News

Dorsey-Backed diVine Brings Back Vine’s Looping Videos

The reboot pulls 100,000-plus clips from a salvaged archive and adds strict checks to block AI-made posts.

Published

11 months ago

November 13, 2025

dorsey-backed divine brings back vine's looping videos

diVine has gone live with a rebuilt trove of classic Vine loops and fresh funding from Jack Dorsey. The app restores more than 100,000 six-second videos from the Vine archive and reopens a format that disappeared when Twitter shut Vine down in 2016.

The recovery almost didn’t happen. Archive Team volunteers scraped the site ahead of its closure but stored the material in huge binary dumps that were effectively unusable. Evan Henshaw-Plath (an early Twitter engineer who’s now working with Dorsey’s new nonprofit and Other Stuff) spent months cracking those files and stitching user data back together. He says the result captures most of Vine’s best-known clips, though millions of niche posts were never archived.

Creators retain their copyrights. They can request takedowns or reclaim profiles by proving control of the accounts linked in their old bios. Once verified, they can upload missing videos or post new ones.

diVine isn’t pitching nostalgia alone. The app lets users shoot fresh six-second loops but runs each upload through checks from the Guardian Project to confirm a clip was recorded on a real phone. Suspected AI content is blocked. That stance stands out as generative video races across major social platforms.

The service runs on Nostr, the decentralized protocol Dorsey has pushed as an alternative to corporate-controlled feeds. “Nostr — the underlying open source protocol being used by diVine — is empowering developers to create a new generation of apps without the need for VC-backing, toxic business models or huge teams of engineers,” Dorsey said.

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Meanwhile, Henshaw-Plath sees a simple demand: spaces where the feed is human. “Yes, people engage with [AI] … but we also want agency over our lives and over our social experiences,” he said.

For users in the Middle East and elsewhere watching automated content flood their timelines, diVine marks a return to a lean format that once defined early mobile video — now rebuilt on open tech and a bet that authenticity still matters.

News

NEOPAY Wants To Follow Merchants Across Channels And Borders

A controlling 65% stake in noon payments would give NEOPAY access to marketplace sellers, online merchants and the payment flows they generate.

Published

1 day ago

October 5, 2026

Nour Nasir

neopay wants to follow merchants across channels and borders

It’s been a long time since checkouts were single defined places. A merchant might take payments at a physical register, on its own website and through an online marketplace, sometimes in more than one country. NEOPAY wants to follow those transactions wherever they happen.

The UAE payments company has entered into an agreement to acquire a 65% controlling stake in noon payments. NEOPAY already runs the acquiring infrastructure that lets merchants accept card payments, along with omnichannel acceptance and a merchant services platform. This new deal would add noon payments’ embedded payments platform, e-commerce gateway and merchant network across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. That would considerably expand both NEOPAY’s digital commerce capabilities and its regional reach.

For merchants, the attraction is a single provider for online and in-store payments, plus faster settlements, data and analytics, and value-added financial services.

“Payments should be simple, reliable, and built for the markets they serve,” said Faraz Khalid, CEO of noon. His counterpart at NEOPAY, Vibhor Mundhada, added: “We have built a strong payments business in the UAE, and our ambition is now to take that capability across the region”. The acquisition, Mundhada added, would “expand our footprint into Saudi Arabia and Egypt” while reinforcing NEOPAY’s position at home.

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NEOPAY is also keen to point out potential payment volume increases. The company says noon payments’ integrations with marketplace sellers and online merchants create high transaction density in some of the region’s fastest-growing digital commerce segments. It also believes control of the business would give it access to those merchant relationships and payment flows, and speed up the rollout of alternative payment methods and installment options.

The combined roadmap targets faster merchant onboarding, better payment performance, tighter fraud controls and embedded financial services. The deal could also strengthen cross-border payments and settlement along key regional commerce corridors.