DFC

"Commercial bank Signature Bank is launching a new payments platform for institutional clients powered by a permissioned version of the ethereum blockchain. Developed in partnership with trueDigital Holdings in New York, the Signet Platform lets Signature Bank clients move money in 30 seconds, 24-hours a day, seven days a week by converting U.S. dollars into tokens compliant with ethereum’s ERC-20 standard."

Blockstream has announced Crypto Garage, a joint venture with Digital Garage and Tokyo Tanshi, to serve the Japanese Bitcoin market. The partnership will soon launch the Liquid sidechain based SETTLENET suite, the first application of which will be a yen-pegged stablecoin.

MUFG, which has also tested its own crypto-token, is far from alone. Mizuho Financial Group, a large holding company, has been experimenting with blockchain technology for several years as part of a project dubbed “J-Coin” and plans to release its own digital currency for retail payments in March. SBI Holdings, a big financial-services firm, says it’s building its own token, also for retail payments, called S Coin.

"An arm of Tokyo-listed internet group Digital Garage is working with bitcoin infrastructure startup Blockstream to test the issuance of a Japanese yen-pegged stablecoin."

"itspark, a cryptocurrency money transfer platform, has launched Sparkdex.HKD. The company claims that is the world’s first market-ready cryptocurrency pegged to the Hong Kong Dollar (HKD)."

"Maker (MKR) is a smart contract platform leveraging Ethereum (ETH) to back and stabilize the value of a stablecoin called Dai (DAI). The MKR token circulating supply is currently 728,228, generating a market cap of US$285 million, with US$591,000 traded in the past 24 hours."

"South Korea-based fintech firm BxB Inc. has launched the first supposed stablecoin backed by the Korean won, according to a press release shared with Cointelegraph on Jan 29."

"Stablecoins are simply digital assets acting as proxies for a particular fiat currency. That’s what makes them stable. But it also takes away any semblance of achieving the core mission of cryptocurrencies — to give the people a new form of money only they control."

A stablecoin is any cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to a single national fiat currency, a collection of fiat currencies, or a basket of goods in a consumer price index. A stablecoin can also be alternatively defined as a cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to the value of one or more financial assets that individually or collectively have a stable value.

"A new token backed one-to-one with bitcoin is now live on the ethereum blockchain. “Wrapped BTC” (WBTC) officially launched its ERC-20 token Wednesday evening. The project was first unveiled in October as a joint initiative between decentralized exchange startups Kyber Network and Republic Protocol, as well as cryptocurrency custody company BitGo. As stated on the project’s website, the aim of WBTC is to bring “greater liquidity to the ethereum ecosystem including decentralized exchanges and financial applications.”"

"Still in development, the platform – called Stablehouse.io – is aimed to addresses patchy liquidity, stability and accessibility that currently “prevent the stablecoin market from reaching critical mass,” according to an announcement."

Two over-the-counter trading desks say their accounts at Gemini, the crypto exchange founded by U.S. investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, were abruptly closed without explanation over attempts to redeem GUSD, the company’s stablecoin first introduced in September.

Citing unnamed sources, the publication said Facebook has been eyeing several blockchain startups with a view of making acquisitions. Some of these firms include Algorand, Basis and Keybase.

The Centre consortium was founded by crypto finance firm Circle and United States-based crypto exchange Coinbase. USDC s a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin released by Coinbase and Circle in October of last year.

While still a nascent class of digital assets, stablecoins have quickly developed into a meaningful competitor to traditional bank accounts at banks. Stablecoins are digital tokens that represent national currencies and are issued using a variety of bitcoin-based technologies, representing an $18 trillion market opportunity.

"Infrastructure is fast growing for crypto credit markets. With the introduction of collateralized debt positions (CDPs) Maker's stablecoin DAI has been a game-changer and the driving force behind the nascent crypto lending markets by allowing users to lock up their ETH in CDPs and being issued with the USD stablecoin DAI. To get DAI, users most post collateral at least 1.5x the value of their debt."

"This is a brief overview of how MakerDAO and Dai works. There are many intricacies to the system, but I believe these are the main mechanisms in place if one wants a brief overview of how Maker gives Dai its stablecoin properties."

According to a new Satoshi Capital research, stablecoins are dominating bitcoin, quickly developing into a major competitor to the traditional bank accounts. According to Satoshi Capital research, the functional differences between traditional bank accounts and stablecoins lie in speed, costs, and accessibility. Whereas traditional bank accounts – both business and individual accounts – can only be accessed by customers of each respective institution and transfers come with high costs and processing times, stablecoins can be used across the board considering that it has open system architecture.

