“CryptoMom has formally proposed a safe harbor for token projects. It would give them some breathing room to develop their networks and communities before having to worry about the regulatory regime.
Under Peirce’s proposal, crypto startups would have a three-year grace period from their first token sale to achieve a level of decentralization sufficient to pass through the agency’s securities evaluations.
The analysis of whether a token is offered or sold as a security is not static and does not strictly inhere to the digital asset.
If adopted by the majority of the SEC’s other commissioners, it would create a strict set of requirements for crypto projects to raise funds through a token sale, including requiring personal disclosures, code disclosures, public notices and a number of other factors.”
“The Fed is ‘conducting research and experimentation related to distributed ledger technologies and their potential use case for digital currencies, including the potential for a CBDC.’
The U.S. dollar’s global importance means the Fed needs to ‘remain on the frontier of both research and policy development‘ regarding digital currencies, she added.
The surprise release of Libra last summer ‘imparted urgency to the debate over what form money can take, who or what can issue it, and how payments can be recorded and settled.‘”
“In mid-April, the chiefs of six central banks as well as the Bank for International Settlements (BiS) will hold a meeting in Washington to discuss the potential creation of their own digital currencies.
The planned meeting would be the first by the group formed last month amid growing concerns among financial authorities about the rise of regulated digital fiat currencies, most notably Facebook’s Libra and China’s digital yuan.
Top officials of the six banks will prepare their findings on CBDCs before the leaders meet in April. The group aims to have an interim report ready for June and a final report in the autumn.”
Good read – recommended in full.
“There are two parts to the problem. First, there needs to be some means of identifying VASPs. This could be broadly equivalent to the Bank Identifier Code (BIC) used by SWIFT.
The second part of the problem concerns data transmission. The ideal solution crypto businesses and industry groups are working towards would be a standards-based and interoperable message layer between VASPs, allowing identity, authentication and messaging to be pinned onto blockchain transactions. There are some 20-plus solutions being built to tackle the problem.
A key design principle of Switzerland’s OpenVASP project is decentralization, which means avoiding the mistakes of the past, say its developers, like having a single point of failure, central servers and directories. In order to achieve decentralization where it’s deemed desirable, OpenVASP is leveraging a selection of features from ethereum.
For instance, at its messaging layer, OpenVASP proposes using Whisper, ethereum’s off-chain peer-to-peer messaging system. Whisper employs so-called dark routing to obscure message content and sender and receiver details to observers. ‘This means that nobody would be able to understand that two VASPs are interacting with each other.’
As G20 countries gradually begin to roll this out, increased jurisdictional arbitrage seems likely. ‘People are going to lean towards the countries with either weak implementation or enforcement. It will be interesting to see how this scenario plays out.‘
The FATF will review progress on Travel Rule solutions at its June 2020 plenary meeting.”
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In sum, Audubon holders are receiving 17.25 Dai/Day, directly to their wallet! Two New Properties are Now Available!“
“The new policy roadmap aims to make Australia’s nascent blockchain industry into a global leader, making the country’s wine industry, banking and finance the key priority sectors.
The five-year blockchain roadmap will underpin the work of regulators, startups and researchers. However, the government has ostensibly not yet allocated any funds to blockchain roadmap implementation.”
“The startup is said to be able to automate data management, payments and clearing to reduce transaction fees and human error, and offer instant cross-border settlements.
There is an ‘unbelievable amount of friction‘ in B2B trading, said co-founder Eran Haggiag, and that allows banks and other middle-men to collect fees amounting to over $140 billion a year.
In order to encourage as many companies as possible to use Clear, the platform can support and operate on multiple blockchain protocols.“
“The Naval Air Warfare Center, a California-based research group of the U.S. Navy, has given blockchain software startup Simba Chain nearly $10 million to put a secure messaging platform in play.
The platform will be up this year, with on going updates over the next 4 years.
Built using Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, the communication platform applies to land and water operations, allowing for safe data exchange. Simba Chain is no stranger to U.S. military work. The startup began building a blockchain-based supply chain solution for the U.S. Air Force in August 2019.”
“The newly announced Asensys said it has solved the trilemma without going off-chain or sharding transactions.
The paper proposed removing the duplication of efforts built into blockchains and instead spreading the workload across the entire network by creating multiple “zones” within it that work independently and asynchronously.
Asensys is able to essentially ‘divide and conquer’ all network actions, thereby reducing unnecessary redundancy.”
“Sun brought several guests including Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, eToro CEO Yoni Assia as well as the CFO of Huobi, Chris Lee, and head of the Binance Charity Foundation, Helen Hai.
While his dinner had been originally scheduled for late July 2019, Sun postponed days before, claiming to have fallen ill with kidney stones. A Chinese media outlet reported the day after the dinner’s postponement that Sun was under investigation by local authorities and was not allowed to leave China.”
The Disrupt 