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Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani has proposed creating a cryptocurrency for Muslim countries as an alternative to the US dollar. Rouhani said the U.S. has used economic sanctions as the “main tools of domineering hegemony and bullying” of other nations. Last month, BRICS nations also proposed creating a cryptocurrency for settling payment transactions between the group “
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EY today announced the release of the third-generation zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) blockchain technology to the public domain on the Ethereum public blockchain. The enhancements of the ZKP blockchain technology will help make private transactions on public blockchains more scalable by significantly reducing transaction costs through batching multiple private transfers together in a single transaction.
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The hype around initial coin offerings may have quieted down in the States, but France seems to be taking a newfound interest. On Dec. 17th, France’s financial regulator, the Autorité des Marchés Financiers, granted the country’s first approval for an ICO application.
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On December 10th, 2019, Monerium and Tradeshift Frontiers carried out the world’s first cross-border euro transaction on the Ethereum network. Using the Tradeshift platform, Tradeshift ordered goods from Shop Icelandic which in turn ordered the goods from their supplier, Nordic Store. Invoices and purchase orders were issued through Tradeshift smart-contracts and settled using Monerium e-money on-chain.
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In this work, we investigate how the governance features of a managed currency (e.g., a fiat currency) can be built into a cryptocurrency in order to leverage potential benefits found in the use of blockchain technology and smart contracts. The resulting managed cryptocurrency can increase transparency and integrity, while potentially enabling the emergence of novel monetary instruments.
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Instead of increasing its size and scope, the Fed should reconsider its priorities. There does not seem to be an urgent need for real-time payment technologies, which are already being offered and developed by the private sector. The role of public entities such as the Fed is not to compete with the market, but to provide and secure a good competitive environment for the market to develop.
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The Financial Conduct Authority has issued a call for input on proposals to extend open banking rules to a wider range of products, under a new model billed as ‘open finance’.
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Planning to score some cocaine before meeting your girlfriend at a hotel? Neither the cops nor your wife will be any the wiser if you use some of the “anonymity vouchers” Europe’s central bank just proposed building them into an e-euro.
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The paper finds that the credit scoring model based on machine learning and non-traditional data is better able to predict losses and defaults than traditional models in the presence of a negative shock to the aggregate credit supply. One possible reason for this is that machine learning can better mine the non-linear relationship between variables in a period of stress. Finally, the comparative advantage of the model that uses the fintech credit scoring technique based on machine learning and big data tends to decline for borrowers with a longer credit history.
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Funnily enough, the core point I keep returning to is that you need trusted intermediaries to allow people who don’t trust each other to trade. And that is what banking does. Banks exist as regulated and licensed institutions to ensure you can trust them to transfer funds without losing them. That’s it folks. That’s what it’s all about and crypto is learning this, just as every FinTech does. Banks exist for a reason, are regulated the way they are for a reason and operate the way they do for a reason. And that reason is all about trust.
