FIRSA

💰 Is Bitcoin money or myth?

📢 Presenting this Saturday at the 6th Money View Symposium hosted by @ineteconomics.bsky.social

Register here:
🔗 fs8.formsite.com/CNZLjX/0acgs...
📍 Online event, free attendance
📅 Saturday, February 28
⏰ 12:30 New York

#PoliticalEconomy #Monetarytheory #Bitcoin

Who owns crypto in Europe?

Join the FIRSA Academic Roundtable (link below) to learn more about research on FinTech (CBDCs, Crypto, Regulatory Sandboxes) from top scholars.

📣 20 Jan · 10:00 CST (Chicago) / 18:00 EET (Vilnius)

zoom.us/j/9443773243...

Passcode: 995511

🚨 Academic roundtable on fintech regulation.

Join the conversation with Colin Chia (University of Victoria), Ghita Chraibi (University of Virginia), and Vytautas Kuokštis (Vilnius University).

📣 (TUE) 20 Jan · 10:00 CST (Chicago) / 18:00 EET (Vilnius)

🔗: zoom.us/j/9443773243...

#fintech #finance

Shares of total NTF sales (2021). Source: EU Observatory and Forum on Blockchain

💡 What are NFTs?

NFTs are unique digital tokens on a blockchain that certify ownership of a specific item. Unlike crypto coins, they aren’t interchangeable.

🔗 Demystifying NFTs Report (2021): blockchain-observatory.ec.europa.eu/document/dow...
#FinTech #DigitalFinance #EU #NFT

💡 What is an Innovation Hub?

📌 A contact point where (fintech) firms can ask regulators about new tech
📌 Offers guidance — no live testing
📌 Helps clarify licensing pathways

🔗 ESAs Joint Report (2023):
www.esma.europa.eu/sites/defaul...

#FinTech #DigitalFinance #EU

💡 The EU’s AI Act sets the first global rules for artificial intelligence.

📌 Risk-based approach — from minimal to high risk
📌 Stricter rules for financial AI
📌 Promotes AI testing in supervised sandboxes

🔗 EU AI Act: digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/...

#FinTech #DigitalFinance #EU

Walmart-Backed Fintech Onepay to Launch Crypto Trading and Custody Services Onepay, majority-owned by Walmart, plans to launch cryptocurrency trading and custody within its app later this year. Integrating Crypto Into the Retail Ecosystem The fintech firm Onepay, which is majority-owned by Walmart, is reportedly set to expand its services by introducing cryptocurrency trading and custody on its mobile application. The move, expected to roll out […]

Walmart-Backed Fintech Onepay to Launch Crypto Trading and Custody Services

Onepay, majority-owned by Walmart, plans to launch cryptocurrency trading and custody within its app later this year. Integrating Crypto Into the Retail Ecosystem The fintech firm Onepay, which is majority-o…

#crypto #news

💡 What is MiCA?

📌 The EU’s new framework for crypto-assets
📌 Sets common rules for issuers, exchanges & wallets
📌 Balances innovation with consumer protection

🔗 EU MiCA Regulation: www.esma.europa.eu/esmas-activi...

#FinTech #DigitalFinance #EU

💡 What is a regulatory sandbox?

A regulatory sandbox is a framework that allows firms to test innovative financial services in a controlled environment under the regulator’s supervision.

🔗 Read more on the FIRSA website: www.firsa.eu

#FinTech #DigitalFinance #EU

Trump’s 2025 UN Speech Was the Most Anti-European on Record Every September, world leaders speak at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) about the global issues they deem most important. These…

🇺🇸💔🇪🇺
Trump’s 2025 UN speech was the longest U.S. address on record and the most negative toward Europe.

This is the focus of my first Medium article, where I track how Europe appears in U.S. UNGA speeches from 1946–2025 and visualize the results.

📖 Read on Medium:
medium.com/@alfredo-hs/...

👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – PayPal’s paying attention to Africa

Image Source: Make A Meme Nigeria’s bank-owned fintech subsidiaries have been hunting for their breakout moment. For Guaranty Trust Holding Company (GTCO)’s fintech arm, HabariPay, that moment came in H1 2025, where it grew its profit…

Digital finance New financial technologies can facilitate access to financial services and improve the efficiency of the financial system.

💡 FinTech = financial technology.

✅ Cheaper, faster, more inclusive finance
❌ New risks for consumers & regulators

FinTech is central to the EU’s Digital Finance Strategy.

🔗 EU Digital Finance Strategy: finance.ec.europa.eu/digital-fina...

#FinTech #DigitalFinance #EU

Are you an R user tired of missing out on the LLM craze?

In my new tutorial I show how to use OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini models to classify political texts. I connect to the APIs directly from R using reticulate.

alhdzsz.net/posts/llms_r...

#rstats #dataviz #ai #python #textdata

Zero-shot classification and natural language inference (NLI) offer a powerful way to analyze political texts without labeled training data. This tutorial shows how to classify sentences using a pre-trained transformer model.

Google Colab Link: colab.research.google.com/drive/1gCZBy...

Here you can find a a hands-on tutorial on how to perform Named Entity Recognition (NER) using Python’s transformers library from within R via reticulate.

firsa.eu/posts/ner_re...

#NLP #rstats #Python #Quarto

ERA Fellow Dr Alfredo Hernández Sánchez’s Research on FinTech Regulatory Sandbox Development in Europe (FIRSA) Vilnius University is a prestigious institution of science and studies in Lithuania, which develops world-class science and develops science-based international studies.

An insight on latest research from Vilnius University on Europe's FinTech regulatory sandbox development

www.vu.lt/en/news-even...

Global Fintechs keep expanding into Africa (TWIF - Africa 03/17) Hi Fintech friends 👋, Here are the highlights of what happened in African Fintech this week; * Moroccan Super app Fintech raised $1.9 Million in a pre-series A funding round. * Global B2B payments…

Fintech expansion in Africa is showing no signs of slowing down.

This week’s TWIF Africa covers:
🌍 New market entrants
💰 Funding updates
And more

Catch up on the latest fintech news across the continent: