🇬🇧10📰News CBDCs, StableCoins and WEB3 Worlds: We’re Not Talking About Bitcoin …
…Through the Roof But of Everything Else, Which Is No Small
Overview.CryptoCurrency: Regulatory Openings in Pakistan, Belarus Kyrgyzstan — Canada and AML/CTF — Germany and Securities on DLT — SEC Sues Ripple — Italy: HELP! — Venezuela Crypto-Battleground — News and Third-Party Analysis To Deepen-FinTech: Market Trends and Verticalizations; CBDC: Bahamas, China, Cambodia, Japan, Saudi Arabia (and U.A.E) and Sweden-StableCoin: FaceBook’s Libra Changes Name Again — Agreement Between Visa and Circle For USDC-WEB 3. 0: Cross-API — 2FA For Smart-Contract
Upcoming in-depth analysis, About The Pandemic Black Swan: Positive for the Crypto-World but Bad Thing For the Consequences on Digital Control By Everyone Suffered.
CryptoCurrencies
🇵🇰🇧🇾🇰🇬Pakistan’s financial services agency is approaching regulation on cryptocurrencies and tokens according to two profiles of analysis: the traditional one of bringing everything back to the existing financial regulatory framework and, the innovative one, of providing new ad hoc regulations for new instruments (Malta and Switzerland style). Remembered that the country plans to issue its own CBDC by 2025;
BelarusBank, central bank of Belarus, with a local private parter has inaugurated a state exchange for domestic residents also available to those of Georgia and Ukraine: it is the first legal exchange opened in the three territories.
In Kyrgyzstan, despite the problems they face on a daily basis, the central bank has launched a call-of-proposal for the development of an internal regulatory policy for the sector.
🇨🇦The Canadian Fintrac has defined what indicators to consider cryptocurrencies suspicious for AML/CTF.
🇩🇪The German Finance Minister announced that the country aims by 2021 to test and operationalize new issues of securities, public and private, exclusively digitally over DLT protocol.
🇺🇸The SEC, along the lines of the successful action filed against Telegram during 2020, sued Ripple for issuing XRP Token on the basis of unregistered securities marketing.
🇮🇹Help!!! As Andrea Bianconi well analyzes the president of Consob, Paolo Savona, gave a recent interview on cryptoeconomy and CBDCs that makes you cringe for confusion, superficiality and inaccuracies (read: out of this world). If these are the thinking-heads who have to lead digitalization of the country we’d suffer. The question, however, sounds strange because, as already reported in these lines, in the past months Paolo Savona had demonstrated a circumstantial awareness of the general role of the innovative use of the DLT protocol in the monetary and financial sphere: either he had a bad day on the interview day or, more likely, the spin-doctors within the committee and dedicated to the matter were on vacation. Forgettable.
🇻🇪Venezuela is manifesting a singular crypto-iper-activity. On the one hand, the current government, that of Nicolás Maduro, which:
- owns its own exchange (officially for remittances but usable at will), Patria, which has increased the cryptocurrency available for exchange with Petro national crypto;
- through the state entity that oversees crypto-national development, SUNACRIP, inaugurated a new portal, VEX (Venezuela Exchange), to integrate the various state crypto-apps under one umbrella;
- allowed the army to mine cryptocurrency, again under SUNACRIP auspices and aimed at self-sustainability (❗️❗️❗️), through an autonomous center run by the 61st Brigade.
On the other hand, the U.S. which, through Circle and Airtm, gets USD (in the form of USDC stablecoin) to the shadow government of self-proclaimed president Juan Guaidó and, from them, to whoever is needed.
So a good example of using the crypto-universe for purposes of domestic political empowerment and foreign meddling.
🌎 👀A list of news, data and insights worth dwelling on:
excellent analysis, as often happens from the pages of Andreessen Horowitz, by Chris Dixon and Eddy Lazzarin on the strategic cycles that have characterized the cryptoeconomy from 2009 to the present;
Quartz takes a cue from the non-use of blockchain by US document signature services giant DocuSign to highlight how, in terms of cost efficiency, the protocol is not always (and necessarily) the business best-solution;
always on Quartz, the interview to Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, focused on WOZX, the cryptocurrency he created and based on tokens issued according to profits from energy efficiency projects;
on December 1, after several difficulties, phase 0 of the launch of Ethereum 2.0, called Beacon Chain, started, for the transaction from PoW (Proof of Work) to PoS (Proof of Stack): for the validation of blocks, the concept of computational speed of the node is no longer used, but rather the quantity of tokens owned. Here is Vitalik Buterin’s road map for the entire 2.0 project;
S&P Dow Jones Indices will launch indexes on cryptocurrency by 2021;
J.P. Morgan has initialized an internal blockchain-based protocol for regulating repos where the firm is a broker and the counterparties are marketplace bankers;
ChiperTrace affirms that the level of financial investigators, bankers and non-bankers, who have awareness in detecting transactions related to cryptoeconomy is 22%: the information could also reflect the average reality because if on one hand ChiperTrace sells detection processes, so it detects according to who addresses to it, on the other hand there are still entire evolved financial systems, like the Italian one, where the ignorance of officials and employees in the subject is total;
to read the defining note issued by FED on what are and how consider the operational and structural differences between account and token with banking perspective;
Fintech
📈Andreessen Horowitz again, this time by Alex Rampell, starts from the consideration that the pandemic has highlighted in several countries the uselessness (when not the harmfulness, as in Italy) of the banking system in the direct monetary relationship in give-and-take (money) between state and citizen. In fact, banks in this case are of no use at all if not, as occurred precisely in Italy, to provide (badly) for the functions that, due to digital backwardness, the state bureaucratic system was not able to provide. He therefore sees as one of the main drivers of fintech development in the coming years the overcoming of banking ‘uselessness’ in the relationship between the state and the citizen, in view of the irreversibility that the pandemic impulse has generated and, we add, also in view of the advent of CBDCs;
still on the subject, traditional banks are no longer needed even for online transactions: leaving aside the system of bank payments, by now history, as an example hundreds of fintechs make up for the offer of installment payments in purchases as an alternative to banking products. They will increase tenfold when DeFi apps will be affordable, for UX and token type (read: CBDCs again), to the masses. Another author of Andreessen Horowitz, Anish Acharya, foresees in the verticalization by shared interests communities a possible evolution way for fintech market.
CBDCs
🇧🇸The Bahamas with the SandDollar finished the operational testing phase and the CBDC is freely spendable: first retail purchase on December 17 a milkshake and a fish burger.
🇨🇳A lottery for distribution of spendable DCEPs to citizens started via app in Suzhou;
(🇭🇰) the Hong Kong Monetary Authority is working with PBoC, China’s central bank, to regulate cross-border movements in DCEPs;
Bank of China (state-owned bank) implemented processes and first operational tests for tax verification of cross-border movements with Tibet: all on blockchain protocol and with the collaboration of 7 Tibetan banks.
🇰🇭The road map of the Bakong project, launched in 2016 by the government of Cambodia (white-paper here), has been met and the Bakong, the state CBDC, is operational. Developed by NCB, the central bank, with the collaboration of Soramitsu (Japanese crypto-project company) on Hyperledger IROHA platform , the CBDC is characterized by the presence of banks as active players for user account interface, even if the management of the CBDC is entirely in charge of NCB
🇯🇵Japan Times reports that, compared to the initial apathy (if not adversity) that marked the country regarding the subject, Japan is accelerating the times to arrive at a formulation of its own CBDC: cause of the change the extreme vivacity of the neighbors; time frame: test between the first and second half of 2021;
🇸🇦🇦🇪Presented the final-report of the Aber project, jointly developed by the central banks of Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E., for the introduction of a common CBDC.
🇸🇪Sweden takes a step back or, at least, takes a pause for thought regarding the launch of the E-Kruna that, until last month, saw the country in pole-position in Europe in the CBDCs context. In a press release on 13 December, the central bank again explains all the phases of the project and invites the social partners to express their opinion in public debate on the advisability of the introduction.
StableCoins
🇨🇭The never-ending story of Libra continues, which applied for authorization to FINMA in Switzerland in May and is expected to be operational in early 2021. The name has been changed again, this time to Diem. Considering the trend of competitors (whose charts by TradeBlock are below) and CBDCs, the continuous re-branding, from Libra to Novi to Diem in a short period, and many continuous reinforcements of the different operational teams, they lead to the risk that the mountain gives birth to a market mouse.
🇺🇸A confirmation of the risk of positioning and market penetration that Facebook takes with Diem the news, from early December, of the agreement that Visa has made with Circle. All know what Visa is while Circle is one of the main players in the cryptocurrency market and, for the case, the issuer of USDC the second stablecoin against USD for market parameters. The agreement foresees that merchants will be able to get paid in USDC and the issue of USDC cards.
WEB 3.0
😫 Ingamar Ramirez on Hackernoon makes an interesting examination on what are the 5 headaches of WEB 3.0 developers. The headaches become 6 if we take the role of end users (with a level of functionality suitable for WEB 2.0) and we add the UX paucity and the lack of commitment in this sense of the developers of the various WEB 3.0 apps (a bee in my bonnet).
Undoubtedly, as Ramirez rightly writes, one of the problems at the root is the need for WEB 3.0 apps to keep different SDKs on the client side, because the server to be queried is not one, but we are faced with P2P structures and, moreover, with more platforms not connected to each other.
It is highlighted then the cross-solution proposed by Web3API, developed in the GraphQL environment, i.e. the query language for APIs, which allows to organize and optimize the requests to the servers, is therefore highlighted, to which we add The Graph Network, a similar platform by function recently initialized.
Perhaps a good step forward.
💡Another good idea (about another bee in my bonnet) regards the interoperability between chains: it is the solution proposed by Digital Bridge, supported by ChainLink, which allows 2FA between smart-contract counterparts. This can help with automated identity verification although, in this case, it is limited to those who are part of the ChainLink ecosystem.
🚀Finally, the most promising solution from 2020, Polkadot, the brainchild of Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum: it’s a cross-chain backbone platform. It raised 120mil USD in funding and it has lived up to expectations (for now), if we see the token capitalization achieved in 6 months of market.
🔜
Upcoming in-depth analysis, About The Pandemic Black Swan: Good For the Crypto-World But Bad Thing For The Consequences On Digital Control Everyone Suffered.
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This is an English adaptation of a neuronal Italian/English AI translation by DeepL
