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Stablecoins such as Facebook’s Libra will need to be tightly regulated or they could destabilise the global economy and risk being used for money-laundering and the financing of terrorism, according to a working group consisting of senior officials from the G7 central banks as well as the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements and the Financial Stability Board.
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Everyone says Libra should be heavily regulated. But nobody seems to know how—including Facebook. That much was clear in the often muddled questions of legislators who hauled in Facebook executive David Marcus to testify this week, as well as in Marcus’ frequent deflections.
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Ocasio-Cortez references previous instances of people being paid in corporate-controlled currency, known as “scrip” — a very dark history there.
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Gotbit inflates trading volumes on obscure cryptocurrency exchanges for a fee and has about 30 token projects as clients. The firm programs bots to trade tokens back and forth with each other, creating the illusion of active markets so the assets can get listed on CoinMarketCap. Its co-founder says exchanges are aware of this manipulation but are not interested in stopping it.
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Chainalysis’s business today is split between crime fighting and regulatory compliance. Half the company’s revenue still comes from working with state governments and regulators including the IRS and the FBI to provide investigation software.
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France’s Financial Markets Authority is poised to approve a first tranche of crypto-related companies under new rules on digital coins. Under the rules, set to come into force late this month, crypto-related firms will voluntarily abide by standards on capital requirements and consumer protection and pay tax in France, in exchange for approval from the regulator.
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Companies are investing billions of dollars to find uses for blockchain, but a review of 33 projects involving large companies announced over the past four years and interviews with more than a dozen executives involved with them show the technology has yet to deliver on its promise. At least a dozen of these projects, have not gone beyond the testing phase, the review shows. Those that have made it past that stage are yet to see extensive usage.
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SWIFT has concluded a trial to integrate its “global payment initiative” with Singapore’s Fast And Secure Transfers (FAST) domestic instant payment service, that linked 17 banks across seven countries. It said all payments in the trial were settled within between 13 and 25 seconds.
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The European Banking Authority published today the findings of its analysis on the regulatory framework applicable to FinTech firms when accessing the market. The Report illustrates the developments on the regulatory perimeter across the EU, the regulatory status of FinTech firms, and the approaches followed by competent authorities when granting authorisation for banking and payment services.
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Japan’s government is leading a global push to set up an international network for cryptocurrency payments, similar to the SWIFT network used by banks, in an effort to fight money laundering. a source familiar with the effort as saying that the network is aimed to combat money laundering and was approved last month by the FATF.
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In our last post, we explored mobile money as the driving force for financial inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the increasing digitisation of use cases across different sectors – many of which were not imagined in the early days of mobile money. This post focuses on the future of mobile money. Looking ahead, we see three key areas of future growth in mobile money across Sub-Saharan Africa.
