DFC

Payments platform Wirex is launching 26 fiat-backed stablecoins on the Stellar blockchain network, including the U.S. dollar, euro, the British pound, Hong Kong dollar and the Singapore dollar.

Following the NY AG’s accusations of a $850M cover-up, Bitfinex refutes the claims as ‘riddled with false assertions’ and that the funds are not lost.

Launched in December 2017 as an ERC-20 token, MakerDAO is pegged 1:1 with the United States dollar, with its peg being maintained via over-collateralization with ether (ETH). In other words, users receive the equivalent of $1 in DAI by depositing more than $1 in ETH, and they can later reclaim their collateral by repaying the DAI they've received plus a “stability fee” in MKR, MakerDAO's other (nonstablecoin) token. By charging users this additional fee, the MakerDAO system theoretically prevents the value of DAI from dropping below $1, since the fee makes it expensive to mint more DAI tokens.

Ontology will launch Paxos Standard (PAX), a regulated USD stablecoin, on the Ontology blockchain, in May.

In what seems to be one of the greatest crypto scandals 2019 has seen so far, the United States Attorney General in New York accused Bitfinex of using Tether’s cash reserves to cover a rumored $850 million funding gap with reserves meant for backing the stablecoin. Both companies share the same owner.

Tether has cash and cash equivalents (short term securities) on hand totaling approximately $2.1 billion, representing about 74 percent of the current outstanding tethers.

Gemini is partnering with Harbor, an all-in-one platform for tokenized securities offerings, to allow users to invest in deals using Gemini dollars (GUSD) and receive any future distributions or dividends of such deals in GUSD.

Facebook is looking to raise $1 billion for its rumored cryptocurrency stablecoin, the WSJ reports. Facebook was also said to be talking Visa and MasterCard about potential support, along with payment processor First Data Corp.

Crypto Capital were the money transmitters for Bitfinex and Tether. They operated in the US through Global Trading Solutions. The founder of GTS, Reggie Fowler, was indicted on Tuesday. The US Government has filed a motion to detain Fowler as a flight risk.

Crypto Capital founder Reggie Fowler is being charged by the SDNY with bank fraud and conspiracy to commit bank fraud, and of running an unlicensed money transmission business and conspiracy related to its operation. Crypto Capital were the money transmitters for Bitfinex and Tether.

At the heart of the initiative, under way for more than a year and code-named Project Libra, is a digital coin that its users could send to each other and use to make purchases both on Facebook and across the internet, according to people familiar with the matter.

As is currently being done, crowd-sourcing of pricing data feeds is fundamentally broken for stablecoins because the incentives are misaligned. Stablecoins that rely on this fundamental mechanism should be considered broken.

Bitfinex has released the official white paper for its $1B exchange token sale, said it will also launch a dedicated platform for projects to raise funds via similar initial exchange offerings.

Decentralized algorithmic stablecoins (eg DAI) do not contain any of the risks outlined in this summary of the Tether situation. While they do contain a host of other risks, those that value transparency migrate may migrate to DAI.

The JPM Coin team replaced Constellation, Quorum’s privacy layer written in the Haskell computer language, with Tessera, which has a similar design, but is built in Java to make it easier for businesses to use and deploy.

MakerDAO emerged as a clear market leader in part for its rock-bottom interest rates of 0.5 percent, which are a technological necessity for keeping its DAI stablecoin worth $1. With interest rates rising to 19.5 percent, some early borrowers are angry.

The U.S. Senate Banking Committee wrote an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, asking him to share details about its secret cryptocurrency project, with a particular focus on consumer privacy.

Is issuing fiat-backed stablecoins on public blockchains the best approach? Is a public, permissionless blockchain actually necessary? Let’s take a closer look at what stablecoins supposedly gain from the use of public blockchains and whether there may be more practical options available to issuers.

Is the Maker DAI experiment over? Have MKR holders been underwater from the beginning, and increasing stability fees is their attempt to resuscitate their investment with the side effect of killing the patient?

The company behind the Paxos Standard (PAX) stablecoin announced that its users can now instantaneously redeem unlimited amounts of its tokens for United States dollars.

Gemini is joining forces with Flexa, a platform that enables shoppers to spend bitcoin, ether, Bitcoin Cash, and Gemini dollars at major retailers across the U.S.

Facebook is working on a blockchain-based payment solution code-named Project Libra. What are the implications for FacebookCoin, the Facebook ecosystem, and the wider blockchain space?

Neutral Dollar is a metastable basket of stablecoins. The result is a digital dollar designed to have lower volatility than individual stablecoins by combining fragmented pools of liquidity.

For the first time in five months, MakerDAO token holders have voted to decrease fees on all DAI loans. DAI is a dollar-pegged stablecoin operating on the ethereum blockchain backed by nearly 2 million ether tokens.

A new digital token backed by $300 million worth of gold guaranteed by the Chinese Gold and Silver Exchange has just been released in Hong Kong.

Several of the world’s largest banks are investing around $50M in Fnality to create a blockchain-based digital cash system to settle financial transactions. It may be an offshoot of the UBS and Clearmatics "utility settlement coin" project.

Facebook has set up a new Fintech company, Libra Holdings, in Switzerland focusing on blockchain and payments as well as data analytics and investing, Geneva’s commercial register shows.

Bitfinex has reportedly raised $1B worth of US dollars, Bitcoin and Tether with its UNUS SED LEO exchange utility token offering. LEO lies “at the heart of the [Bitfinex parent] iFinex ecosystem" and will be useable for a variety of exchange-based activities.

Circle has published the latest third-party (Grant Thornton) audit of its USD-pegged stablecoin, USD Coin. It states that as of end-April there were 293,184,174 USDC issued and $293,351,374 in the firm’s reserves.