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Mu Changchun, Deputy Chief in the Payment and Settlement Division of the People’s Bank of China, has announced that the country will soon roll out its central bank digital currency.
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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.
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Thailand’s central bank announced it is working with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority to develop interoperability among ledgers for cross-border funds transfer. The collaboration is part of the third phase of the Bank of Thailand’s Project Inthanon.
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The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System was formally launched by the African Export-Import Bank at the African Union Extraordinary Summit, which ended recently in Niamey, Niger Republic. The PAPSS, then becomes a continent-wide digital system to facilitate payments and settlements for goods and services in local currencies.
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There are a few variations of crypto debit cards available that you should be aware of. Some crypto debit cards hold your Bitcoin directly as BTC and convert it into fiat only at the time of transactions, while other cards convert it into equivalent fiat as soon as you deposit them. On the other hand, there are also cards that are simply linked to your fiat accounts where you can switch between crypto or fiat as much as you like.
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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.
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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.
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Ripple and Mastercard are the investors in Ripple-powered global remittance startup, SendFriend. Another Ripple partner Earthport, an automated clearing house for payments received bids from Mastercard and Visa, a round won by the latter. Now, Mastercard is buying a Denmark-based payments platform Nets for EUR 2.85B.
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According to “Why Is XRP Underperforming?” report by cryptocurrency exchange OKEx, “as a payment solution provider, Ripple is facing intense competition,” and “any negative impact on the company could easily transform into undesirable price actions in XRP.”
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It is safe to say xRapid is Ripple’s most vibrant project right now. It has been active before, but not as alive with multiple banking institutions and other mainstream cash transfer entities as it is right now. It has been so buzzing lately that it is only recently that MoneyGram finally joined the clique of companies relying on it.
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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.
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Introducing the Bitcoin Difficulty Ribbon. When the ribbon compresses, or flips negative, these are the best time to buy in and get exposure to Bitcoin. The ribbon consists of simple moving averages on mining difficulty so we can easily see the rate of change in difficulty.
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Of the 36,836 10-K reports in the database spanning five years, only 242 reports — representing a little more than half of a percent — mentioned blockchains or distributed ledgers.
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Tokenizing real estate is akin to creating a REIT. A company acquires real estate and then sells it as fractional shares in an exchange. The shares change in price with the underlying assets and rents are distributed as dividends, after subtracting an amount for the company that holds and manages the assets.
