Europe

The largest Russian airline company “Aeroflot” is considering accepting payments for airline tickets in a cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin.

After nearly 10 years of exploration of blockchain technology, we are at the pinnacle of innovation, with a range of major corporations to small businesses exploring blockchain opportunities and use-cases to cut costs and add value throughout the business process. However, these recent developments have equally attracted interest from regulators across continents; prominent amongst them being Europe.

Venezuela, one of South America’s biggest oil-producing nations, is an economically depressed nation characterized by high rates of unemployment, food rationing and massive migration to other countries, including Europe. Despite all this, the socialist government is offering almost free electricity to people which aids Bitcoin mining activities.

The Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, has taken the all-time risk of pledging to resign after a negative result of a referendum on a constitutional reform which could make it easier for the government to pass laws without unnecessary delays.

QIWI, one of the most popular payment services providers in Eastern Europe and the only official representative of R3 Blockchain consortium in Russia, has developed its own data storage system using Blockchain technology and its first Bitcoin ATMs.

Individual producers and consumers of solar and wind energy will now have an instrument to integrate a Blockchain-based network into a new generation of energy trades. This comes thanks to three hackers who won the Dutch international energy hackathon H4ckenergy 2016 with their Blockchain project named EcoCoin.

German Gref, the President of Sberbank, the largest bank in Russia and Eastern Europe, and the third largest in Europe, spoke about the complete breakdown of the traditional banking system within just 3-5 years. He predicts giant changes in the banking industry sooner than most people expected.

The banking crisis in Europe goes even further in Italy. While in countries like Germany and France we see only a decline of major banks’ asset prices, in Italy besides the banking crisis itself another problem occurred - civilian Italians began to distrust bank transfers and payments. One of the possible solutions may be Bitcoin, which can serve as a salutary means, grow in price and even get official recognition in the country.

Razormind, enterprise software developing company, announced a €5 million investment to build and operate two Blockchain banks in Europe located in Ireland and France.