total VC firm investments since 1998 -- as far as back as the PitchBook data goes. Much of that money has recently gone to artificial-intelligence startups -- a white-hot space in which valuations are rising fast and companies quickly burn through cash to develop new technology.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The White House said it's completed a $6.6 billion grant agreement with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) through the Chips and Science Act. "Today's announcement is among the most critical milestones yet in the implementation of the bipartisan CHIPS & Science Act, and demonstrates how we are ensuring that the progress made to date will continue to unfold in the coming years, benefitting communities all across the country," Biden said in a statement. The Hill reports: The grant is expected to create $65 billion of private investment by TSMC in Arizona, Biden said, which will include three new facilities and the creation of tens of thousands of jobs by the end of the decade. The first of the company's new facilities is on track to open next year. Biden earlier this year announced a slew of preliminary grant agreements with companies, including TSMC, through the CHIPS law. The announcement of a final agreement underscores how the administration is hoping to get those deals across the finish line before President-elect Trump takes office. [...] Biden has repeatedly touted the importance of the CHIPS and Science Act, citing the prevalence of microchips that are used in everyday technology such as phones, cars, home appliances and more. Officials have said the law is critical to bolster domestic production of the chips to make the U.S. less reliant on foreign supply chains.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.