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ETA Announces 2025 Industry Affairs Committee Leadership

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WASHINGTON, Jan. 3, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — The Electronic Transactions Association (ETA) today announced its 2025 Industry Affairs Committee leadership structure, reflecting the organization’s continued commitment to advancing the payments technology industry through expert guidance and collaboration.

The committees, comprising over 700 payments professionals from more than 400 member companies and led by experienced industry executives, will address crucial developments in payments technology, including emerging technologies, regulatory compliance, and market expansion opportunities.

“The payments industry is driving unprecedented transformation, fueled by emerging technologies and evolving market demands,” said Jodie Kelley, CEO of ETA. “ETA’s Industry Affairs Committees are where these changes take shape, bringing together the brightest minds in payments to address critical challenges and opportunities. From AI to crypto and security – our committees are advancing conversations that will define the future of commerce.”

The 2025 ETA Industry Affairs committee structure emphasizes ETA’s focus on innovation and industry leadership, providing forums for discussion, education, and guidance on critical industry issues.

2025 ETA Committee and Chairs

Artificial Intelligence

Russell Moore, Global Payments
Kevin Shamoun, Fortis
Donald Riddick, Featurespace

B2B

Raghuram Adiraju, Mastercard
Perryn Holtrop, PayNation
Abhishek, Visa

Bank

Adrienne Gray, Commercial Bank of California
Mary Meade-Koslen, Synovus

Compliance

Tom Bloodworth, Global Payments
Gina Gioia, North American Bancard, LLC
Rob Johnson, Visa

Crypto

Eric Brown, BlockWyre
Elly Aiala, Boost Payment Solutions
Hitesh Bajaj, TD Bank

Investment Community

Tim Chiodo, UBS

ISV

Jeff Marshall, TouchBistro
Nerino Mayer, PayFactory
Gordana Hrnjez, TouchBistro

LATAM

Leon Vega, J.P. Morgan
Ivan Szabo, NMI

Mobile

Olivia Tomares, Stripe
Craig Ross, EWS
Georgia Kyprianou, Global Payments
Natalia Leonardis, CardFlight

Payment Sales and Strategy 

George Smith, Clerkie
Naomi Mastera, NMI

PCI/Cybersecurity 

Emily Baxter, RPY Innovations

PayFac

Deana Rich, Infinicept
Caroline Hometh, RPY Innovations
Amy Schultz, Key Bank

Retail Technology

Ryan Aumann, Global Payments
Greg Aamoth, PoPcodes

Risk Fraud & Security

Melissa Sutherland, EverC

About ETA:

The Electronic Transactions Association (ETA) is the world’s leading advocacy and trade association for the payments industry. Our members span the breadth of significant payments and fintech companies, from the largest incumbent players to the emerging disruptors in the U.S. and in more than a dozen countries around the world. ETA members make commerce possible by processing approximately $47 trillion annually in purchases and P2P payments worldwide and deploying payments innovation to merchants and consumers. www.electran.org

Contact: Scott Talbott, stalbott@electran.org 

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SOURCE Electronic Transactions Association (ETA)

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RWA.LTD Announces Comprehensive Consumer Goods Token Ecosystem Layout at Hong Kong Web3 Festival, Leading the Launch of the Consumer RWA Alliance

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HONG KONG, April 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — During the Hong Kong Web3 Festival, RWA.LTD, the world’s first platform dedicated to consumer goods RWA (Real World Assets), officially announced the completion of its comprehensive consumer goods token ecosystem layout. At the event, the platform spearheaded the unveiling of the “Consumer RWA Alliance”. Positioned as the “Asian Consumer Goods Asset Trading Center,” RWA.LTD aims to enhance consumption efficiency through AI, reconstruct value distribution via Web3, and connect cross-city and cross-country consumer networks through tokens to accelerate the arrival of the “Smarter Consumer” era.

