Based in Gibraltar with offices in both South America and East Asia, RSK launched its main net in January 2018 and the RIF token the following November. RSK’s smart contract network is based on the bitcoin state’s hashing power which the company claims to give its network high security.
IOVLabs, the parent company behind RSK‘s bitcoin smart contract network, today announced its acquisition of Spanish-language social networking platform Taringa. With the deal, IOVLabs announced it will also integrate RIF, RSK’s native token, into Taringa.
In a release, IOVLabs said Taringa will both integrate and test RSK decentralized applications and infrastructure.
One of the largest Spanish social media apps, Taringa claims to have some 30 million users, 1,000 active communities, and 8 million daily shares on its platform.
“IOVLabs chose Taringa because of its strong dominance in Latin America and Spanish speaking audience and the unique position the region has to lead cryptocurrencies mass adoption”, the company told CoinDesk.
“We see Taringa as the first step towards massive adoption of both RSK and RIF platforms”, Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar, CEO of IOVLabs, said in a statement.
In a partnership with bitcoin custodial service Xapo, Taringa integrated bitcoin into its app in 2015. Under the deal, top content creators on Taringa received bitcoin tips for their work.
Commenting on the acquisition, Taringa CEO Matías Botbol said Taringa is excited to bring more advanced digital products to its users.
“Once this is in place, we envision adding more features, including peer-to-peer token exchanges, a marketplace for other dApps to start offering products and services to our users, and more. Our ultimate goal is to create a new open, decentralized Internet that respects an individual’s freedom of speech and privacy.”
Past the acquisition itself, IOVLabs has allocated some $5 million in assets towards developing products for Taringa, the company told CoinDesk.
Revolut Expands Crypto Offering – But Not in the US
U.K. challenger bank Revolut said Thursday that all standard users will now be able to buy and sell cryptocurrencies supported in its banking app, though this won’t include U.S. residents for now.Revolut had already planned to expand its crypto offering later this year. But in an email to users, the bank’s head of crypto, Edward Cooper, said growing concerns about the potential economic impacts of central bank quantitative easing and currency devaluation had hastened the move to Friday.
Revolut – which raised $500 million in a Series D earlier in the year – has allowed users to purchase crypto directly from the app since it added support for bitcoin in 2017. Although users can trade digital assets with other Revolut users, they cannot take them out of the app.
Revolut expanded to the U.S. in late March. The bank said at the time that new U.S. customers would only have access to its core features. Additional services, such as its crypto-buying service, would be added at a later date.
A Revolut spokesperson confirmed to CoinDesk that U.S. users were still not able to trade crypto on the app, though they said it is «only because the feature has not launched there yet.»
