-
Hedera Hashgraph, one of the prominent new projects for 2019, is in trouble again. Nodes have shut down without warning, suggesting the network may be more centralized than previously thought.
-
Investors back projects aiming to ‘decentralise finance’ and offer direct loans and derivatives.
-
This paper presents a blockchain-based framework for CBDC with three layers, including supervisory layer, network layer and user layer, and describe the key business processes of the CBDC’s entire lifecycle of issuance-circulation-withdrawal in detail.
Month: December 2019
Protected: Kiffmeister’s CBDC Monitor, December 2019
Kiffmeister’s Fintech Daily Digest 12/30/2019
-
South Korea’s Ministry of Finance and Strategy confirmed that the current tax laws do not support the taxation of profits earned from cryptocurrencies.
Kiffmeister’s Fintech Daily Digest 12/29/2019
-
Craig Wright, who was ordered by a judge to surrender about $3 billion of his Bitcoin holdings, may not be able to do so anytime soon. He said that he “cannot be certain that information will in fact arrive” to help identify the coins he has to split in a legal dispute.
-
Coinbase has won a U.S. patent for an invention that allows bitcoin to be sent via email, something that could help bitcoin and crypto achieve wider adoption.
Kiffmeister’s Fintech Daily Digest 12/28/2019
-
This IMF paper concludes that the mere disappearance of physical cash would not imply that monetary policy’s bearing on economic dynamics be in any way reduced. Hence, the disappearance of cash cannot be the argument for calling for CBDCs from that perspective. More relevant arguments for digital instead of physical cash include instead the objective to be better able to counteract money laundering and combat the financing of terrorism and tax evasion.
-
This Article aims to highlight the factual interconnections linking ICOs, cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and CBDCs: although these entities belonging to different contexts (securities law and capital formation, payment systems, monetary policy), they are intertwined and are part of the same evolution.
-
Based on four stylized models of CBDC issuance, this Bank of Japan (BoJ) report discusses what legal issues would arise within the Japanese legal framework if the BoJ were to issue its own CBDC.
Kiffmeister’s Fintech Daily Digest 12/27/2019
-
In its “Monetary Policy for 2020” brief the Bank of Korea said it will continue to build on its research into distributed ledger technology, crypto-assets, and central bank digital currency. The Bank will organize a CBDC-dedicated task force and recruit additional experts.
-
The first of its kind, NZIA’s decentralized wireless payment system provides an alternate payment infrastructure for CBDC that augments existing payment networks.
-
China’s regulators have urged Beijing authorities to carry out relevant actions aimed at preventing the usage of cryptocurrencies by the public.
-
A recent ECB paper describe a hypothetical payments system in which citizens are provided with a monthly allotment of ‘anonymity vouchers’. The vouchers expire and cannot be traded. If users wish to make an anonymous payment, they must attach a voucher to each payment request. By doing so neither the issuing central bank nor the anti-money laundering authorities will be privy to the payor’s identity. Once the allotment is used up, payments can no longer anonymous. By rationing anonymity, the authors of the paper hope to allow for lower-value anonymous payments while filtering out larger ones.
-
“Cash could be crowded out of the payment landscape if current trends continue, but should central banks be responsible for ensuring its survival?”
-
The proposed two models would be modest contributions to introducing digital currencies for the sole use of cross-border interbank clearing and settlement. The concerns about verification of AML, CFT, KYC and tax evasion would be addressed as participating banks are properly supervised by their respective supervisory authorities. Transactions in ‘bricks’ would be authorized and executed by them. This would be a China designed and operated cross-border payments infrastructure, first for BRICS countries and later for partner countries of the Belt and Road Initiative. Like this, China and its partner countries could wean themselves off an outdated USD based system, which needs to face the digital age in a reform of its own before long.
Kiffmeister’s Fintech Daily Digest 12/26/2019
-
The Central Bank of the Bahamas will introduce a digital version of the Bahamian dollar, starting with a pilot phase in Exuma in December 2019, and extending in the first half of 2020 to Abaco. This initiative has acquired the name Project Sand Dollar, with the sand dollar also being the name assigned to the proposed central bank digital currency (CBDC). This is a continuation of the Bahamian Payments System Modernization Initiative (PSMI), which began in the early 2000s.
Kiffmeister’s Fintech Daily Digest 12/25/2019
-
The SEC will keep assessing the Wiltshire Phoenix ETF proposal, which was initially filed earlier this summer, giving February 26, 2020, as its decision date to reject or approve the ETF proposal.
-
Blockchain company Hedera Hashgraph has urged the investors of its tokens to wait longer for the delivery as the price of the tokens plunged significantly. However, the company is not slapping the decision to the investors of the token.
-
This year, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) issued strict new global standards for crypto assets. In 2020, the guidance will begin to come into force, while in January the EU’s Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD5) kicks in. The upshot of this is more Know Your Customer (KYC) enforcement, stricter controls on buying and selling cryptocurrency, and increased compliance. Bad news for bitcoiners, in other words, who value their privacy.
-
The ESCB’s EUROchain research network (with the support of Accenture and R3) uses distributed ledger technology. Based on the R3’s Corda platform, the project is a study on how privacy can be balanced with compliance procedures, like anti-money laundering rules, while DLT helps drive down the cost of transactions.
