Daily Briefing: Temasek eyes stake in Indian digital payments startup; LTA to accept license applications from bike-sharing operators

And another Singapore-based blockchain network has breached the US$1b market cap.

From Deal Street Asia

Singapore government-owned sovereign fund Temasek Holdings Pvt. Ltd plans to acquire a significant minority stake in digital payments platform Pine Labs for $350-400 million, two people aware of the development said. Temasek is likely to buy the stake from Sequoia Capital and promoters, in a deal that will value Pine Labs at $1 billion, one of the two persons cited above.

Pine Labs, which provides digital point of sale (PoS) solutions to merchants, had raised $82 million in an investment round led by Actis Capital along with Altimeter Capital in March, valuing the company at $800 million. Pine Labs’ existing venture capital investor Sequoia Capital first invested in the payments company in 2009 and remains its largest shareholder.

Pine Labs offers cloud-based PoS payments solutions, allowing merchants to accept credit or debit card payments, e-wallets, QR code payment solutions and unified payments interface (UPI)-based solutions.

Read more here.  

From Yahoo! News Singapore

Bicycle-sharing operators will have to apply for a license starting from next Tuesday (8 May) and meet conditions including maximum fleet size as part of measures by the government to tackle indiscriminate parking by users of such services.

The Land Transport Authority (LTA) said existing operators who fail to submit an application by the 7 July deadline will have to cease operations immediately.

Any unlicensed operator that runs shared bicycles may face a jail term of up to six months and/or a maximum fine of $10,000, plus a $500 fine for each day that the offence continues.

Read more here. 

From Tech in Asia 

The total value of tokens on Zilliqa, a blockchain network founded by a Singapore-based company with the same name, has broken through the billion-dollar barrier, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

Zilliqa is the second Singapore-based blockchain firm to achieve the feat. Qtum was the first. Zilliqa’s bull run began in April, days after it released a prototype (a “testnet” in crypto-lingo) of its blockchain, which aims to process a far larger number of transactions per second than Ethereum can manage.

The startup is one of many teams scrambling to solve Ethereum’s so-called scalability problem, which proponents say is preventing blockchain from achieving its true potential.

Read more here.