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Deputy Governor Amamiya said the BOJ has no plans to issue digital currencies for now, partly due to uncertainties over how it affects conventional commercial banking. He also brushed aside the idea that central banks can boost the effectiveness of negative interest rate policies by issuing digital currencies, as it would require the elimination of cash.
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JPM Coin (JP Morgan), USC (UBS and twelve others), J Coin (Mizuho and a consortium of Japanese banks), MUFG Coin (Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFG), and Signet (NY-based Signature Bank).
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Fujitsu is developing a digital identity exchange technology that uses blockchain to prove reputation and improve trust in validating a user. It makes it possible for individual users and service businesses involved in online transactions to confirm the identity of the other parties.
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Our previous post in November last year provided compelling empirical evidence that USDT printing was used by Bitfinex to manipulate the BTC/USD price upwards during the fourth quarter of 2017. And until the current allegations are proved one can only conjecture, but we conclude that the crypto market is now entering its second tether bubble.
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“SIX MONTHS OF 2019 are on the books already, and certainly there have been six months’ worth of data breaches, supply chain manipulations, state-backed hacking campaigns, and harbingers of cyberwar to show for it. But the hallmark of 2019, perhaps, is feeling like the worst is yet to come. Ransomware is an ever-growing threat, corporate and US government security is still a mess, and geopolitical tensions are rising worldwide.”
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The US$1 trillion that traditional retail and commercial banks have invested globally over the past three years to transform their IT operations has not yet delivered the anticipated revenue growth, according to a new report from Accenture.
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Banco BTG Pactual will with Dubai’s Dalma Capital to host a deal pipeline of $1bn for existing and future prospective security token offerings. They plan to utilize the Tezos blockchain, which will include a range of tokenized traditional and alternative investments.
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“What the Libra discussion totally misses is how consumers are going to get value into the Libra system in the first place. If I have cash, how do I put funds on Libra? I’m going to need to go through a bank or other financial institution, and it’s not going to be free. Same if I want to take money out of Libra.”
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Libra is a massive money market fund that doesn’t pay any interest to coinholders, probably in part to avoid being qualified as a security by the SEC. It does, however, pay this interest to Libra Association members, who all have massive idle cash reserves to park profitably at the Libra Association. For example, Facebook, which has over $40 billion in cash liquidity, could “pre-mint” Libra, which it will then sell to users, and buy it back when they want to get out of it.
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My best guess is that Libra is meant to be like a mutual funds share, redeemable (by authorized resellers, not by the public directly) at the net asset value of a low-risk mutual fund diversified across several fiat currencies. The public can buy and sell Libra “coins” in exchange for existing fiat money. Also, unlike an ordinary mutual fund, which allows members of the public to buy shares directly and sell them directly back to the fund at their current net asset value, Libra only allows Resellers to interact directly with the Libra Reserve.
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“There is no longer any doubt that high-altitude balloons can be used to provide cellular service to remote locations or places reeling from natural disaster. The question for Loon — an Internet-providing balloon service owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company — is whether that technology is commercially viable.”