RWA.LTD stated that consumer goods RWA is not a single product, but a set of new infrastructure developed around consumption scenarios, the circulation of consumer rights, and brand interaction. Since CEO Fu, Rao Tony first proposed the concept of “Consumer Goods RWA” in late 2024, the team simultaneously prepared the RWA.LTD platform and completed Beta testing in September 2025. Following several months of iteration, the platform completed a comprehensive upgrade in mid-March 2026, marking RWA.LTD’s formal transition from the proof-of-concept stage to the ecological development stage.

RWA.LTD Ecosystem

In this public announcement, RWA.LTD systematically disclosed its four major ecological sectors for the first time. First, RWA.LTD | Mall (Winpoint Mall) was officially launched during the Hong Kong Web3 Festival, providing consumers with diverse brand rights driven by RWA Coin; current offerings include the CDAA (Chartered Digital Asset Analyst) Course, Matrix E-commerce Services, and more. Second, RWA.LTD | Exchange was fully launched in mid-March 2026 as a primary issuance and secondary trading market for consumer goods tokens, with plans to list 100 types of consumer goods tokens within the year to provide bidirectional exposure for brands and users. Third, RWA.LTD | Fund plans to collaborate with established VC funds to focus on brand token ecosystem construction and explore new paths for the synergistic development of consumer brands and on-chain capital. Fourth, RWA.LTD | Bot (rwaclaw.ai, rwabot.ai) has completed domain layout and is currently under development; it will provide consumers with real-time AI price comparisons, intelligent recommendations, and automated ordering tools to enhance decision-making efficiency and consumer experience.

RWA.LTD believes that the traditional consumer market has long suffered from information asymmetry, price opacity, and inactive membership systems, while the combination of blockchain and AI provides a new consumption model. By standardizing, digitizing, and placing consumer rights on-chain, consumers are no longer just end-buyers but can become active participants in the consumption network; brands are no longer limited to one-time interactions with consumers but can build stable, sustainable consumer relationships through on-chain tools.

Consumer RWA Alliance

At the Hong Kong Web3 Festival, the Consumer RWA Alliance, spearheaded by RWA.LTD, was inaugurated. The alliance aims to unite consumer brands, channel platforms, technology service providers, ecological partners, and cross-regional resource providers to jointly promote the co-construction of standards, ecological synergy, and scenario implementation for consumer goods RWA. The alliance members attending the unveiling ceremony included Dr. and Professor Lawrence Yu, Founder and Chairman of the Asia Pacific Economic Leaders’ Confederation; Dr. Wang Ping, President of the RWA Ecological International Federation and Chairman of the Asia Pacific M&A Fund; Dou Jun, Secretary General of the Hong Kong RWA Global Industry Alliance and Executive Secretary General of the Blockchain Professional Committee of the China Communications Industry Association (CCIA); Dr. Yu Jianing, Principal of Uweb Business School (Hong Kong) and Rotating Chairman of the Academic Committee of the Hong Kong Certified Digital Asset Analysts Association (HKCDAA); Dr. Jingle, Founder of Hong Kong Meta Strategy; Dr. Qiu Yueying, CEO of Winchain Technology; Tongjian Sun, CEO of INOVAI TECH K.K.; and Wen Hua, Director of the Australia & New Zealand Center of the Hong Kong RWA Global Industry Alliance, with RWA.LTD CEO Fu, Rao Tony serving as the Chairman. The establishment of the alliance marks an important step for consumer RWA moving from platform exploration to industry collaboration, signifying that the RWA narrative is extending from the relatively singular field of financial assets to the consumer industry which is more closely related to real life.

Industry insiders pointed out that the establishment of the Consumer RWA Alliance holds industry significance beyond platform business. On one hand, it helps break the market’s inherent impression of RWA as being “over-financialized” and encourages the outside world to re-recognize the application value of RWA as digital infrastructure in real consumption scenarios. On the other hand, it provides a new organizational framework for the Asian consumer market, making cross-regional brand cooperation, mutual recognition of consumer rights, and on-chain circulation mechanisms more operational. RWA.LTD stated that it hopes to promote the formation of a more diverse, open, and sustainable RWA world through the alliance mechanism, making RWA not just a synonym for asset securitization, but also a key driver for consumer innovation and industrial upgrading.

