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Regulators have made clear that the old way of transacting, where you have pseudonymous transfers-that's not going to scale. Some users may leave compliant exchanges for others that choose not to share personal information, or seek out more decentralized methods of exchange that are harder to police. Such a community will have to remain niche.

Speaking at the Digital Banking Summit Innovation and Excellence Awards 2019 in Accra yesterday, Dr Opoku-Afari said adopting digital technology by players in the banking and financial space could help promote transactional efficiency in the delivery of financial services as well as scale up and broaden financial access to all segments of the society.

If the United States is smart, it will wake up and start competing for dominance in digital payments. The shortest cut to a system to rival Alibaba and Tencent is called Libra, the digital currency proposed by Facebook, which, with its 2.4 billion active users, is uniquely positioned to create something on a Chinese scale, and fas

The Algorand team explicitly designed the platform with the idea of catering to large scale payment processing, enterprise uses, mainstream user adoption, and a vision of a "borderless economy" from scratch.

The Algorand platform is explicitly designed with the idea of catering to large scale payment processing, enterprise uses, mainstream user adoption, and a vision of a "borderless economy" from scratch.

Crypto exchanges, including Coinbase and Kraken, have developed a system to rate which crypto-assets are likely to be securities. Crypto-assets are rated on a scale of 1 to 5, with the highest value signifying that a token is a security.

According to Byte Tree, a transaction from a private wallet to an exchange worth $1.2 billion triggered the dip. The scale of funds at involved sparked a panic selling session.

"As a new technology, stablecoins are largely untested, especially on the scale required to run a global payment system," said Mr Cœuré. "They give rise to a number of serious risks related to public policy priorities. The bar for regulatory approval will be high."

The introduction of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) allows the central bank to engage in large-scale intermediation by competing with private financial intermediaries for deposits. Yet, since a central bank is not an investment expert, it cannot invest in long-term projects itself, but relies on investment banks to do so. We derive an equivalence result that shows that absent a banking panic, the set of allocations achieved with private financial intermediation will also be achieved with a CBDC. During a panic, however, we show that the rigidity of the central bank's contract with the investment banks has the capacity to deter runs. Thus, the central bank is more stable than the commercial banking sector. Depositors internalize this feature ex-ante, and the central bank arises as a deposit monopolist, attracting all deposits away from the commercial banking sector. This monopoly might endangered maturity transformation.

Government-to-person (G2P) payments have never been more important, as governments worldwide seek for ways to respond to the economic and social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Eighty-four countries have reported changes to their social protection systems in response to the pandemic; fifty-eight countries of these are scaling up cash transfer schemes.

Libra still intends to issue a multi-currency stablecoin, but it would be backed by the new stablecoins, rather than directly by fiat currencies held in a bank. The new model limits Libra's flexibility, since adding (or removing) a currency from the basket requires issuing (or retiring) another digital token.

"The face of insurance is changing. Again. Led by data, digitalisation and a need to engage the customer, there are already many shifts underway. This current round of technology-driven change differs from those of the past, not least because of the speed and scale involved. Harnessed properly, these powerful forces offer new hope for the insurance industry to remain central to the lives of its customers. Swiss Re's Sigma report Data-driven insurance, ready for the next frontier? explains what's going on and presents a potential roadmap for progress."

We hear plenty of talk of how public blockchains are going to change the world, but to function on a global scale, a shared public ledger needs a functional, efficient and secure consensus algorithm. While not a comprehensive list, the following are a few of the alternative approaches being kicked around out there.

While bitcoin's (BTC) price is rallying, traders have scaled back their open interest positions in bitcoin perpetual contracts listed on the crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX.

UK payment specialist allpay launched a prepaid card program to help disburse emergency funds to those affected by COVID-19. allpay currently works with around 50 councils across Britain enabling them to distribute the benefits of the prepaid cards for a variety of projects and the team is experienced in deploying such projects on both a small and large scale quickly.

Founded by Cornell professor Emin Gun Sirer, who has previously worked on a scaling solution for bitcoin, AVA had been in private testnet for over a year. It originally had been slated for launch as early as December but this was pushed back until April. The project is now aiming for a full launch sometime in July, according to its roadmap.

Calibra asserts that Twins allows its operator to systematically generate Byzantine attack scenarios at scale, execute them in a controlled manner, and check for desired protocol properties.

Checkout.com will join the Libra Association in developing its series of stablecoins. Libra was announced last year as an effort to create a single global currency that could expand financial services to anyone who had a smartphone and an internet connection, though some of these ambitions have since been scaled back.

Aon, via insurtech platform Nayms that supports cryptocurrency investors in insuring crypto-risk, is conducting a pilot with Teller Finance, a decentralized lending protocol, to highlight the ability to scale cover efficiently by matching assets to liabilities when underwriting crypto-specific risk. The underwriter for the contract will be Relm Insurance Ltd, a Bermudian specialist insurer. The pilot will mark the first tokenised, or blockchain-enabled, placement of insurance ever conducted with regulated, professional insurance entities.

Ripple is piloting a private version of the public, open-source XRP Ledger that provides Central Banks a secure, controlled and flexible solution for the issuance and management of digital currencies. Moving money on the CBDC Private Ledger will be cost-effective, reliable and close to instantaneous. Transactions can also happen at volumes required by Central Banks. The CBDC Private Ledger will handle tens of thousands of transactions per second (TPS) initially with the potential to scale to hundreds of thousands TPSs over time.