The idea of a blockchain is that you want to do bank transfers without a bank. You want people to be able to do transactions, and have them confirmed, and have there be some canonical agreed list of the transactions, but you don’t want to trust some central party to do it. At a high level, the blockchain solution is ...

  Alipay and WeChat Pay’s dominance of China’s retail payments was scripted over the past decade on the back of the humble quick recognition code. The same dotted squares could now start to undermine their moat. Fan Yifei, a deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China, said at a recent forum on digital finance that it was necessary to ...

  It took scientists 30 years to create the first malaria vaccine, approved by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2021. A second, even better one is now almost ready to be deployed against the disease. Governments and philanthropies should be stepping up their funding to global health partners so they can build on that momentum in the battle against ...