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The World Economic Forum has teamed up with over 100 global supply chain and logistics leaders to standardize blockchain apps in the industry. The project aims to co-develop interoperable blockchain applications in the logistics industry and to leverage an open-source toolkit to deploy blockchain responsibly.

The GSMA Mobile Gender Gap Report 2021 highlights, so far the pandemic does not appear to have negatively impacted the overall gender gap in mobile ownership, which has remained relatively flat, nor the gender gap in mobile internet, which has improved this year - driven mostly by South Asia. Across low- and middle-income countries, 58 per cent of women now access mobile internet, with an estimated 112 million women going online for the first time in 2020. But access and use of mobile remains unequal; women are 7 per cent less likely than men to own a mobile and 15 per cent less likely to use mobile internet.

The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSMA) released a COVID-19 response tracker that monitors mobile money-specific regulatory policy, government and provider interventions globally, collated using both primary and secondary sources and updated weekly. The tracker is intended to support mobile money providers and regulators with a mobile money-specific policy response database and learnings from other markets, in order to effectively tailor policy responses for their market. The tracker collates data from 32 countries, spread across Sub-Saharan Africa (17), East Asia & Pacific (7), South Asia (4), Middle East & North Africa (3), and Latin America & Caribbean (1). An interim analysis of the data collated in the tracker showed preferred policy response instrument, regional variations, and the validity period of these instruments.

Kabbage said it had processed more than $3.5bn in Paycheck Protection Program loans, six weeks after shutting its lending operation in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis. The turnround follows a lobbying push by Kabbage and other fintech lenders for approval to help disburse $660bn of government funding earmarked for US small businesses.

"Parallelized Architecture for Scalably Executing smart Contracts (PArSEC) is the result of the MIT DCI's latest research on flexible technical architectures for centralized digital currency at scale. PArSEC supports a wide class of smart contract runtimes, including the Ethereum Virtual Machine. It supports flexible research and testing: the system can support clients easily updating their contracts' logic, or even switching to different smart contract runtimes, without having to understand and alter the core architecture of the underlying transaction processor."

"Many types of so-called stablecoins have tried to meet the market's demands for digital money, only to go wobbly. Instead, the future of online payments lies in commercial bank deposit tokens, which can and should be issued within the current two-tiered monetary system and work in tandem with central bank digital currencies."

I moderated a couple of sessions on offline central bank digital currency (CBDC) at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) DC³ From Cryptocurrencies to CBDCs​​ Conference on January 27, 2023. The first session was on the importance of offline payments for CBDCs and financial inclusion at which cases were presented by Lars Hupel (G+D), Razvan Dragomirescu (WhisperCash), Joachim Samuelsson (Crunchfish) and Jerome Ajdenbaum (IDEMIA). The second session was a deep dive into offline CBDC implementation and risk management presented by Lauren Del Giudice (IDEMIA) and Stuart Smith (VISA). [Both sessions were recorded and are available at the ITU]

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) published a paper proposing a common protocol to specify conditions for the use of digital money such as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), tokenized bank deposits, and stablecoins on a distributed ledger. The whitepaper was supported by the release of open source software prototypes that demonstrate the concept of purpose bound money (PBM), which enables senders to specify conditions, such as validity period and types of shops, when making transfers in digital money across different systems.

The Thai Prime Minister reportedly announced a 10,000 baht handout of "time stamped" blockchain-based digital money to the 50 million Thais earning less than 70,000 baht per month. It is time stamped in that recipients must begin spending the money within six months on food, nonalcoholic beverages and consumer products bought in stores, and only within their electoral districts.

The Banque de France successfully completed the last experiment of its program for interbank settlements in wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC), launched in March 2020. This final experiment involved the issuance of a digital bond on a blockchain and subscription with settlement in It successfully tested an end-to-end digital asset transactional lifecycle, through issuance, subscription by several actors, and coupon payment involving a conversion into another currency. All those transactions occurred across different blockchain environments operated by HSBC for the custody of the assets, and by the Banque de France for the securities settlement and the CBDC. The next phase of the Banque's CBDC experiments will be mainly dedicated to cross-border transactions.

Indian fintech app CRED is reportedly beta testing support for the digital rupee as part of India's central bank digital currency (CBDC) trials. Another app, MobiKwik, is fully in production for Android users. Yes Bank is acting as sponsor bank for both fintechs to enable access to the CBDC. Both wallets also support India's UPI instant payment system. Transaction limits for the CBDC are currently Rupee 10,000 ($115.50) and Rupee 50,000 ($578) per month. Other apps planning to support the digital rupee include Walmart-backed PhonePe, Google Pay and Amazon Pay. PhonePe and Google Pay dominate consumer UPI payments with market shares of 49% and 37% respectively at the end of last year.