Fintech Daily Digest

Union Bank of the Philippines recently became the first Philippine bank to successfully pilot blockchain-based remittance from Singapore to the Philippines. This was done in partnership with OCBC Bank, Singapore, using the Adhara liquidity management and international payments platform.

The proliferation of crypto assets may create a multicurrency environment prone to monetary and exchange rate volatility, warned St. Louis Fed President James Bullard. "Cryptocurrencies may unwittingly be pushing in the wrong direction in trying to solve an important social problem, which is how best to facilitate market-based exchange."

Due to mounting regulatory pressures in the United States, the Circle is moving the majority of its exchange operations to Bermuda, where it received a full Digital Assets Business Act license its crypto exchange Poloniex. 70% of Poloniex users hail from beyond the U.S.

"The Indian Inter-Ministerial Committee on Virtual Currencies is of the view that it would be advisable to have an open mind regarding the introduction of an official digital currency in India."

An Indian government panel has recommended banning all private cryptocurrencies and a jail term of up to 10 years and heavy fines for anyone dealing in digital currencies, which could signal the end of them in India.

Facebook has seen an increase in the median number of comments, likes and ads clicked by users on the service from January to July. In the U.S., Facebook users increased their engagement from six comments, nine post likes and 13 ads clicked on Jan. 3 to eight comments, 13 post likes and 17 ads clicked on July 18.

Hope lies in tools such as zero-knowledge proofs and in emerging "self-sovereign" identity concepts, as well as in a more open-minded regulatory model for curtailing crime - one that doesn't depend on revealing people's personal identifying information. But these are a ways off; they will require user adoption and; to a still large extent, belief in them by policymakers.

In May 2019, IOSCO published "Issues, Risks and Regulatory Considerations Relating to Crypto-Asset Trading Platforms." The focus of the report is on the secondary market trading of crypto-assets on CTPs, assuming that the regulatory authority has the legal authority to regulate those assets.

The Central Bank of Iran has approved the issuance of gold-backed crypto-asset designed to maximize the use of Iranian frozen bank assets, according to the CEO of Iranian Information and Communication Technology. In fact, a number of Iranian banks have been working with blockchain startup Kuknos Company on this "Paymon" project since January.

A noncustodial exchange (NCE) is a service that facilitates the trade of different cryptocurrencies without ever holding user funds.

"Because the (Libra) Association is headquartered in Geneva, it will be supervised by the Swiss Financial Markets Supervisory Authority (FINMA). We have had preliminary discussions with FINMA and expect to engage with them on an appropriate regulatory framework for the Libra Association."

Facebook now seems to recognize its original vision was a non-starter with regulators. So this week Marcus sketched out a new vision for Libra-one in which the Libra Association will shoulder significant responsibility for ensuring compliance with laws relating to money laundering, terrorist financing, and other financial crimes.

"Phone numbers and email addresses added as profile attributes, those provided for security purposes such as two-factor authentication, those provided to the Facebook Messenger app for the purpose of messaging, and those included in friends' uploaded contact databases are all used by Facebook to allow advertisers to target users."

While Wyoming is perhaps the most notable state to court the crypto industry, others have also joined in. Montana passed a crypto-friendly securities law in May. In South Dakota, Anchorage is following in the footsteps of fellow crypto custodian BitGo, which got the green light from state regulators in 2018.

Fidelity Digital Assets has officially applied to the New York Department of Financial Services for a Trust license. If its application is successful, Fidelity Digital Assets (FDAS) would be cleared to add New York to the handful of states in which it currently operates its custody business for digital assets."

This Cleveland Fed paper shows that while the decentralized nature of the Bitcoin network "democratizes" payments, it is not obvious that the approach increases the equity or efficiency of markets or that the costs of the decentralized control structure won't outweigh the benefits in the long run.

The use of cash as a means of payment in the Netherlands continued to decline in 2018, according to data released by the Netherlands Bank. Last year, Dutch consumers paid 37% of their purchases in cash, down from 41% in 2017. Cash also declined in transactions between consumers, falling to 59% of peer-to-peer transactions in 2018, down from 67% the previous year.

Bank of Ghana deputy governor Maxwell Opoku-Afari stressed the large gains that Ghana has made in financial inclusion, mostly due to the growth of its mobile money sector. He said the number of mobile money accounts has grown from 3.8m in 2012 to 32.6m in 2018, which is greater than the population of Ghana (30.1 million).

"If Facebook had built an app that just allowed in-app, user friendly payments in USD, I could have gotten behind that. What has been proposed instead is a combination of a licensed version of Liberty Reserve with an ETF, which furthermore proposes to share transactional data with a veritable rogues' gallery of privacy-abusing tech companies and the VC firms that funded their rise. "

The European subsidiary of Binance has launched a British pound-pegged stablecoin. Starting today, Binance Jersey has started offering a British pound-backed Binance called GBP Stablecoin (BGBP), The Block confirmed with Binance.