China’s Digital Currency May Come With Hardware Wallets as Well
CoinDesk grabbed a copy of the Terms and Services that users were required to agree to follow when signing up for the China Construction Bank (CCB) DC/EP central bank digital currency wallet, before it was pulled from the bank’s website. It showed that apart from DC/EP wallets within CCB’s mobile app that was offered, separate hardware wallets for DC/EP may also be in the works. It would be offered in a four-tier system; a user could only maintain a balance of up to 10,000 ($1,500) yuan in a tier-2 DC/EP wallet. The cap for a single transaction would be less than 5,000 yuan daily and annual accumulated spendings could not exceed 10,000 yuan and 300,000 yuan, respectively. Similarly, tier-3 and tier-4 DC/EP wallets would have tighter caps on wallet balances as well as daily and annual spendings but the Terms did not indicate if there will be any limit on tier-1 wallets.
Trading volume surges on decentralized exchanges
Trading volume on decentralized crypto exchanges (DEXs) has surged in the last year — and is up over 1500% since January 1st. The growth has been driven by a rising demand to trade ERC20 tokens, accompanying a booming decentralized finance (DeFi) sector on Ethereum (ETH). The top 3 exchanges Uniswap, Balancer and Curve accounting for over 90% of all DEX volume. Of these, Uniswap, an open-source project developed by Hayden Adams that allows users to swap in and out of ERC-20 tokens, is far and away the leader with a market share of 67%.
Crypto Users Apathetic About Privacy
According to Coinmetrics, the combined daily transactions of three privacy coins, Zcash (ZEC), Monero (XMR), and Grin (GRIN), equated to only 6% that of Bitcoin (BTC), despite the coins offering substantially more privacy. Moreover, those cryptocurrency holders who do use privacy coins aren’t necessarily maximizing those coins’ features. For example, despite Zcash having a fully private mode, fewer than 2% of transactions made with the currency use this method. The overwhelming majority of Zcash users choose to use transparent transactions or partially private transactions.
On September 1, the average transaction fees on the Ethereum network climbed to a new peak at above $10, and gas prices went past 450 Gwei. In response, Tether, the second biggest guzzler of gas, is planning to add support for ZK-Rollups. In this technique, many transactions are bundled into a single one, after integrating with OMG Network. This will reduce the pressure on the Ethereum network, which is congested amidst growing usage. Ethereum co-founder Vitalk Buterin has also been advising using layer2 solutions like OMG Network and Loopring.
DeFi users turn to USDC stablecoin to earn high-yield interest
Members of the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem are turning to USD Coin USDC in order to interact with DeFi protocols either by earning high-yield income on lending protocols like Compound and Aave. Users are also providing liquidity to liquidity pools like Uniswap and Curve, the latter of which offers stablecoin to stablecoin trading. Following the launch of Curve’s governance token, CRV, on August 14, there was a surge in USDC on-chain activity. The launch of the token has also helped Curve earn the third place in terms of value locked, following Aave and Compound, with $1.27 billion locked.
How blockchain could revolutionise bonds
HSBC has been working with the Singapore Exchange (SGX) and investors Temasek Holdings to explore the use of distributed ledger technology (DLT) in the country’s bond market. The partnership has just successfully simulated a fully digitalised bond issuance on SGX’s DLT-enabled platform. The trial operated in parallel to a traditional SGD400 million ($290 million) issuance on the SGX – and a follow-on SGD100 million reopening of the same issue – by Olam International, a food and agri-business company.
Posted from Diigo: https://www.diigo.com/user/kiffmeister/Fintech
