DFC

The Libra Association added 3 new members to its ranks; Singapore government-owned investment giant Temasek and U.S.-based venture capital firms Slow Ventures and Paradigm.

Bitcoin miners need cash to pay their electricity bills. They could sell their rewards on exchanges which someone would have to buy, to prevent BTC from crashing. Tether and Bitfinex have real money from those who trade on its exchange, but why would they buy miners' BTC, when they can loan them the money instead? And if a miner defaults, it's not Tether the company that takes the hit, but USDT holders. Maybe that's the real reason why Tether/Bitfinex don't want an audit. Not because USDTs aren't backed, but because they're backed by miners' BTC. And because Tether controls the miners, they also control Bitcoin.

Prior to abandoning its involvement in the Telegram Open Network and GRAM token, Telegram offered TON investors in its 2018 $1.7 billion initial coin offering an immediate 72% refund, or a 110% refund in 12 months. However, the majority of TON investors purportedly decided to get their money back as soon as possible, choosing the 72% option.

The Celo Foundation has announced its mainnet is live, almost two and a half years since the team began working on the project. The launch of the mainnet means users who participated in the network’s $10-million auction can now transfer their cGLD tokens on-chain.

The Libra Association announced Robert Werner as General Counsel. He adds more regulatory and financial compliance firepower to the Facebook inspired stablecoin and blockchain project. This executive change comes just after the announcement of Libra’s new CEO, Stuart Levey, who recently stepped down from HSBC Holdings as Chief Legal Officer.

Billon and Raiffeisen Bank International are extending a successful proof-of-concept of a national currency tokenization platform into a pilot project, which will include selected RBI corporate and institutional clients. This pilot will lever a new form of national currency tokenization using Billon’s distributed ledger technology, successfully tested during RBI’s Elevator Lab acceleration program earlier this year.

This fall digital asset management firm Cryptex will launch TCAP, a decentralized stablecoin that’s pegged to the entire crypto market.

Bitcoin's price is determined by the total dollars, both fiat and Tether, in the system. Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, believes that actual dollars in the system are depleted as Bitcoin miners need cash to pay their electricity costs. If the amount of real dollars in the ecosystem hits zero, Bitcoin will collapse, he argues. (Exchanges, typically those that lack links to traditional banking, use Tether in lieu of real dollars as a way to bring liquidity to the crypto markets and hedge against volatility.)

Terra aims to provide a price stable cryptocurrency, built on top of the Cosmos SDK, that will function as the infrastructure layer for decentralized financial applications. The protocol utilizes an elastic monetary supply that allows for both a stable price and the censorship resistant capabilities of Bitcoin to be maintained, enabling it to be used in everyday transactions. Currently, Terra is the backend technology powering CHAI, a mobile payments application that allows users to link their bank accounts and participate in ecommerce using Terra’s currency and receiving discounts in exchange.

Aiming to overcome price-volatility and ease of use problems associated with many cryptocurrencies, Celo seeks to bring financial infrastructure and tools to anyone with a smartphone.  To reach this goal, Celo is taking a full-stack approach and introducing innovations at the networking and application layers with technologies like a lightweight address-based encryption scheme, an ecosystem of stable-value tokens, and novel system architectures. "

Telegram withdrew its appeal over a previous court decision that backed the SEC in prohibiting the issuance of Gram tokens to investors both in and out of the U.S. The new document filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit states: “The parties in the above-referenced case have filed a stipulation withdrawing this appeal pursuant to Local Rule 42.1.” The rule means that the parties have filed an agreement for dismissal of the case without prejudice. As such, the case is over for now, but not necessarily forever.

Libra’s wallet provider Calibra has now been rebranded to Novi – a portmanteau of the Latin root words, “novus” meaning new and “via” meaning way. The first wallet product from the firm is intended to hold Libra’s various digital currencies, once the Facebook-led initiative goes live.

Acting as a settlement, payment and transaction currency, Aton is the blockchain-based stablecoin for participation and use of the Further travel industry settlement and transaction ecosystem.

In an upcoming release, Synthetix will introduce sUSD-denominated ETH collateral − a feature familiar in many ways to Maker CDP owners − and the value proposition will flip overnight. Not only will this feature deliver more utility to the trader, it will also expose a key advantage sUSD has over DAI as a stablecoin.

Earlier this month the Libra Association issued a new White Paper updating its paper of June 2019.  This column argues that while the authors of the paper now understand that to succeed, their project must address economic and political concerns, they have done nothing to address worries about currency substitution.  A new proposed capital buffer is underspecified.  A key market in Libra futures or forwards is missing, as is a Libra lender of last resort.

