Fintech Daily Digest

The vast majority of the world's cryptocurrency trading volume is in the hands of "lower quality exchanges", while the world's top-rated exchanges control only 5 percent of cryptocurrency trading volume, according to a new report from CryptoCompare.

Over the past few years, Axoni, a distributed-ledger technology (DLT) firm, has been building the platform for Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and other investors to make the convoluted process of reconciling equity swaps closer to a limpid one. The platform will eventually be open to any firm.

Intensifying regulatory scrutiny of Facebook's Libra digital currency has spooked some of the project's early backers, with at least three privately discussing how to distance themselves from the venture.

Binance experienced issues with APIs and withdrawal processing due to network issues with Amazon Web Services on August 23. Amazon has confirmed to The Block that AWS has experienced a temporary outage in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region.

The creation of a vibrant market in SDR linked to commodity prices could create a powerful new monetary anchor, argues former IMF SDR chief Warren Coats.

Engineer sources told The Block that R3 is finding it hard to manage or support its growing client base, insinuating the company is flogging software that isn't fully baked yet.

The Fed has defied lobbying and the insistence of some Republicans that banks should control faster payments to prod the US into the 21st century. Even so, its promised FedNow service is a distant prospect: it may only launch in 2024.

The Rwandan central bank is looking into ways it could potentially issue its own digital currency to make the processing of transactions more efficient and to boost economic growth.

UK-based remittance firm Xendpay is partnering with Ripple to use its RippleNet global settlements platform to allow it to enter new markets like the Philippines, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand.

Chainalysis's real-time crypto transaction AML monitoring/ compliance product began providing suspicious crypto-asset transaction alerts across 15 crypto-assets.

The New York State Department of Financial Services authorized Bakkt Trust Company LLC to offer custody services for Bitcoin following the introduction of trading physically delivered Bitcoin futures contracts on the Intercontinental Exchange Futures U.S. Under its charter, Bakkt will provide services to institutional customers.

PlusToken's intake of BTC, EOS, and XRP since the beginning of the scam in mid 2018 is still being calculated by our team. Once this data is finalized, we expect that PlusToken will easily emerge as the largest crypto Ponzi scheme in history, surpassing both BitConnect and OneCoin by a handsome margin.

This ECB article discusses the crypto-asset phenomenon with a view to understanding its potential risks and enhancing its monitoring.

The European Banking Association and the European Securities and Markets Authority have written to the European Commission to say they will review the legal frameworks used by European Union member states for monitoring stablecoins such as Libra.

2019 has proven a huge year for the development of stablecoins and decentralized finance, particularly in regards to projects built on the Ethereum blockchain.

The New York Attorney General is investigating Bitfinex, Tether and various associated iFinex companies - on the basis, amongst other reasons, that there's been funny business with the Tether "reserve".

Starbucks has around $1.6 billion in stored value card liabilities outstanding. This represents the sum of all physical gift cards held in customer's wallets as well as the digital value of electronic balances held in the Starbucks Mobile App.* It amounts to ~6% of all of the company's liabilities.

In China, online lenders are filling the credit gap, leveraging cutting edge technology including artificial intelligence (AI) to make lending decision in just a second. Alibaba's MyBank and Tencent's WeBank make their lending decisions using AI, processing vast amounts of user data and information gathered from the mobile payment services they operate.

The merchant payments startup Flexa will soon allow any other app to run payments in crypto just like its own SPEDN app has since May. For now, Flexa delivers final payment to most merchants in fiat, working with exchange partners to provide liquidity to trade tokens used in payment for the final currency. But the Flexa system defaults to paying merchants in the cryptocurrency used by the customer, and it hopes to nudge more to do so.

Although both of the stablecoin projects may appear to be international in scope, Binance's will likely only work with specific countries and regions in developing their own digital currencies to help establish financial autonomy and security.