Kiffmeister’s #Fintech Daily Digest (20260717)

July 17, 2026July 17, 2026 ~ kiffmeister ~ Leave a comment

Visa Introduces Platform for Stablecoin Minting, Movement and Management (VISA)

Visa is launching the Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP), an enterprise environment for institutions to mint, move, and manage stablecoins, initially focused on Open USD (OUSD) issued via the Open Standard. VSP provides Visa‑managed onchain wallet infrastructure, connectivity for minting, burning, holding, and transferring OUSD, and integration with Visa’s existing settlement, treasury, and currency services, effectively offering a stablecoin “wallet‑as‑a‑service” embedded in Visa’s network stack. This is structurally significant because it treats stablecoins as an additional rail within Visa’s institutional treasury and settlement workflows, with controls such as dual‑approval, audit logging, passkeys, and allow‑lists aligned to existing risk and fraud frameworks. Key unresolved issues include how regulatory treatment, balance‑sheet accounting, and interoperability with non‑OUSD stablecoins and non‑Visa infrastructures will be handled as VSP moves from beta to broader deployment. [VISA]

BTW if you want to see a complete database of my DFC-related posts going back years, including many that didn’t make the Daily Digest cut, click here.

FYI I produce a monthly digest of digital fiat currency (DFC) developments exclusively for the official sector (e.g., central banks, ministries of finance and international financial institution (e.g., the BIS, IMF, OECD, World Bank)) plus academics and firms that are active in the DFC space (commercial banks, technology providers, consultants, etc.). (DFCs include central bank digital currency (CBDC), stablecoins and tokenized deposits.) It goes out via email on the first business day of every month, and if you’re interested in being on the mailing list, please email me at john@kiffmeister.com.

Kiffmeister’s #Fintech Daily Digest (20260713)

July 13, 2026July 13, 2026 ~ kiffmeister ~ Leave a comment

Bolivian Government Considers including USDT as an Official Form of Payment (La Razon)

La Razon is reporting that Bolivia’s government is considering recognizing USDT as an additional settlement currency within the domestic payment system alongside the dollar and boliviano, following a 2024 Central Bank of Bolivia resolution that lifted a prior ban on crypto operations amid foreign‑exchange pressures. Authorities highlight that current usage of crypto-assets remains outside legal‑tender status and operates in a regulatory vacuum beyond the initial unblock, creating both market disruption and compliance gaps. The policy discussion is shaped by Bolivia’s placement on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) “grey list,” with explicit concern that any formal integration of USDT must address anti‑money‑laundering and counter‑terrorist‑financing (AML/CFT) vulnerabilities in crypto flows. The key unresolved issue is the design of a robust regulatory framework governing crypto‑asset use in payments. [La Razon]

Stablecoins and the Future of the Dollar (Philadelphia Fed)

An article by the Philadelphia Fed’s Joseph Abadi argues that reserve‑backed stablecoins, reinforced by the GENIUS Act, will entrench the dollar and position stablecoins primarily as regulated payment instruments rather than interest‑bearing stores of value. It traces the shift from early trading‑oriented and algorithmic designs, through the Terra collapse and the Silicon Valley Bank–linked run on USD Coin, to the current dominance of transparently backed, short‑term dollar‑asset portfolios that depend on public safety nets in stress. This matters because U.S. law now treats stablecoins as fully reserved “digital cash,” channels them into settlement and remittance use, and is intended to prevent disintermediation of bank deposits, even as yield‑like products via exchanges expose a regulatory gap. The unresolved issue is whether Congress closes this “yield loophole” and how cross‑border demand interacts with capital controls. [Philadelphia Fed]

BTW if you want to see a complete database of my DFC-related posts going back years, including many that didn’t make the Daily Digest cut, click here.