"Basis, the highly anticipated algorithmic stable coin project, shut down and announced it would return 90% of capital raised to its investors. It didn’t mention that it was actually contractually obligated to do so. Both USD and ETH/BTC investors received 90% of returned capital, USD investors at a notional value of 1:1, whereas Ether investors saw as much as an 85% discount to par. Some of these investors have reached out to The Block under anonymity to share how the marketing of the sale differed from the underlying fine print in the pre-sale SAFT agreement"

MakerDAO, also known as Maker, is a crypto-collateralized stablecoin that uses a two-token system comprised of Dai, which targets a value of $1 per unit, and Maker (MKR), which is used to pay fees on Dai loans and grants governance input via voting on Maker’s policies, like the collateral ratio required on loans and the amount of fees charged on loans. Maker has a fixed maximum supply and when it is used to repay Dai loan fees it is burned, thereby reducing the circulating supply. To keep the price of a unit of Dai at $1, Maker employs incentive mechanisms that will be detailed later in this piece.

The document states that “cryptocurrency is not money under the Money Services Act, […] However, when a cryptocurrency transaction does include sovereign currency, it may be money transmission depending on how the sovereign currency is handled. A licensing analysis will be based on the handling of the sovereign currency.”

"According to Cryptocompare, USDT currently comprises the largest currency pairing by volume for three of the four largest crypto assets by capitalization. In the last 30 days, USDT pairings have comprised more than 67% of total BTC trade, nearly 46% of total ETH trade, and 48% of LTC trade. While BTC is the dominant pairing for XRP, with almost 49% of monthly volume, USDT is the second-most traded pairing with 22.60%."

JPM Coin, a so-called stable coin JPMorgan Chase & Co. plans for its clients to use in cross-border payments, is a direct threat to one of the most visible blockchain companies, Ripple, and the digital currency used in its products, according to Tom Shaughnessy, principal at Delphi Digital, a crypto research boutique in New York. XRP, which can be used to facilitate faster, lower cost international payments, is the third most valuable cryptocurrency by market value.

"J.P. Morgan this month became the first U.S. bank to create and successfully test a digital coin representing a fiat currency. The JPM Coin is based on blockchain-based technology enabling the instantaneous transfer of payments between institutional accounts. We sat down with Umar Farooq, head of Digital Treasury Services and Blockchain, to find out more about the announcement and what it means for the future of payments."

JPMorgan has a lot of clients (“Pretty much every big corporation is our client,” says Farooq), and they will try out JPMorgan’s walled-garden blockchain, and it will be good, and they will start sending money and doing transactions using the JPMorgan walled-garden blockchain rather than the creaky old wire-transfer-based system, and this blockchain will be so good that everyone else will want to join it too, which they will do more or less by becoming JPMorgan customers (or otherwise, somehow, getting permission to plug into the JPMorgan blockchain), and ultimately the JPMorgan blockchain will eat the world, yay.

"The author is too long in this game to mince words. If your token doesn’t have the above properties – immutable, cash-like, and resistant to the petty despots of the world – then it is not a cryptocurrency. Point-blank."

While crypto-land is abuzz about JPMorgan’s plan to move U.S. dollars around via blockchain, a smaller New York bank has already been doing this for nearly two months. Since launching at the start of the year, Signature Bank’s blockchain-based Signet system has on-boarded more than 100 clients who are using it to send each other millions of dollars a day, 24/7, bank executives said.

JPM Coin’s encrypted digital ledger – one that substitutes hashes for trust – eliminates vast numbers of layers and time. Time and trust equal counterparty risk. Automating this with blockchain drops the costs to a small fraction while increasing certainty.

"Ending Ripple’s dreams of world domination, and those of other digital coin issuers, might therefore be exactly what J.P. Morgan has in mind. It will be interesting to see how this little stand-off develops."

"The Mizuho Financial Group, operator of Japan’s second largest (and one of the top 20 largest banks in the world) bank – Mizuho Bank – says it has developed a smartphone app that will allow customers to pay at a wide range of Japanese stores using its forthcoming J Coin token. The stablecoin is slated to be unveiled next month. Alipay, for its part, is said to be keen to increase the overseas reach of its services, and will soon allow customers to pay for goods in Japan via QR code-powered J Coin transactions."