DFC

Data privacy commissioners from Australia, Albania, Burkina Faso, Canada, the EU, the U.K., the U.S., shared concerns that “while Facebook and Calibra have made broad public statements about privacy, they have failed to specifically address the information handling practices that will be in place to secure and protect personal information.

Centralization is a well-known problem of crypto markets. People often referred to as whales control a fifth of some markets and have the strength to promote manipulation whenever they want to. Tether, however, seems to be facing an even worse situation: only 318 crypto addresses actually control 80% of the circulating supply of Tether.

Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty is developing a "token-based" ecosystem, utilizing blockchain, to simplify and accelerate cross-border insurance payments for its corporate customers.

If the likes of Western Union or Ria Financial Services, or MoneyGram intend to make a fist of this fight and not get swept away in the Facebook tidal wave, then it’s on them to do something that they probably haven’t had to do in quite some time... Win over their audience.

"Libra is an opportunity for the American financial industry to leapfrog Alipay and other Chinese fintech, provide much of the world with sorely needed reliable banking and simply make doing business in America less expensive. "

When you see a large Tether print it means a handful of wealthy clients have essentially preordered batches of Tethers, days in advance, to then dump on the market–often before it’s begun to surge. Buying significant amounts of USDT also allows whales to make trades on deeply liquid crypto exchanges that do not transact in fiat currencies.

I think twice about the utopian ideal of disintermediation and I think you should too. When all the vampire squids have gone extinct and Rich Uncle Pennybags is dead and buried, we may look back and wish we had once more the sense of order they provided. We may long for the days when our enemies were so easily defined.

The price of the Libra will depend on the commitment to supply coins at the speed demanded. This is not a trivial matter as the Association will have to back new coins with the underlying assets. Consider an occasion in which a Libra hype leads to a very high demand for coins (not unlike what we have seen for bitcoins). To preserve the value of one Libra, the Association will have to mint new coins at the rate demanded and back them up by buying the assets in the underlying composition. It is not obvious that suppliers will be willing to do that for any level demanded.

Fintech Beat talks with the former head of Bank of America’s global quant business, and a co-founder of Sila Money, who has raised red flags about the Facebook Libra project. Alex Lipton argues that Libra’s core design resembles the vision laid out in an open-source paper published by the Royal Society and Scientific American.

Facebook is getting into cryptocurrency because once they have a widely accepted payment method, their garden will be the largest in the world. Basically, a company is creating a walled garden when all of its apps, products, and services are interconnected with each other, and sometimes reliant on each other.

Facebook's planned cyber currency, Libra, is little more than a glorified currency board – the failed arrangement that in 2001 caused the largest sovereign default the world had ever seen. A major risk is devaluation – and the problems don't stop there.

"Even discounting the large number of unbanked adults who don’t have formal ID or mobile internet, and whom Libra won’t be able to reach in its initial stages, we estimate that Facebook’s digital currency still has the potential to reach between 370 and 800 million unbanked people1 by providing access to financial services, cheap capital, and the open, instant, and low-cost movement of money."

"Essentially, Walmart’s offering looks more or less the same as nineteenth-century scrip, issued to company employees who could spend it only in the company’s stores. There is no word yet on whether Walmart employees will be paid in WalCoin, but it is a reminder that history has a habit of repeating itself, just with new people and new technologies."

The Financial Supervisory Authority of Iceland approved Reykjavik-based Monerium as its first electronic money institution in June. The designation means that Monerium has regulatory approval to provide fiat payment services on a blockchain and use it throughout the European Economic Area. Electronic money is a well-established regulatory framework in Europe that’s been in use for years.

As an electronic money institution (EMI), we are issuing asset-backed e-money on blockchains. A regulated EMI provides customers with legal protections while gaining all of the advantages afforded by blockchains: sending, receiving, and storing digital money without going through a financial institution. In contrast, virtual currencies that transact on blockchains do not offer such protections, they are not subject to the same requirements of being asset-backed, redeemable, fully audited and supervised.

Coin Metrics says the unique identifiers known as addresses show that only about 300 entities control around 80% of Tether, the token that serves as a conduit for trading on many of the world’s largest crypto exchanges.

While Facebook was talking about their proposed cryptocurrency and blockchain linked to a basket of fiat currencies, Monerium was issuing fully licensed fiat-denominated e-money on an established blockchain, Ethereum.

The group of six US legislators will hold a meeting with the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner Adrian Lobsiger. It will be led by Maxine Waters, Chair of the House Banking Committee.

"Binance today announced its plans to initiate an open blockchain project, Venus, an initiative to develop localized stablecoins and digital assets pegged to fiat currencies across the globe. Binance is looking to create new alliances and partnerships with governments, corporations, technology companies, and other cryptocurrency companies and projects involved in the larger blockchain ecosystem, to empower developed and developing countries to spur new currencies."

"The appropriate response to Libra or the larger crypto phenomenon is not a binary yes or no. Rather, it’s to engage in a wide and deep debate on how to create technology-enabled monetary solutions that better serve humanity. So far at least, the traditional banking sector has not been up to the challenge, preferring instead to use compliance requirements as a fig leaf to protect what is an all but entrenched oligopoly."

Fnality is pleased to announce key additions to the senior management and advisory team. Gary Chu joins as General Counsel and Adam Clarke as Chief Technology Officer (CTO), with Daniel Heller joining as Head of Regulatory Affairs.

Transfer volumes across stablecoin platforms have risen considerably in 2019. While the number of on-chain transactions across tracked stablecoins still trail that of Venmo, the aggregate total on-chain transfer volume across the largest stablecoins has now surpassed Venmo’s total payment volume .

A rag-tag team of Israeli entrepreneurs is looking to leverage Facebook’s cryptocurrency project for profits, even without the $10 million required to join the Libra Association. So far the newly established startup, Libracamp, has received more than 80 applications to participate in a virtual bootcamp for Libra developers starting in November.

Antitrust regulators at the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, have sent out a questionnaire to determine whether Facebook’s proposed stablecoin Libra is an anticompetitive project.

Tether is planning to issue a stablecoin pegged to the Chinese renminbi, according to a trader with ties to the company.

Although both of the stablecoin projects may appear to be international in scope, Binance’s will likely only work with specific countries and regions in developing their own digital currencies to help establish financial autonomy and security.

The New York Attorney General is investigating Bitfinex, Tether and various associated iFinex companies — on the basis, amongst other reasons, that there’s been funny business with the Tether “reserve”.

2019 has proven a huge year for the development of stablecoins and decentralized finance, particularly in regards to projects built on the Ethereum blockchain.

The European Banking Association and the European Securities and Markets Authority have written to the European Commission to say they will review the legal frameworks used by European Union member states for monitoring stablecoins such as Libra.

Intensifying regulatory scrutiny of Facebook's Libra digital currency has spooked some of the project's early backers, with at least three privately discussing how to distance themselves from the venture.