So far, economic sanctions on Russia have done nothing to halt Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. The ruble is still strong. Oil prices are high. Before Ukraine’s latest advances on the battlefield, polls showed that 75% of Russians still supported the war (in public at any rate). So why continue with sanctions? Economic boycotts, of course, are one way for ...

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 ...