Regarding compliance issues of market concern, RWA.LTD provided a brief explanation in this announcement. Consumer goods tokens do not fall within the definition of “virtual assets” under Section 53ZRA of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing Ordinance (AMLO), as they are neither payment tokens nor governance tokens. Even if there is overlap in certain characteristics, the relevant tokens can ultimately be defined as “Limited Purpose Digital Tokens” under Section 53ZR of the AMLO, which are explicitly excluded from the scope of “virtual asset” in the AMLO. Based on this, RWA.LTD does not fall within the regulatory scope of the Virtual Asset Trading Platform (VATP) licensing regime. Meanwhile, the U.S. SEC’s previous No-Action Letter to the Fuse project, along with the definition of “Digital Tools” in the regulatory interpretation published on March 17, 2026, further supports the stance that consumer goods tokens are non-securities, non-commodities, and are not regulated under the virtual asset framework. RWA.LTD emphasized that the company consistently adheres to advancing product design and business development within a compliance framework and will continue to monitor regulatory dynamics in different jurisdictions.

The RWA.LTD team possesses a rich international background and overseas market experience, having long followed the development trends of the Web3 and RWA markets in Europe and the United States. The team observed early on that the Asian RWA market has long been concentrated on financial narratives with relatively monotonous scenarios, and platforms that truly integrate deeply with mass consumption and high-frequency lifestyle scenarios remain scarce. Consequently, the team began preparing the consumer goods RWA platform as early as 2024, hoping to take the lead in completing infrastructure, model verification, and resource integration before an industry consensus was formed.

RWA.LTD CEO Fu, Rao Tony pointed out that consumer goods RWA is currently one of the directions most likely to land and scale quickly. Compared to financial RWA, consumer goods RWA has a stronger efficient foundation in terms of compliance structure, user understanding, scenario adaptation, and promotion paths. Its core value lies in using blockchain technology to release liquidity that the consumer industry has long lacked, allowing consumer rights—which were originally fragmented, dormant, non-tradable, or difficult to circulate across regions—to achieve more efficient allocation and redistribution. Through this mechanism, the relationship between brands, platforms, and consumers will be redefined.

Fu, Rao Tony further stated that as the digitalization of the Asian consumer market continues to improve, the combination of consumer RWA and the real consumer industry is expected to release trillion-dollar economic potential in the future. For Hong Kong, this is not just an emerging Web3 track, but could become an important hub connecting international consumer networks with digital asset innovation. Hong Kong possesses unique advantages as an international financial center, an international trade center, and a highland for institutional innovation. If it can take the lead in forming scale synergy in the field of consumer RWA, it has the opportunity to occupy a leading position in the global wave of consumer asset digitalization.

In the future, RWA.LTD will continue to advance its layout around consumer goods RWA infrastructure construction, ecological cooperation expansion, alliance network improvement, and AI consumer tool research and development, exploring new on-chain paradigms for the consumer industry with more brands, institutions, and partners. As the Mall, Exchange, Fund, and Bot sectors gradually mature, RWA.LTD hopes to drive consumer RWA from concept to large-scale application, providing a more efficient, intelligent, and participatory new value network for the Asian and global consumer markets.

About RWA.LTD

RWA.LTD is positioned as the Asian consumer goods asset trading center, committed to enhancing consumption efficiency with AI, reconstructing consumer value distribution with Web3, and establishing cross-city and cross-country consumer alliance networks via tokens. The company focuses on the consumer goods RWA track, continuously promoting the digitalization of consumer rights, the circulation of consumer assets, and the synergy of the consumer ecosystem to explore the future consumption model of “Smarter Consumer”.

