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The Internet, especially through online gaming and social networks, has spawned a number of new electronic currencies. Are any of these ready to make the leap into general usage, the way dollars and pounds and euros and yen are today? That was the fascinating question raised this week at a …

Facebook Inc., a massive social network with more than 500 million users worldwide that is said by some experts to have ambitions in the payments business, has established a wholly owned subsidiary called Facebook Payments Inc. Facebook incorporated the entity in Florida on Dec. 10 and is advertising now for …

Payvment Inc., a San Francisco startup whose shopping-cart software has been enabling transactions for storefronts on Facebook for the past six months, plans to use $1.5 million in new funding to add engineers and expand its network beyond the massive social network. Christian Taylor, the company’s chief executive, tells Digital …

With the announcement on Thursday that PayPal Inc. will process payments for Facebook, the massive social network has found a major-brand payments partner and PayPal has established a tie to what could become an enormous online marketplace with equally big transaction potential. The two companies said PayPal will process payments …

Prepaid card processors paired up with partners ranging from Facebook to Western Union to the MoneyPass surcharge-free ATM network in deals this week that expand the processors' distribution channels and transaction sources. In a cutting-edge deal that further opens up an Internet parallel to gift card giving, grocery chain Safeway …

This is the fifth installment of a six-part series on how Web 2.0 is likely to transform the payments business. Prior articles focused on how new providers are leading the transition from the first generation of e-commerce, where a buyer had a one-way relationship with a seller's Web site and …

Don't look for Facebook to get into the payments business any time soon. According to a report this week in “Inside Facebook,” a Web site that tracks Facebook developments for software developers and marketers, the social network has put on hold a payments platform that the network had announced a …

Despite its formidable reach, the social-media platform X faces a steep climb to achieve its goal of launching a peer-to-peer payments service, according to payments experts. X, formerly known as Twitter, announced in a blog post earlier this week its plans to add P2P payments to its platform this year …

Peer to peer payments networks are wrestling with the fallout triggered when users send money to a scammer. Solutions won’t be easy. In the world of digital payments, there’s a scam born every minute. The latest scam is conning consumers to send money via a peer-to-peer payment network to a …