Kiffmeister’s #Fintech Daily Digest (20260710)

July 10, 2026July 10, 2026 ~ kiffmeister ~ Leave a comment

SWIFT’s Blockchain Ledger for Tokenized Deposits Ready for Use (SWIFT)

SWIFT announced that its new blockchain-based shared ledger for tokenized bank deposits is ready for initial live cross-border payment pilots, positioned as an extension of its existing messaging infrastructure rather than a new settlement asset. Seventeen banks across six continents will orchestrate 24/7 movements of bank-issued tokenized deposits on their own ledgers, with final settlement still occurring through current systems, aiming to improve intraday and overnight liquidity efficiency and customer payment availability without altering underlying compliance, credit, and control frameworks. Key unresolved issues include how far this model can scale beyond deposits to broader regulated digital assets and whether interoperability across competing tokenized networks will remain under SWIFT-led governance. [SWIFT]

EU Parliament Agrees on Digital Assets Policy Stance (EU Parliament)

The European Parliament voted to adopt a position paper on how the European Union (EU) should approach crypto regulation after the rollout of its Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework. The paper calls on the EU to extend its regulatory perimeter to currently under-specified activities such as decentralized finance, staking, lending, non-fungible tokens, and tokenized assets, while tightening MiCA’s implementation. It calls on the European Commission to assess whether and how these activities should be brought into MiCA or adjacent regimes, and warns that divergent national measures that could fragment the single market. The report also signals a more supportive posture toward euro-denominated stablecoins and tokenization as tools for capital-market competitiveness. Key open questions are the precise treatment of interest-bearing stablecoins and the institutional allocation of oversight for DeFi-type arrangements. [EU Parliament]

Zelle Head to India and Unveils ZelleUSD Stablecoin (EWS)

[On June 11, 2026] Early Warning Services (EWS), the network operator of Zelle, unveiled ZelleUSD (ZLUSD), its proprietary U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin. ZLUSD will support future international payment capabilities, giving U.S. consumers more opportunities to send money to family and friends around the world. EWS is owned by Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, PNC Bank, Truist, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo. EWS runs Zelle, a U.S.-based service that enables individuals to near instantly transfer money from their bank account to another registered user’s bank account using a mobile device or the website of a participating banking institution. Coincidentally, EWS announced that India will be the first country where U.S. consumers can use Zelle to send money to family and friends overseas. Further details on ZLUSD will be announced in the coming months. [EWS]

Digital Bonds as Collateral in Central Bank Lending (EUI)

A European University Institute (EUI) Florence School of Business and Finance paper by Long and Fisher argues that central banks should treat digital bonds that replicate conventional bond economics as eligible collateral but must adapt collateral frameworks and operations to capture benefits and manage novel risks. The authors map existing collateral policy (eligibility, haircuts, pricing, rehypothecation, pre‑positioning) and the role of central securities depositories (CSDs) and real‑time gross settlement (RTGS) in ensuring delivery‑versus‑payment (DVP) and settlement finality. They then assess how distributed ledger technology (DLT), tokenized and digitally native bonds, and sandbox regimes alter issuance, settlement, and collateral mobility, highlighting operational, legal, liquidity, and procyclicality risks that remain unresolved and require explicit policy adaptation. [EUI]

BTW if you want to see a complete database of my DFC-related posts going back years, including many that didn’t make the Daily Digest cut, click here.

Kiffmeister’s #Fintech Daily Digest (20260706)

July 6, 2026July 7, 2026 ~ kiffmeister ~ Leave a comment

ECB Publishes New Version of Digital Euro Scheme Rulebook (ECB)

The European Central Bank (ECB) published version 0.91 of the digital euro scheme rulebook. Its purpose is to provide a single set of measures, rules, and standards for the provision of digital euro payment services, and ensure a standardized digital euro payment experience across all Member States, irrespective of the country or the payment service providers (PSPs) used. It leverages, to the extent possible, on existing industry standards and procedures to improve interoperability and promote harmonization within the European payments infrastructure. [ECB]

Engaging with Privacy Stablecoins: A Framework for Scalable and KYC/AML-Compliant Adoption (BoI)