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SOURCE RWA.LTD

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Fox ESS Ranks No. 1 Globally in Residential Energy Storage

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WENZHOU, China, April 23, 2026 /CNW/ — Fox ESS, a global leader in renewable energy solutions, has been ranked No. 1 among residential energy storage providers worldwide for 2025, based on MWh shipments in S&P Global Energy’s Residential Energy Storage Market Tracker.

The report also places Fox ESS at No. 1 in Germany and the UK, highlighting the company’s momentum in key markets and expanding distribution footprint.

Compared with 2024, Fox ESS’s global market share rose 50% in 2025, reinforcing its position in a rapidly growing residential storage sector. The company has continued to scale internationally, with global headcount doubling from the end of 2024. As of April 2026, Fox ESS employs more than 5,000 people worldwide, and has added local support through new offices, including in Sydney, Australia.

“We’re thrilled for this remarkable achievement. It reflects our commitment to innovation and product quality, and to making clean, reliable energy practical for households around the world,” said Michael Zhu, CEO of Fox ESS. “We will continue pushing the boundaries to deliver solutions that help homes and businesses move toward energy independence.”

Notably, Fox ESS has launched the Champion’s Choice campaign globally, combining the endorsement of sports champions with recognition from prestigious organizations. With the first stop in Australia, the company signed Ian Thorpe, a five-time Olympic champion last December. The campaign underscores Fox ESS’s ambition to deliver better value for customers and partners.

Fox ESS is committed to building long-term trust with customers and partners. The company delivers reliable, high-quality energy storage systems engineered for consistent performance, supported by rigorous quality-control processes designed to help ensure every product meets the highest standards.

Fox ESS develops solutions that serve both installers and end users. With ongoing investment in R&D, the company stays ahead of evolving market needs, helping installers work more efficiently while enabling homeowners to move toward energy transition and reduce electricity costs.

With a team of more than 400 experts in R&D, Fox ESS continues to refine its product design for easier transportation, installation, and everyday use. The AI-powered FoxCloud app also makes energy management more intuitive, enabling users to monitor and control home energy consumption, manage smart devices, and track detailed generation and usage data in a single streamlined platform, delivering greater peace of mind.

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SOURCE Fox ESS

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Deepvein Mining Tech Wins NY Product Design Gold for Exploration Robotics

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SHANGHAI, April 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Deepvein Mining Tech, a developer of robotic systems for mining operations, has received Gold at the 2026 NY Product Design Awards for its Intelligent Geological Mapping and Geochemical Sampling Quadrupedal Robots, a robotics series developed for mineral exploration in remote and high-risk field environments.

The NY Product Design Awards, organized by the International Awards Associate (IAA), recognize achievements in product design and industrial innovation worldwide.

Mining exploration has become increasingly costly and technically challenging as easily accessible deposits are depleted, particularly in remote and geologically complex regions where fieldwork can be slow, labor-intensive and operationally demanding.

Deepvein’s award-winning robotics series was developed to address those constraints through a combination of quadrupedal robotic hardware and integrated software systems. The solution supports route planning, equipment coordination, sample logging and geological data management, helping standardize field operations and reduce manual workloads.

Designed for geological mapping and geochemical sampling, the robotic units can autonomously perform targeted collection tasks while reducing repeated manual fieldwork. A single operating cycle can gather approximately 30 to 50 samples.

According to deployment data from company-operated mining assets in Africa, exploration data collection cycles were reduced from around 12 months to one week, while overall workflow costs fell by approximately 40%.

Beyond efficiency gains, the use of robotic systems in steep, high-temperature or hard-to-access areas can help reduce personnel exposure to hazardous conditions. Improved targeting and digital workflow management can also limit unnecessary surface disturbance during early-stage exploration.

Deepvein is developing a broader portfolio of mining robotics covering the industry lifecycle, with future applications expected in transport support, inspection, maintenance and site rehabilitation, alongside continued iteration of its exploration-stage systems.

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SOURCE Deepvein Mining Tech

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