DFC

Binance's Evolution of Stablecoins report finds that stablecoins are eating into the dominance of Bitcoin and Ethereum pairs, and have grown to represent 60% of traded volume, most of it in Tether.

Circle, the company behind USDC, has announced it will allow other institutions to issue and redeem the dollar-pegged stablecoin. Until now, Coinbase and Circle have been the only platforms where users can redeem their USDC, having been the sole members of the CENTRE network

The Circle Pay mobile and web apps will shut down on 8 July 2019, as Circle focuses on open blockchain technology and fiat tokens and stablecoins such as USD Coin (USDC).

Facebook Inc. has signed up more than a dozen companies including Visa Inc., Mastercard Inc., PayPal Holdings Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. to back a new cryptocurrency it plans to unveil next week and launch next year.

Facebook won’t directly control the coin, nor will the individual members of the consortium—known as the Libra Association. Some of the members could serve as “nodes” along the system that verify transactions and maintain records of them, creating a brand-new payments network.

Our results suggest design improvements that can improve long-term stability and suggest methods for solving pricing problems that arise in existing stablecoins.

"Facebook's Libra will pay interest to those who hold it at an equivalent rate at which banks earn interest on their deposits at the Fed. Which in turn will make people begin to wonder why the legacy banking system is not so generous with its depositors. This will put populist pressure on banks and new scrutiny on their relationship with the Fed."

Facebook and dozens of partners are set to unveil the Libra Association and Libra Blockchain next week. The Libra Blockchain will be backed by Libra Reserve, a reserve of real assets that will provide the cryptocurrency with “stability, low inflation, global acceptance, and fungibility. The Libra Blockchain will be open-sourced under an Apache 2.0 License as of the day of the announcement, and a testnet will be launched at the same time.

The Basis stablecoin had huge ambitions – to be the global algorithmic central bank. Despite plenty of cash & brains, Basis failed. This article pieces together the story of what happened and what it means for the Blockchain Economy.

After months and months of speculation, Facebook has finally revealed the details of its would-be cryptocurrency challenger.

Calibra is how Facebook intends to make money off Libra. More generally, it’s a massive play for Facebook to get into financial services in a way that no other technology company may be able to compete with.

Because Facebook owns Calibra and also has a seat on the Libra Association, it will be the only entity on the currently 29-member board that will effectively have two votes. But the governing structure of the Libra Association is still evolving.

Libra is nothing more than a brazen attempt to override national monetary sovereignty by creating a global-scale Fed equivalent — within which Facebook's dominance is veiled by the cunning use of buzzwords like blockchain, DLT, decentralisation and cryptocurrency.

Third parties will be able to build their own apps, wallets, and marketplaces around Libra. If you want to, though, you can use Facebook’s digital wallet, Calibra, a regulated subsidiary. In the US, Calibra is registered as a money service business, and will be overseen by the US Treasury.

Among the payments giants, a number of NGOs are involved in the Libra Association, including Creative Destruction Lab, Kiva, Mercy Corps and Women’s World Banking. To become a “Social Impact Partner,” participating non-profits must have a five-year track record of poverty alleviation work, including digital financial inclusion initiatives in the field, and an operating budget of greater than $50 million.

Facebook has built a dedicated computer programming language called “Move” to provide more flexibility to the Libra blockchain. By building programmability into the blockchain, it can take advantage of new functionality or new techniques, without an entire network upgrade.

In addition to Libra, the project will also issue a “Libra investment token” that will be sold only to the founding corporate members of the Libra Association, and accredited investors. Excess interest earned on the portfolio backing outstanding Libra collateral will go to holders of the investment tokens.

Talk of decentralised structures is everywhere in the introductory material, but for now the system only aspires to achieve decentralisation at some point in the future. Libra Blockchain will be coming to market in fully permissioned form, effectively centrally controlled by the founder Libra coin holders.

Some are comparing Facebook's Libra Reserve scheme to the IMF's Special Drawing Right (SDR) system. This makes sense. It's based on a basket of currencies just like Libra intends to be when it is launched next year. But the truth is Libra is anything but an SDR system.

A digital challenger with the clout of Big Tech is the stuff of nightmares for the old guard of finance. Facebook says that money transfers with Libra will be fast and cheap. That would undercut banks’ transaction fees, especially internationally.

U.S. regulations may represent another hurdle for Facebook. The SEC has shut down about a dozen businesses issuing their own tokens for violations of securities law. Facebook has been in contact with the SEC, but it hasn’t received a “no-action” letter from the SEC yet. That would have safeguarded the project from regulatory action by the agency.

Facebook says that Calibra customers' account information and financial data will not be used to improve ad targeting on the Facebook family of products and only in limited cases will information be shared to reflect our need to keep people safe, comply with the law and provide basic functionality to the people who use Calibra.

PayPal, for example, charges a three percent transaction fee, which takes a substantial cut out of businesses and freelancers who use their payment service for the majority of their transactions. Unless PayPal and its peers lower their fees in response to the new competition from Facebook, they could end up losing substantial market share.

A possible policy impact could come from Libra’s use as a safe haven. It may be easier for people to flee to Libra than to dollar assets, which could impact exchange rates worldwide. To the extent Libra attracts depositors away from banks, it could have an impact on banks’ access to funding.

From a technical perspective, the consensus mechanism that helps members with different interests come to an agreement uses a modified version of the math behind bitcoin’s Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) algorithm, called BFTLibra.

Signing up for Calibra will require KYC (know your customer) verification, meaning that users will have to upload some sort of government-issued ID before they can start using the service.

Facebook has revealed plans for an ambitious new digital currency, Libra, ending months of speculation about the project. The work is in its early stages but Facebook has published documents revealing ideas for the currency and some heavyweight partners. Many of the details will be hashed out in the coming months.

This document contains several parts: (1) What is the purpose of the reserve? (2) How is it getting set up? (3) How do entities interact with it? And (4) How will it change over time?

An in-depth review of Facebook's long-anticipated entry into cryptocurrency

If you buy most things online, and if everything online is priced in Libras, then you’ll end up living your life denominated in Libras, and only converting your Libras into dollars on your occasional touristic visits to the physical world. The goal is for Libra to be more useful than any national currency, accepted in more places and with fewer complications; pegging it to a single national currency would only hold it back.