The Bank of Italy (BoI) Financial Intelligence Unit published a paper that examines the potential of privacy-preserving stablecoins (“privacy stablecoins”) as retail payment instruments. It argues that stablecoins currently operating on public Layer-1 blockchains face structural limitations in terms of scalability, regulatory compliance, and privacy protection. Privacy-enhancing Layer-2 architectures may help overcome these constraints by combining greater operational efficiency with mechanisms that reconcile user confidentiality and regulatory oversight. The paper proposes a framework that relies on rollup‑based Layer‑2 designs with validity‑proof systems, data‑availability guarantees, and rule‑based selective disclosure to reconcile privacy with auditable reserves and enforceable financial integrity. [BoI]

BTW if you want to see a complete database of my DFC-related posts going back years, including many that didn’t make the Daily Digest cut, click here.

Kiffmeister’s #Fintech Daily Digest (20260701)

July 1, 2026July 1, 2026 ~ kiffmeister ~ Leave a comment

Project Agila: Results, Technical Findings and Policy Implications (BSP)

Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) published a paper that concludes a wholesale central bank digital currency (WCBDC) on Hyperledger Fabric is technically feasible for 24/7 interbank settlement and could serve as a conditional back-up to PhilPaSS Plus, subject to major design, risk, and legal work. The two-phase Project Agila sandbox showed Oracle’s distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform can support full WCBDC lifecycle operations, programmable payments and high volumes, but with clear constraints around transaction finality, access controls, cybersecurity, and scalability at larger loads. The report frames WCBDC as reserves-on-ledger and potential high-quality liquid asset, analyzes implications under the National Payment Systems Act and BSP Charter, and identifies systemically important payment system treatment, access, holding limits, and charter changes as key policy questions. It recommends focusing next on tokenized securities settlement and institutional cross-border use cases while hardening governance, IT risk, and integration with existing financial market infrastructures (FMIs). [BSP]

Stablecoins and Anonymous Money (BIS)

Gita Gopinath argues that global stablecoin usage is structurally evolving toward maximum pseudonymity, in tension with decades of policy that pushed traditional money toward transparency. Empirically, most United States dollar‑pegged stablecoins (Tether and USD Coin) are held in self‑custody wallets and increasingly transferred wallet‑to‑wallet, with regulated exchanges and issuers involved in a shrinking share of flows, even on the most identifiable chains. This pattern undermines tax collection, financial‑crime controls, capital controls, and sanctions that depend on residence and identity information, while exploiting lighter compliance burdens relative to banks. Existing United States and European frameworks focus on issuers and centralized exchanges, leaving self‑custody and offshore activity largely outside ex ante monitoring, raising unresolved questions on how far regulation should extend into wallet‑level and cross‑border infrastructure. [BIS]

BTW if you want to see a complete database of my DFC-related posts going back years, including many that didn’t make the Daily Digest cut, click here.

Protected: Kiffmeister’s Digital Currency Monitor, June 2026

July 1, 2026July 1, 2026 ~ kiffmeister

Kiffmeister’s #Fintech Daily Digest (20260630)

June 30, 2026June 30, 2026 ~ kiffmeister ~ Leave a comment

U.K. BoE and FCA Approach to Joint Regulation of Systemic Stablecoin Issuers (BoE)

The Bank of England (BoE) published a paper that outlines how it and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) will jointly regulate “systemic” stablecoin issuers within the new U.K. stablecoin regime created by recent legislative changes. The paper allocates supervisory remits across the two authorities and the Payment Systems Regulator, explains how issuers move from solo Financial Conduct Authority oversight to joint regulation once HM Treasury recognizes them as systemic, and details transitional tools such as staged onboarding and the BoE’s power of direction. It hard‑codes a more prudentially oriented regime for systemic issuers (backing assets in central bank deposits and short‑term gilts, capital and reserve requirements, issuance guardrails) while leaving conduct, disclosure, and competition issues primarily with the Financial Conduct Authority. Unresolved points include final calibration of failure arrangements, guardrail withdrawal, and rule disapplication mechanics. [BoE]

BTW if you want to see a complete database of my DFC-related posts going back years, including many that didn’t make the Daily Digest cut, click here.

