“Bank Frick, one of Europe’s leading blockchain banks, is ditching SWIFT for Circle’s USDC stablecoin.
A trend we are seeing and expecting to surge in the year ahead—regulated banks adding support for USDC, which is becoming a significant alternative rail to value transfer for banks.”
“Unstoppable Domains has released its decentralized blog (dBlog) service hosted on Protocol Lab’s InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), complete with the .crypto domain.
dBlogs come complete with tools similar to Medium, with functionality such as plain text, images, audio and video. Notable crypto investors and enthusiasts have launched personal blogs on the network.
Kam of Unstoppable Domains noted the recent rise in censorship among tech platforms, not to mention nation-states with less lenient free speech guarantees than the U.S. He pointed to a report from think tank Freedom House that claimed some 2 billion people ‘experience a partially or fully censored internet.’
The censorship-resistant internet is usable now. No one can take it down.”
See Also: Filecoin Prepares for Network Launch With Final Testing Phase
See Also: Blockscan: The Search Engine for a Decentralized Web
“On June 11, the Congressional Fintech Task Force held a hearing examining FedAccounts and a digital dollar as ways of expanding financial inclusion in the United States. Particularly in the aftermath of greatly delayed $1200 stimulus payments directly to U.S. citizens, the digital dollar has gotten much more attention.
Nearly 35 million people have received paper checks, not direct deposits to their bank accounts. However, I’m concerned that the people who most likely need stimulus payments may not even be able to deposit a paper check.
Unless we act, this coming wave of innovation will put enormous strain on our aged financial system.”
“Markets are taking the U.S. Federal Reserve’s less-than-optimistic economic forecasts quite hard, and that’s leading crypto traders to hit the sell button.
Cryptocurrency stakeholders have long insisted bitcoin is its own asset class, not tied to any other. However, it seems like it is increasingly operating with the traditional markets, at least for now.”
“According to the updated white paper, Libra hopes that ‘these CBDCs could be directly integrated with the Libra Network, removing the need for Libra Networks to manage the associated Reserves, thus reducing credit and custody risk.’
Further down the road, it would be possible to offer the central bank of Ghana, for example, a way of ‘creating a cross-chain trading window between you and the currency you issue, and user-level applications that are interoperable.’
In this particular race, Libra appears to be extending its hand to the U.S. and offering a way to get a CBDC into the hands of consumers.
You can be NASA, [Libra is] telling the Federal Reserve, and we’ll be the Space-X of money.”
See Also: Google and Gates Foundation to Help Spread Digital Payments in Developing Countries
“Vanguard’s end goal for the pilot is to improve the process of securitization with blockchain. The decades-old Wall Street practice of repackaging loans into bonds sold to investors is one that many firms are trying to reimagine with blockchain technology.
By digitizing and streamlining the ABS issuance process, we will be able to increase the speed and transparency of transactions while reducing costs and minimizing exposure to risk.”
“DEX tokens have increased on average 241% so far this year while centralized exchange tokens have only increased by 44%. And that’s not including some recent upswings. Kyber’s token (KNC) was leading the charge with an increase of more than 420%.
Looking at the ‘earnings’ of centralized exchanges, DEXs have a long way to go to emulate this kind of value […] But one advantage DEXs have is they don’t rely on the existence/good faith of a centralized entity […] This could prove to be more scalable both economically and in terms of user trust.”
“The exchange is exploring support for Aave (LEND), Aragon (ANT), Arweave (AR), Bancor (BNT), Compound Coin (COMP), DigiByte (DGB), Horizen (ZEN), Livepeer (LPT), NuCypher (NKMS), Numeraire (NMR), KEEP Network, Origin Protocol (OGN), Ren (REN), Render Network (RNDR), Siacoin (SC), SKALE Network, Synthetix (SNX), and VeChain (VET).
Recent outages during Bitcoin (BTC) price surges coupled with the news Coinbase may sell its blockchain intelligence arm to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has prompted massive withdrawals from the platform.
This may be too little too late.”
“As many DeFi products are regarded for upholding the values of permissionlessness with no centralized authorities, it would make sense for the companies governing the products to distribute their power and follow suit. Now we’re seeing businesses implementing dissolution into community governance as though it were a stage in their business cycle.
Ideally the governing communities will be incentivized by the revenue-generating mechanisms of said DeFi products. Governance will be the new frontier of business models for decentralized autonomous organizations.”
“The Ontario Securities Commission, or OSC, claims that the crypto exchange Quadriga collapsed in 2018 because of fraud committed by its late founder.
The report says Cotten opened several accounts under aliases and credited himself with “fictitious currency.” The deceased Quadriga founder was unable to meet his client’s withdrawal requests when the price of crypto assets fell. He then created a Ponzi scheme, covering the demand using funds from other Quadriga clients.
The OSC attributed about $115 million of the $169 million clients lost to Cotten’s fraudulent trading. Due to Cotten’s death, the OSC says it will not seek to bring legal action against Quadriga, as “it’s not practical.””
See Also: Japanese Judge Upholds Charges Against Mt Gox’s Mark Karpeles
The Disrupt 