100% E-Money and its Implications for Central Bank Digital Currency
100% e-money and the corresponding regulation are compared to two models where the CBDC providing third-party is either an intermediary or a custodian.
Swiss regulator FINMA issues guidelines for stablecoins, including Facebook’s Libra "The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) has issued new guidelines for stablecoins, including Facebook’s planned cryptocurrency Libra
The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) has issued new guidelines for stablecoins, including Facebook’s planned cryptocurrency Libra.
Facebook Libra Is Seeking to Register as a Payment System in Switzerland
Swiss financial regulator FINMA confirmed in a guidance note on stablecoins Wednesday that it had received a request for an assessment of how it would classify the Libra project as currently planned. The agency added that range of services projected by the Libra Association would need extra oversight.
Switzerland’s guidance on stablecoins — what it means for Facebook’s Libra
Switzerland’s guidance on stablecoins — what it means for Facebook’s Libra.
France to block development of Facebook’s Libra crypto, says minister
France will halt the development of Facebook’s planned Libra cryptocurrency in Europe because it threatens the “monetary sovereignty” of governments.
France shuns Facebook’s Libra. How was Libra stupid enough to end up here?
“Did Libra hire an economist who’d worked at a central bank, or for a government, on serious macroeconomics — someone who could talk to regulators in their own language — at any point since Facebook started looking into cryptocurrencies in 2017? ...You might think “someone who knows how economies tend to work” would have been a useful sort of person to have on the team before the big announcement.”
Libra is imperialism by stealth
"If Libra follows the route of many stablecoins -- including the dominant market player, Tether -- and backs itself with dollar assets (and, it is difficult to see what else it can do but go down that route), then it is nothing but dollarisation by proxy. "
Central banks to grill Facebook over Libra
The ECB's Benoît Coeuré will chair a meeting on September 16 at the BIS headquarters in Basel between Libra and the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructure. The CPMI side will be represented by officials from 26 central banks, including the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England.
Tethers Cause Traffic Jam on Ethereum
The Ethereum network has become congested with users complaining transactions are taking hours or in some rare instances, even days, and the culprit appears to be Tether.
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."
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
The End of a Stablecoin — The Case of NuBits - Reserve Currency
NuBits, a stablecoin first introduced in 2014, provides an illuminating case study for how stablecoins work in practice. It has been functional for over 3 years, ever since the beginning of the stablecoin concept, and is currently the only live example of a stablecoin in the Seigniorage Shares category. Well, mostly functional. NuBits has suffered two big crashes, with extended peg breaking. Fortunately for us, there are valuable takeaways to be garnered from those crashes.
Introductory remarks to the Committee on the Digital Agenda of the Deutscher Bundestag
"All things considered, Libra has undoubtedly been a wakeup call for central banks and policymakers. Global "stablecoin" initiatives are the natural result of rapid technological progress, globalisation and shifting consumer preferences. The demand for fast, reliable and cheap cross-border payments is bound to grow further in coming years. Policymakers and central banks should respond to these challenges."
Why building a new protocol for money is the only way to truly change the game for people
"David Marcus: I'm often asked why we didn’t take a more traditional route of building a payment system on top of existing rails, instead of the more ambitious route we’ve chosen. I tried to find a good concise write-up about the advantages of a new core network to move money around, and couldn’t find one, so I thought it would be a good idea to take a stab at it.
Ether Price Drop Shakes DAI Stablecoin Peg, Two Collateral Contracts Closed
The recent Ether (ETH) price drop showed the reliability and weaknesses of the decentralized stablecoin built by MakerDAO, Dai (DAI), and the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem built on top of it.
At House hearing, Facebook’s Libra stablecoin faces existential threat
“[I]t seems that we have integrated the [Libra investment] token into the Libra coin in some way such as to produce a return, which would then deem it [the Libra coin] to be a security." (U.S. Rep. Al Green at a September 24 SEC oversight hearing)