Kiffmeister’s #Fintech Daily Digest (20260629)

June 29, 2026June 29, 2026 ~ kiffmeister ~ Leave a comment

The Macroeconomics of Stablecoins (BIS)

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published a paper by Hofmann, Kaldorf and Rottner that argues widespread stablecoin adoption modestly reduces long‑run U.S. output by tightening bank funding and credit, with offsetting fiscal effects from cheaper government debt issuance. The authors embed stablecoins in a macro‑finance and banking model with distortionary fiscal policy, where issuers hold short‑term government bonds, wholesale bank deposits, or central bank reserves under varying regulatory regimes. Stablecoins operate through a bank lending channel that raises deposit rates and funding costs and a fiscal space channel that expands room for tax cuts or spending by lowering Treasury bill yields. In baseline calibration the lending channel slightly dominates, but short‑run transition effects are expansionary and design choices, public debt levels, and foreign demand materially alter the long‑run macro impact and monetary transmission. [BIS]

BTW if you want to see a complete database of my DFC-related posts going back years, including many that didn’t make the Daily Digest cut, click here.

Kiffmeister’s #Fintech Daily Digest (20260622)

June 22, 2026June 22, 2026 ~ kiffmeister

Bank of England Policy Statement and Draft Rules on Regulating Systemic Stablecoins (BoE)

The Bank of England (BoE) published a policy statement and draft code of practice for systemic stablecoin issuers, reflecting extensive engagement with industry and stakeholders that resulted in targeted revisions to the proposals consulted on in 2025. The maximum share held in short-term U.K. government debt has been increased from 60% to 70%, with the remainder in central bank deposits. Also, a temporary issuance guardrail will apply to each systemic stablecoin, initially set at £40 billion, dropping the holding limits (£20,000 on individuals and £10 million on corporations) proposed in the 2025 draft. However, the BoE will ban issuers (directly or indirectly) from paying interest or dividends directly to users for simply holding stablecoins, but will permit activity-based rewards, similarly to the U.S. CLARITY Act currently winding its way through Congress. The BoE is also considering offering a backstop lending facility for eligible, solvent, and viable systemic stablecoin issuers, which would allow them to borrow against short-term sterling-denominated UK government debt securities in a limited set of circumstances. [BoE]

Bank of Korea Digital Currency to Connect with Bank Account Networks (Electronic Times)

Korea’s Electronic Times reports that, as part of Project Han River Phase 2, participating banks are integrating deposit-token infrastructure with their core banking ledgers inside the Bank of Korea (BOK) Naver Cloud test environment. Under the architecture, the BOK issues wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) to banks as the interbank settlement asset, while banks issue deposit tokens that users spend via bank-app wallets. The new work links deposit tokens to core deposit, transfer, and accounting systems, including interest accrual and payment, and builds treasury-voucher systems for programmable government subsidy disbursement. Sources frame this as a pre-institutionalization step, moving from “can it settle payments” to “can it run inside production banking systems.” [Electronic Times]

BTW if you want to see a complete database of my DFC-related posts going back years, including many that didn’t make the Daily Digest cut, click here.

Kiffmeister’s #Fintech Daily Digest (20260619)

June 19, 2026June 19, 2026 ~ kiffmeister

Bipartisan US Housing Bill Bans Retail CBDC until 2030 (Senate Banking Committee)

The U.S. Senate Banking Committee and House Financial Services Committee released the latest text of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, with backing from the leading Republicans and Democrats on both committees, which includes a ban on central bank digital currency (CBDC) until December 31, 2030. The Act defines a CBDC as a U.S. dollar‑denominated direct Federal Reserve liability widely available to the general public. The text explicitly carves out wholesale CBDC and tokenized reserves (“any dollar-denominated currency that is open, permissionless, and private, and fully preserves the privacy protections of U.S. coins and physical currency. The Senate and the House are expected to formally pass the bill within weeks, and the President is expected to sign the bill once passed. [Senate Banking Committee]

HKEX and HKMA Launch Wholesale CBDC Pilot Project to Facilitate After-Hours Derivatives Trading (HKMA)