-
Digital technologies have begun to transform the payments and banking systems, but the final impact of the change is far from determined. However, faster payments are here to stay, and the new payments technologies will disrupt legacy deposit and payments franchises. The level of disruption on incumbents will depend on the structure of their legacy business and on their response in adopting the new technologies.
Kiffmeister’s Fintech Daily Digest 12/24/2019
-
Many PNC clients are having trouble connecting their bank accounts to their Venmo apps, cutting off their access to the popular mobile-payment system, owned by PayPal. When they have sought help, they have found the two companies blaming each other for the disruption. PNC suggested in tweets that customers switch to Zelle, a payment app that it and other big banks operate jointly and that competes with Venmo.
-
EMVCo serves as a de facto standard-setting body in the card payments industry, and it is controlled by the MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Discover, JCB, and China UnionPay. This paper by the Retail Payments Global Consulting Group concludes that EMVCo standards have limited payment innovation, security, and competition, and impaired merchants’ rights to transaction routing choice.
-
In many emerging economies, digital financial services markets are limited to one or two major providers, reducing innovation, customer choice and potentially facilitating monopolistic or cartelistic behavior. In this primer, CGAP proposes regulatory levers that policy makers can use to promote more competition.tags: Fintech Regulation
-
“Decades of consumer habit and resistance from retailers, say banking and fintech analysts, are proving hard to dislodge from a society that is used to paying in cash, enjoys the anonymity that comes with it and generally feels safe enough carrying around large sums. “
-
The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority has today launched a Call for Input on the opportunities and risks arising from open finance, what is needed to ensure it develops in the best interests of consumers, and what role the FCA should play.
-
Beginning in early 2020, HBAR holders that participated in the token sale will be able to take part in a program that would compensate them with annual allocations of additional coins. In exchange, investors would have to postpone the release date of the tokens acquired in their original investment.
-
While the US still struggles to bring regulatory clarity to the world of cryptocurrencies, its neighbor, Canada, currently faces taxation issues. The country was quick to introduce crypto taxes as early as in 2013. However, the country’s CPAs are concerned that tax rules might scare away future entrepreneurs.
-
Finland’s presidency of the Council and the European Parliament reached a political agreement on a new framework which makes it easier for crowdfunding platforms to provide their services across the EU. Following finalisation of technical work, the deal will be submitted for endorsement by EU ambassadors. The new rules will remove barriers for these platforms to operate cross-border by harmonising the minimum requirements when operating in their home market and other EU countries. They will also increase legal certainty through common investor protection rules.
-
The Securities Commission of The Bahamas launched its FITLink Fintech Hub to serve as the central point of contact for the Commission’s engagement with the public on various issues related to FinTech, such as virtual assets business, crowdfunding, distributed ledger technology, artificial intelligence and virtual initial offerings.
-
The Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan has launched a regulatory sandbox to stimulate financial and technological innovation and help in enhancing financial inclusion and broaden the range of financial products in Pakistan.
Kiffmeister’s Fintech Daily Digest 12/23/2019
-
According to the People’s Bank of China’s Mu Changchun, the top-level design, standard formulation, functional research and development, joint debugging and testing has been completed, and its CBDC is ready for pilot testing.
-
“The world’s growing appetite for physical assets such as paper dollars and gold, coupled with the continued interest in cryptocurrencies and other traditional currency alternatives, merely confirms that faith in artificially levitated markets is approaching a tipping point. Meanwhile the world’s “top 0.001%ers” continue to quietly cash out, literally, and put their Benjamins in secret vaults in the middle of somewhere, even as central banks do everything in their power to reduce the amount of physical currency in circulation and replace it with easily trackable digital alternatives.”
-
A Fed website dedicated to the central bank’s payment processing services put up a notice at 9:57 am. New York time on Thursday stating, “the FedACH Services application began experiencing disruption on December 18 at 3:30 p.m.
-
2019 was an excellent year for fintechs in terms of exposure and raising awareness among the majority of the population about what fintechs are and what potential they hold for the regular citizens. In 2019 we saw a major spike in the number of fintech, in the funding of these fintechs and the collaborations between these startups and the larger, more traditional institutions.tags: Fintech
-
So, what happened in open banking 2019? In Australia, open banking is finally launched; Payments NZ in New Zealand launches open banking APIs and ther NZ banks follow; Mexico continues to be the hot spot for LATAM; Brazil launches open banking model; Additional API offerings launched in Malaysia to further enrich the open banking market there; US banks begin conversations on open banking and to develop open banking ‘like’ APIs; the Central Bank of Nigeria places open banking on its Payments Vision Statement (PSV) 2030 to become the next EMEA country to implement open banking; and Bahrian makes claim to implementing open banking.
-
As of the end of 2019, Congress has introduced 21 bills addressing cryptocurrency and blockchain policy that could be considered in 2020 by the second year of the 116th Congress. Indeed, U.S. legislators have been busy examining the landscape of how this new technology has been and could be impacting businesses, consumers, and society at large.
-
Kraken were hoping to use Wyoming’s somewhat indulgent “blockchain” laws — largely written by the crypto industry — to get a local banking charter. They hoped to use this as a back door into New York state — without getting the New York BitLicense they’d normally need.tags: CryptoAssets Fintech