-
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation gave the green light to an application from the FinTech firm Square to create a de novo industrial bank in Utah. Square Financial Services will originate commercial loans to the retailers that use Square for payments. The Utah Department of Financial Institutions still has to issues approvals to the San Francisco-based FinTech.
-
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange traded just three bitcoin options contracts on March 18, with a notional amount of 15 bitcoin, the CME’s lowest daily volume since the contracts went live on January 13. Meanwhile, Bakkt has seen no options trading activity since February 27.
-
This Banca d’Italia paper reviews the main empirical studies on the use of new digital technologies in the credit market. It finds that new data and methods improve on traditional credit risk models, and fintech borrowers are on average riskier than traditional bank borrowers.
-
The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Canada will soon implement enhanced AML/CFT regulations for businesses operating with cryptocurrencies. The laws including updated guidelines for virtual currencies.
-
The Monetary Authority of Singapore provided guidance on their AML/CFT requirements for digital payment token service providers.
-
The supply for the USDC stablecoin has jumped significantly since the start of the month. The market capitalization for the dollar-backed stablecoin has climbed by approximately $200 million since March 1, now surpassing the $600 million benchmark. This figure represents a 42%.
-
Sales at this auction take a reverse-auction format, with a fixed bidding amount of 50,000 DAI placed for an initial lot of 250 MKR tokens. Bidders can then lower the amount of MKR that they would be prepared to accept for the bid, but with a minimum decrease of 3%. Each lot will continue until one of two thresholds is crossed: either 6 hours passing since the last bid, or 72 hours passing since the first bid.
-
The MakerDAO (MKR) community has locked in a March 19 auction to cover a multi-million dollar hole in DAI collateral after the sudden Ethereum (ETH) price crash on March 12. The system will auction newly minted MKR in exchange for DAI. The proceeds from the sale will be used to recapitalize the system and compensate the losses suffered by the borrowers who saw their Ethereum collateral auctioned off for zero DAI. As the stablecoin powers many decentralized finance applications, the stability of Maker is paramount for the entire ecosystem.
-
Tether has created USD $180 million of its USDT stablecoin for a so-called “inventory replenishment” on March 17-18. Such a step could add further dynamics to an already extremely volatile Bitcoin market.
-
While many retail investors sold their Bitcoin holdings either partially or fully, the crypto market has been dragged down by institutional or professional investors, according to data provided by Chainalysis.
-
The BitMEX analysis divides the CBDC concept into two distinct ideas: i) banning physical cash, and, ii) allowing retail customers to have deposits directly with the central bank. It concludes that although in some ways the two policies complement each other, they have vastly different economic consequences. The former would increase credit expansion, and the latter would cause contraction. Due to the deflationary nature of allowing the public to hold electronic deposits at their central bank, it concludes that financial authorities are unlikely to allow these CBDC schemes to succeed in any meaningful way.
