Kiffmeister’s #Fintech Daily Digest (20230910)*


SEC vs. Ripple: Commission urges court To grant appeal request in latest filing

In a new filing submitted on September 8 the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) urged the US District Court for the Southern District of New York to certify its motion for interlocutory appeal of the court’s judgment in the lawsuit against Ripple and “stay further proceedings until the resolution of that appeal.” This comes week after the payment technology platform argued that the court should not certify the commission’s interlocutory appeal. [Read more at the CourtListener]

The Palau stablecoin proof of concept reporting mess

On September 7, 2023 I reported that the Palau was wrapping up the first of its US dollar stablecoin (PSC) proof-of-concept (PoC) experiments on September 8, 2023. This was based on an X (formerly Twitter) post by Jay Hunter Anson, Digital Residency Office Director at the Palau Ministry of Finance. Some crypto publications took this to mean that Palau was entirely shutting down the PSC research project so Mr. Anson came back on X to make it clear that the PoC, originally scheduled for 60 days, was actually extended for another 30 days to test some additional use cases discovered along the way, and allow more people to participate.

We can blame the crypto press for not doing proper fact checking, but the Palau government could also do a better job of coordinating its communication. You have to link various X and Facebook posts to get the whole story. For example, an end-July post on the government’s Facebook page said that the PoC was originally scheduled for 90 days starting at the end of July, which would put the 60 day inflection point at the end of September, making the original September 7 post on X sound a bit fishy. Later on the 7th, Mr. Anson filled in the blanks to imply that the 90-day PoC had three phases. The August phase was apparently for live field testing, the September phase will see the completion of retailer redemption, freezing of the August batch of PSC and then the minting of new PSC for another live test in the October phase.

However, the confusion doesn’t end there. There was another post on the government’s Facebook page on September 7 that said that the PoC terminates at the end of September, contradicting the end-July announcement of a 90-day PoC.

All of this is why most governments have dedicated communications staff to coordinate such messages.


*For those interested in intra-day updates, check out my searchable Diigo Fintech developments database, which is also a good place to go to query for past developments: https://www.diigo.com/user/kiffmeister/ART.

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