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The IMF’s Dong He and Yan Liu talk about central bank digital currency: the current level of interest among central banks in issuing them, what concerns they need to address when designing them, and how commercial banks might be affected, depending on the design of the CBDC. We discuss how privacy could be built into such a currency while also fulfilling anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financial regulations and how a CBDC could affect the IMF’s ability to achieve its goal of financial inclusion. Plus, we also cover how crypto assets being widely adopted could influence economies, as well as Facebook’s Libra.
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PayPal -owned payments app Venmo announced support for instant transfers to U.S. bank accounts. The feature is an optional alternative to Venmo’s standard bank transfer service, which typically takes one to three business days to process transactions. With Instant Transfer, however, funds from your Venmo account can hit your bank account within minutes.
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The RTP network has a single price for all participants with no volume discounts, no volume commitments and no monthly minimums to ensure that financial institutions of all sizes participate on the same terms. Financial institutions pay only for the transactions they originate.
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The Clearing House, owned by 24 large U.S. banks, is currently operating a real-time payments system. An independent assessment found that the RTP network met all 36 criteria set by the FRB-sponsored Faster Payments Task Force. Those 24 banks have individually or collectively paid hundreds of millions of dollars to build that system.
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According to CipherTrace, outright thefts, scams and other kinds of misappropriation of funds from digital currency holders and trading platforms resulted in around $4.3 billion in losses throughout 2019.
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The U.S. SEC has again delayed making a decision on three bitcoin exchange-traded fund proposals. The ETFs were proposed earlier this year by asset managers Bitwise Asset Management, VanEck/SolidX and Wilshire Phoenix, and filed with exchanges NYSE Arca and Cboe BZX.
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Seed SEF has launched user acceptance testing of its physically-settled bitcoin derivatives which will carry on through early August. Seed SEF, which has been licenced as a Swap Execution Facility by the CFTC since 2016, has opened its UAT environment, allowing customers to start trading on Seed SEF’s matching platform.
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Hedera is a public ledger that uses hashgraph consensus, touted by the company as a faster, more secure alternative to blockchain consensus mechanisms. Hashgraph claims to achieve high-throughput with 10,000-plus cryptocurrency transactions per second, and low-latency finality in seconds from its “innovative gossip about gossip protocol” and virtual voting. Once consensus is reached, the data is added to the public ledger for everyone to see.
Kiffmeister’s Fintech Daily Digest 08/13/2019
