Israel puts the brakes on cash to spur digital payments

The Israeli Tax Authority has placed further restrictions on cash payments to allow authorities to more easily track tax evasion, black market activity and money laundering, and spur digital payments. Since January 2019, Israeli businesses and consumers have been subject to limits on cash payments under the Law for the Reduction in the Use of Cash. They have now been tightened to 6,000 shekels ($1,760) for business and 15,000 shekels ($4,400) for personal transactions. [Read more at CoinTelegraph]

Binance Compliance Officer: KYC Cost Exchange ‘Billions in Revenue’

Reuters recently published a series of investigative reports on Binance and its association with illicit activity, claiming that Binance has become a hub for criminal activity and that it overlooked several money-laundering red flags. In a CoinDesk interview, Tigran Gambaryan and Matthew Price, key members of Binance’s compliance team and former investigators at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service’s cybercrime unit, disputed a number of these claims. In particular, they claimed that proportional to trading volumes, illicit trading on Binance is no worse than on other exchanges. [Read more at CoinDesk]

Millicent Successfully Tests a General Purpose Full-Reserve Stablecoin

Millicent, a fintech company co-funded by the Innovate UK, has successfully performed a test of a full-reserve stablecoin aimed at the retail market. The reserves are held in a ringfenced account safeguarded by a regulated third party, directly at the Bank of England. Millicent runs on a hybrid Layer-1 distributed ledger network. A sandbox demonstration simulated fiat on-ramping via Faster Payments from a UK consumer bank, as well as the on-chain conversion and minting of GBP-pegged stablecoins, and a variety of payment and settlement scenarios. [Read more at Yahoo Finance]

European banking regulator ‘concerned’ about finding staff to oversee crypto

European Banking Authority Chair José Manuel Campa views the regulator’s ability to hire and retain specialized staff as a “major concern”, particularly in the areas of technology, anything related to crypto and digitization. “This is in high demand across society.” [Read more in Finextra]

Upcoming events I’m affiliated with:

The CBDC Think Tank, in partnership with the International Monetary Fund and George Washington University, is hosting a full-day in-person CBDC Masterclass on October 12 in Washington DC. The sessions are designed as instructional deep dives with full presentations and Q&A components.  [Register here]