Bitfinex And Tether Win Appeal From New York Supreme Court In $900 Million Case
Bitfinex has won an appeal in the New York Supreme Court, which means it won’t have to turn over documents pertaining to its use of the the cryptocurrency Tether.
Moneyness: A fifty-year history of Facebook's Libra
"If Libra has its heart set on choosing an artificial currency unit as the basis for its global currency, it should have probably just go with the IMF's SDR basket rather than brewing its own strange currency concoction."
China’s Central Bank: Digital Currency Has ‘No Timetable’ for Launch
China has no specific launch date in mind for its digital currency, its central bank has said in fresh comments contradicting previous statements.
The Digitalization of Money
The ongoing digital revolution may lead to a radical departure from the traditional model of monetary exchange. We may see an unbundling of the separate roles of money, creating fiercer competition among specialized currencies. On the other hand, digital currencies associated with large platform ecosystems may lead to a re-bundling of money in which payment services are packaged with an array of data services, encouraging differentiation but discouraging interoperability between platforms. Digital currencies may also cause an upheaval of the international monetary system: countries that are socially or digitally integrated with their neighbors may face digital dollarization, and the prevalence of systemically important platforms could lead to the emergence of digital currency areas that transcend national borders. Central bank digital currency ensures that public money remains a relevant unit of account.
Maker (MKR) Angers Supporters With New KYC Future
Maker will also possibly add KYC to its onboarding process, once again defeating the purpose of decentralized finance to offer low barriers to entry. This extends the troubles with Maker, including the very high participation fee, which is, in essence, its interest rate for lending.
Riksbank may not use DLT for e-kronor, says Julin
The Riksbank plans to start work on a pilot ‘proof-of-concept’ for a retail CBDC next year. To-date, no decision appears to have been reached for the technology likely to be used for the pilot or any subsequent launch.
Number of Real-time Payment Systems Continues to Grow Globally
New FIS report finds 54 countries now have active real-time payment programs, up from 40 in 2018 and nearly four times as many as 2014. India remains the global leader in real-time payments usage with 10-fold increase in value and eight-fold increase in transaction volumes driven through its national system over the last year.
The Coming Currency War: Digital Money vs. the Dollar
The country that is first to introduce a digital currency that is more easily stored and used abroad than its physical counterpart will have “a first-mover advantage to greater currency use, though not necessarily to reserve currency use,” says the IMF's Tommaso Mancini Griffoli.
Half of all Tether trading volume happens on one obscure exchange
In August, BTC/USDT represented 71.23% of total volume traded into both fiat and stablecoin. Despite controversies, USDT continues to be the most popular stablecoin for Bitcoin trading, followed by USDC, PAX, and TUSD. Bitmax, a trans-fee mining exchange, constituted roughly half of all USDT trading volume across all exchanges. Unlike regular cryptocurrency exchanges, trans-fee mining exchanges refund the fees paid by traders in the form of the exchange’s native token. While popular with traders, these exchanges have faced criticism from industry experts and were often compared to Ponzi schemes. These exchanges also incentivize wash trading.
Important Aspects of Stablecoins: The Difference Between Pegging, Collateralization, and Redeemability
Stablecoins can be broken down into 3 categories: asset-backed, crypto-backed, and non-backed. To this we need to include 3 additional dimensions; pegged, collateralized and redeemable.
Tibado - Digital currency for online micropayments and P2P payments
Tibado is a fiat-backed stablecoin micropayment system based on an Autonomous Finite State Machine (AFSM) which controls a live coin ledger. The transactions are not known to the cash box which means there are no transaction fees and the user’s privacy is preserved.
No Chinese yuan in basket underpinning Facebook's Libra
In a letter responding to a question from German legislator Fabio De Masi, Facebook said the dollar would make up 50% of the basket, followed by the euro with 18%, the yen with 14%, the British pound with 11% and the Singapore dollar with 7%, according to German news magazine Der Spiegel.
Digital Currencies: The Rise of Stablecoins
Stablecoins thus present as many conundrums as they do potential benefits—and policymakers would be wise to envision far-sighted regulatory regimes that will meet the challenge. The policies adopted today will mold the world of tomorrow. We explore one such avenue in our next blog.
