Facebook faces lawsuit over crypto project’s new name
Facebook could be in hot legal water after rebranding its upcoming crypto project to Diem — a name already taken by a London fintech. Finance app Diem is threatening to sue Facebook and its partners for copying the name, telling Sifted it is preparing to take action. The Diem app allows consumers to sell their possessions instantly, rather than waiting for bidders on eBay; offering a digital pawnbroker of sorts. Users also get their own DIEM debit cards and accounts, creating what the company calls a ‘Bank of Things.’
The Swiss Stock Exchange (SIX) is planning to give banks full access to digital assets through a partnership between its digital asset arm, SIX Digital Exchange, and Swiss custody firm Custodigit. The Institutional Digital Asset Gateway will enable banks to develop new financial services and products around crypto-assets and digital assets for their customers. This partnership will also build upon the recent SIX investment in Omniex.
Coinbase crashes when Bitcoin soars – but why?
Coinbase is fast becoming notorious for its capacity problems and has repeatedly reported ‘connectivity issues’ during periods of peak Bitcoin volatility. This article claims it’s a “people problem” – not enough customer support people and not enough people who know how to maintain its servers. Basically, Coinbase has tried to scale too quickly and is cracking under the strain. Nevertheless, staffers uniformly credit the company’s focus on security and regulatory compliance as second to none.
MicroStrategy will issue $400 million in securities to buy more Bitcoin
The world’s largest publicly traded business intelligence firm, MicroStrategy has announced plans to invest the proceeds from a $400 million convertible senior notes securities into Bitcoin. The securities will be issued under Rule 144 of the Securities Act, and will be available to qualified institutional investors only.
Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) Affordability Report
The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) published its Affordability Report – an in-depth annual research initiative that represents part of A4AI’s ongoing efforts to measure policy progress toward affordable internet. It calls for governments to develop effective national broadband plans to make internet access more affordable and enable more people to connect. It focuses on three steps to success when it comes to broadband plans: open consultations, clear targets, and committed funding.
The GSMA Mobile Connectivity Index
The GSMA Mobile Connectivity Index measures the performance of 170 countries – representing 99% of the global population – against key enablers of mobile internet adoption: infrastructure, affordability, consumer readiness, and content and services. This data can help the mobile industry and other stakeholders understand where to focus action in order to drive increased mobile internet adoption. It now includes data from 2014 to 2019. A report accompanies the 2020 update to the Index which highlights the key findings and trends.
Enabling open finance through APIs
This Bank for International Settlements (BIS) report explores the development of an identification and authentication application program interface (API) that could be used to implement privately and publicly administered open finance solutions with seamless scalability. It analyzes an API scheme based on the establishment of a central validator (CV) that allows secure relationships to be created between financial institutions and third parties, without the need for them to come into direct contact with each other. It provides the necessary elements to guarantee that each party involved accesses only the user information strictly necessary to allow the provision of a specified financial service.
