Fintech Daily Digest

Because Facebook owns Calibra and also has a seat on the Libra Association, it will be the only entity on the currently 29-member board that will effectively have two votes. But the governing structure of the Libra Association is still evolving.

Calibra is how Facebook intends to make money off Libra. More generally, it's a massive play for Facebook to get into financial services in a way that no other technology company may be able to compete with.

After months and months of speculation, Facebook has finally revealed the details of its would-be cryptocurrency challenger.

The overstatement of trading volumes by cryptocurrency exchanges, and by implication the understatement of the importance of listed futures, suggests that market structure has likely changed considerably since the previous spike in Bitcoin prices in end-2017 with a greater influence from institutional investors.

The MAS (the Monetary Authority of Singapore), BOE (Bank of England) and FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) have announced they will be working together to strengthen cyber security in their financial sectors.

Researchers from Adobe and UC Berkeley have created a tool that uses machine learning to automatically identify when photos of people's faces have been altered.

This paper analyzes the white papers of the fifty top-grossing ICOs of 2017, how the software code controlling the projects' ICOs reflected their disclosures. Most promised forms of investor protection that the code did not deliver and 12 allowed modifications to the way the smart contract worked, but only four of them disclosed that ability.

This article details how CBDC can be implemented, comparing three possible DLT-based options (Corda, Hyperledger Fabric, and Quorum) on privacy, scalability/performance, resiliency and finality.

According to this article there are three main cryptos that comply with Sharia law; Stellar's Lumen (XLM), OneGramCoin (OCG) and X8Currency (X8C).

Millions of people across Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and southern Brazil were left without power early on Sunday after a massive power failure hit all four countries.

Facebook Inc. has signed up more than a dozen companies including Visa Inc., Mastercard Inc., PayPal Holdings Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. to back a new cryptocurrency it plans to unveil next week and launch next year.

Facebook and dozens of partners are set to unveil the Libra Association and Libra Blockchain next week. The Libra Blockchain will be backed by Libra Reserve, a reserve of real assets that will provide the cryptocurrency with "stability, low inflation, global acceptance, and fungibility. The Libra Blockchain will be open-sourced under an Apache 2.0 License as of the day of the announcement, and a testnet will be launched at the same time.

"Facebook's Libra will pay interest to those who hold it at an equivalent rate at which banks earn interest on their deposits at the Fed. Which in turn will make people begin to wonder why the legacy banking system is not so generous with its depositors. This will put populist pressure on banks and new scrutiny on their relationship with the Fed."

"If you consider the internet to be the equivalent to a nation state, it should have a currency native to itself, and there is not going to be any one party or institution that makes this happen, and there's not going to be any one party or institution that can stop it from happening. And having a global currency that is native to the internet will allow companies like ours to move much faster and reach a lot more people."

Key findings suggest that mobile money may be a positive use case for CBDC, but it is not without potential risks. The application of retail CBDC to mobile money has the potential to foster greater interoperability, improve payment efficiency, facilitate cost-saving gains by minimising reconciliation complexity and notional costs, as well as reduce the key payment risks that are typically associated with mobile money.

From the standpoint of secure, accessible books and records, DLT represents an important step forward. From a funding perspective, it is a gigantic step backward.

Brazil's central bank, finance ministry, and the country's financial sector regulators have teamed up to develop a Fintech regulatory sandbox.

Facebook won't directly control the coin, nor will the individual members of the consortium-known as the Libra Association. Some of the members could serve as "nodes" along the system that verify transactions and maintain records of them, creating a brand-new payments network.

The best way to understand [where Facebook's stablecoin fit in the grand scheme of things] is to look at an admirably punchy speech that Tobias Adrian, head of the markets division at the IMF, recently gave to a meeting of central bankers in Zurich.

Philadelphia Fed researchers find that a central bank digital currency might promote efficiency in exchange, but could raise bank funding costs. However, by appropriately choosing the interest rate it pays on CBDC, the central bank can balance these competing concerns.