Don't Say Unbanked; Say Differently Banked | AIER
America's unbanked need payments services. How to serve them? New products like postal banking, CBDC, or FedAccounts are one option. But good ol' fashioned prepaid debit cards (ie Walmart's MoneyCard) are still the best bet.
High-level policy panel discussion on central bank digital currencies
Chile’s central bank governor, Mario Marcel, says central bank digital currencies (CBDC) can provide additional flexibility at a time of unconventional monetary policies.
North Korea is developing its own cryptocurrency
North Korea is in the early stages of developing its own cryptocurrency. The goal is to avoid international sanctions and circumvent the U.S.-dominated global financial system.
Binance Is Pitching Its Stablecoin as a Government-Friendly Libra Competitor
Binance is now explicitly positioning its Venus localized fiat-backed stablecoin project as a government-friendly alternative to Libra.
Deprived of cash: poorer areas worst hit by rapid move to fee-charging cashpoints
Consumer watchdog Which? reported that one in 10 free cashpoints across the UK have closed or switched to charging a fee for withdrawals. Poorer communities, which tend to rely more heavily on cash for payments, had been hit the hardest.
UK state of pay
More than one in every 10 new accounts opened in the UK is now with a fintech firm, the report by payments firm Vocalink finds.
Modern money is crawling with nasty bacteria
Modern money is crawling with nasty bacteria. It’s not a public hazard, but scientists find that some currencies are particularly gross.
Digital challenges to the international monetary and financial system (Benoit Coeure)
"Libra has undoubtedly been a wake-up call for central banks to strengthen their efforts to improve existing payment systems. This by itself is undoubtedly a win-win situation for the global community. Progress made by those central banks already operating at the technological frontier can be expected to increase the speed of technological diffusion across borders."
The ascent of digital money
If the United States is smart, it will wake up and start competing for dominance in digital payments. The shortest cut to a system to rival Alibaba and Tencent is called Libra, the digital currency proposed by Facebook, which, with its 2.4 billion active users, is uniquely positioned to create something on a Chinese scale, and fas
Wells Fargo to Pilot Internal Settlement Service Using Distributed Ledger Technology
Wells Fargo is developing a USD-linked stablecoin that will run on the firm’s first blockchain platform. "Wells Fargo Digital Cash" will be used in a pilot initially for internal cross-border settlement across the company’s global network.
FINMA Application From Facebook’s Libra Might Not Be Good Enough To Satisfy Regulators
Switzerland's FINMA has made it clear that a) all applicable AML/KYC regulations would have to be observed, and b) a payment system license from may not be enough.
Regulating Libra
“Once Libra becomes well established in some countries, governments will lose control of their money supply and lose monetary policy as a tool of economic expansion or contraction... They will also lose the capacity, in times of severe uncertainty, to impose capital controls to prevent capital flight.”
Overseeing China’s payments revolution
A series of PBoC rulings in 2017 and 2018 have stopped bigtech payment operators profiting from interest income earned by depositing customers’ surplus payment funds. Instead, surplus payment funds now need to be placed with the PBoC and secure no interest in return – it had previously mandated that only certain percentages needed to be held with the central bank. The PBoC asked payment companies to deposit 100% of customer funds with the central bank by January 2019.
Senior CPMI officials meet on stablecoins
"As a new technology, stablecoins are largely untested, especially on the scale required to run a global payment system," said Mr Cœuré. "They give rise to a number of serious risks related to public policy priorities. The bar for regulatory approval will be high."
France, Germany blast Facebook's Libra, back public cryptocurrency
ECB board member Benoit Coeure said Libra has revived efforts to widen the uptake of the ECB-backed TIPs fast cash project, and that the ECB needs to step up its thinking on a central bank digital currency.
China’s digital currency may set the benchmark, not Libra
"There was one big different between Mondex and other electronic money schemes of the time, which was that Mondex would allow offline transfers, chip to chip, without bank (or central bank) intermediation. "
MintChip Misses the Point of Digital Currency
MintChip is a smartcard integrated circuit that holds electronic value and can securely transfer value from one chip to another. Since it's based on tamper-resistant proprietary hardware and currently supports microSD cards, USB sticks, and special high-end hardware security modules, it can perform transactions without an intermediary. This technology was created by the Royal Canadian Mint, backed by the Government of Canada.