MakerDAO is in the process of voting on whether to further diversify the collateral it accepts for loans beyond crypto-assets and tokens to include real-world assets. Specifically, Maker would also allow supply chain invoices and musicians’ future royalty streams as security when it lends out DAI. These assets would be represented on the Ethereum blockchain by non-fungible tokens, the innovation that spawned CryptoKitties. Small businesses and artists could take the borrowed DAI, which usually trades 1-for-1 with the U.S. dollar, to crypto exchanges like Coinbase and convert it to cash.

During the Great Depression, some banks were closing temporarily and others failing completely. There was little money in the hands of the people, and given the uncertainty about their prospects of getting more of it, people tended to hoard what little they had. The short supply of U.S. dollars in the 1930s meant there was a need to come up with another way for trade to keep the economy going -- leading to the idea of local currencies, known across the country as Depression scrip.

Coin Metric’s latest state of the network shows stablecoin usage statistics across issuers and networks. Roughly 40% of all PAX volume is tied to ponzi schemes. The report also demonstrates how stablecoins from the same issuer may be used differently across networks.

MakerDAO's latest spike comes amid a community vote showing strong support for supporting non-crypto-native assets as collateral for the creation of DAI. Currently, MakerDAO users can lock up Ether, Wrapped Bitcoin, Basic Attention Tokens, or the stablecoin USD Coin to fund DAI loans. The vote signaled support for a protocol developed by blockchain startup Centrifuge that would allow “real-world assets” to be tokenized as ERC-20-based securities that can be used as collateral for DAI minting.

CoinMetrics has found extreme wealth centralization among many top stablecoins, with at least 80% of the total capitalization for five top stable tokens being held in less than six accounts. And most at least 20% of transfers made using most stablecoins are valued at less than $100, showing significant stable token adoption as a means of payment. The report also found that more than 40% of transactions made using the Paxos Standard Token are directly linked to a single multi-level marketing, or MLM, Ponzi scheme.

The Libra Association has appointed Sterling Daines as its Chief Compliance Officer. Daines will join Libra later this year after stepping down from his current role as Managing Director and Global Head of Financial Crime Compliance at Credit Suisse.

The Reserve project is also going through the initial testing stage for its Reserve (RSV) decentralized governance stablecoin. The first phase of its development is centralized, where it will be fiat-collateralised and pegged to the US dollar. To get rid of this dependence, RSV will have to make a contrary step towards decentralization and utilize a “basket of assets,” as of now to consist of three collateral tokens: USD Coin, TrueUSD and Paxos, while still keeping the USD peg until it’s finally abandoned.

In a bid to lessen the blow of COVID-19, the town of Tenino has started issuing its own wooden dollars that can only be spent at local businesses. Tenino is setting aside $10,000 to give out to low-income residents hurt by the pandemic. But instead of using federal dollars, they are printing the money on thin sheets of wood designed exclusively for use in Tenino, using a 130-year-old newspaper printer from a local museum.

The Stellar project released the 13th version of its core protocol on June 13th. Network validators will vote on whether to upgrade the network on June 18th. Like XRP, Stellar does not use Proof-of-work or Proof-of-Stake but uses its own unique approach to solve the Byzantine generals problem called the Federated Byzantine Agreement. The protocol changes focus on three key Core Advancement Protocols, Fee bumps, Fine-grained control of asset authorization, and First-class multiplexed accounts.

Venezuelans are digitally dollarizing using Zelle, a U.S.-based payments network that allows anyone with a U.S. bank account to instantly transfer funds to another U.S. bank account for free. Although Zelle is meant for U.S. usage only, Venezuelans have repurposed the network as a way to make dollar payments among each other. Large Venezuelan supermarket chains have enabled Zelle as a form of payment, and cafes, restaurants and taxis accept it. But business and commercial use infringes on Zelle’s terms of service, which specifies that its network is intended only for personal use. Wells Fargo has notified many Venezeulan account holders their connection to Zelle will be terminated, so the game may soon be over.

PieDAO, the decentralized organization building diversified token pools on the Balancer protocol, announced the mainnet release of its USD++ pool on Tuesday. The pool combines several of the top USD-pegged stablecoins into one tradable token. It’s another example of a creative use case of the rapidly growing Balancer protocol—and of the expanding universe of ideas DAOs are working to address. The USD++ pool will contain Maker DAI, Synthetix sUSD, Tether TUSD, and Coinbase USDC.

Stablecoins are assets that have price stability characteristics that make it suitable for short-term and medium-term use as a unit of account and store of value, often pegged to a national currency.