Three big pharmaceutical firms--Pfizer, Amgen, and Sanofi--are working together to use blockchains to speed up clinical tests of new drugs, according to CoinDesk. The problem: Patient data that's crucial to locating individuals for clinical trials is usually scattered across multiple proprietary systems that are often incompatible with each other. That can make it hard to recruit for trials. How blockchains could help: A distributed ledger could allow individual patients to store data anonymously and make it visible to trial recruiters, who could then reach out to individuals who meet the eligibility criteria for a given trial. It could also streamline communication between doctors and patients during the trial.

American authorities have decided that Alibaba's digital payment firm, Ant Financial, won't be allowed to acquire the cash transfer company Moneygram. Ant Financial, which was one of our 50 Smartest Companies in 2017, is a Chinese tech company that handles mountains of data generated by its mobile payment business and other banking services. It was created in 2014 by e-commerce giant Alibaba to operate Alipay, a dominant mobile payment platform in China with 520 million users, and uses tools like computer vision and natural-language processing to reimagine financial services (see "Meet the Chinese Finance Giant That's Secretly an AI Company.") In 2017, Ant Financial tried to expand its international footprint, by buying U.S. money transfer company MoneyGram in a $1.2 billion deal. But on Tuesday, the two companies said that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States rejected their proposals to merge.