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX) and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) will run a joint pilot using e‑HKD wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) operating on a 24/7 basis to fund advance margin for derivatives after‑hours trading while keeping existing operational workflows unchanged. The aim is to improve flexibility and efficiency versus the current cut‑off, under which clearing participants must submit advance margin deposit requests to Hong Kong Futures Exchange Clearing Corporation (HKCC) by 15:00 for them to count toward the after‑hours session. Participants in HKCC can optionally conduct real‑value trial transactions, with broader adoption contingent on regulatory approval and market readiness. [HKMA]

The Trade-Offs Between Different Designs of Tokenized Systems (BoC)

The Bank of Canada (BoC) posted a blog that argues that tokenized systems’ core features—programmability and openness—are not unique to decentralized architectures and can be implemented on centralized platforms as well. It defines design space along two dimensions: validation (centralized, decentralized permissioned, decentralized permissionless) and access (public versus private), and emphasizes that trust models, not “blockchain” per se, determine who controls the ledger and visibility of state. The authors frame the key trade-off as performance versus transparency: centralized systems maximize throughput but minimize transparency; decentralized permissionless systems do the opposite; decentralized permissioned systems sit in between. [BoC]

Digital Assets and Derivatives: Where Next? (ISDA)

The International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) published a paper that argues digital assets can be integrated into derivatives markets at institutional scale if settlement, collateral and prudential frameworks are engineered to fit existing regulatory regimes rather than rebuilt from scratch. The paper documents how distributed ledger settlement, continuous margining and portfolio compression can reduce exposure persistence and x‑value adjustment (XVA) type capital charges by roughly 40–45% for a stylized crypto derivatives portfolio, even with unchanged market risk. It emphasizes that balance-sheet efficiency is constrained less by token design than by legal finality, collateral enforceability, exposure recognition under Basel crypto standards and the availability of cash‑leg settlement assets such as tokenized deposits or wholesale central bank digital currencies. Key unresolved issues include conflicts of law for on‑chain property rights, heterogeneous margin model treatment of crypto exposures, limited margin period of risk grade liquidation channels for digital collateral and the need for common standards like the Common Domain Model to avoid infrastructure fragmentation. [ISDA]

Data Externalities, Market Power, and the Optimal CBDC Design (BoC)

The Bank of Canada (BoC) published a paper by Cheng, Davoodalhosseini, Chiu, and Jiang that shows that central bank digital currency (CBDC) economics is complicated by private payment service provider (PSP) transaction data harvesting and sale. A well-designed CBDC should collect some transaction data itself — for fraud detection and financial crime monitoring — but not sell it. Counterintuitively, a U.S.-calibrated model finds that introducing a CBDC would increase rather than reduce PSP data collection, because PSP market power currently dominates – i.e., public competition pushes PSPs to expand their customer base, raising aggregate data output. The reverse holds if PSP competition intensifies, in which case a CBDC designed to curb data monetization would shrink PSPs’ market share and reduce aggregate data production. [BoC]

Stablecoin Remuneration on Centralized Crypto-Asset Exchanges (BIS)

The BIS published a paper by Huang, Tarashev and Wang that argues that the way that crypto exchanges remunerate customer stablecoin holdings drives very different macrofinancial effects. Exchanges either pass through income from low‑risk reserve assets (“reserve-based” remuneration) or use revenues from lending, margin finance and trading (“activity-based”). In the reserve‑based case (e.g., Coinbase), stablecoin remuneration closely tracks policy rates, while in the activity‑based case (e.g., Binance) yields are highly volatile and tied to crypto market conditions and funding demand. Econometric decompositions show crypto‑activity shocks dominate benchmark‑rate shocks in explaining activity‑based yields, especially during 2024 rallies. If stablecoins scale, either of these remuneration models could alter bank and money‑market funding, introduce boom‑bust dynamics and run risks, and reshape monetary policy transmission, with regulatory capital and liquidity requirements a key open mitigant. [BIS]

BTW if you want to see a complete database of my DFC-related posts going back years, including many that didn’t make the Daily Digest cut, click here.