Fintech Daily Digest

Sci fi and courtroom drama legend William Shatner has announced a partnership with London legaltech firm Mattereum to document the authenticity of memorabilia and collectibles, on the blockchain.

Binance this time decided not to make the deal with miners. And as time goes on, the attack becomes harder. But all it took was a private phone call. The majority hashpower lies under control of a handful of men. They can collude and reverse the chain.

For Latin Americans living abroad sending money back home via traditional banking methods and money transfer operators can be a complicated and costly ordeal. More cost-effective approaches rely on using fintech, like mobile banking, according to a recent IMF working paper.

US SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce is worried that the regulator is moving too slowly for the crypto ecosystem. Rather than being heavyhanded in enforcing the rules as she once feared, the agency has instead been too sluggish to clarify or update them.

The global exchange website Currency.com has announced that it will be offering a tokenized form of Belarussian government bonds. Users can now use fiat money, bitcoin and ether to invest in and trade Belarussian government bonds.

The JPM Coin team replaced Constellation, Quorum's privacy layer written in the Haskell computer language, with Tessera, which has a similar design, but is built in Java to make it easier for businesses to use and deploy.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority issued virtual banking rights to 4 more companies: Ant SME Services (Hong Kong) , Infinium, Insight Fintech HK, and Ping An OneConnect.

A group of traders from 35 digital assets firms are proposing to create a shared blacklist for parties who renege on trades and engage in dubious activities.

Last month a unit of Societe Generale sold EUR 100M of mortgage-backed covered bonds in the form of digital tokens with the French bank as the only buyer. The idea was to test how the technology behind can be used to cut costs and speed settlement for the securities.

Ant Financial is exploring how to issue digital assets in some form of a token on the blockchain that would represent something of value in the physical world-whether that be fiat currency or some other kind of asset.

A quantitative model of mortgage lending suggests that regulation accounts for roughly 60% of shadow bank growth, while technology accounts for roughly 30%.

Relative to other shadow banks, fintech lenders serve more creditworthy borrowers and are more active in the refinancing market. Fintech lenders charge a premium of 14-16 basis points and appear to provide convenience rather than cost savings to borrowers.

The Binance hackers are moving their stolen BTC into smaller and smaller wallets in an effort to hide their tracks.

Decentralized algorithmic stablecoins (eg DAI) do not contain any of the risks outlined in this summary of the Tether situation. While they do contain a host of other risks, those that value transparency migrate may migrate to DAI.

53% said that blockchain has become a critical priority for their organization this year, and 40% are willing to invest $5 million or more in new blockchain initiatives over the next year.

Austria's Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) has announced it will pilot R3's Marco Polo blockchain network for trade finance.

Bitfinex has released the official white paper for its $1B exchange token sale, said it will also launch a dedicated platform for projects to raise funds via similar initial exchange offerings.

Binance decided against responding to the hack with a rollback: i.e. aiming to incentivize miners to form a consensus to wield 51% of the network's hashing power to reorganize the blockchain's transactions after the loss.

As is currently being done, crowd-sourcing of pricing data feeds is fundamentally broken for stablecoins because the incentives are misaligned. Stablecoins that rely on this fundamental mechanism should be considered broken.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's partner at Berkshire Hathaway, expressed concern over the rate at which money is printed by democratic governments. Ironically, Munger, a skeptic of bitcoin, may have accidentally pointed out the merits of the dominant cryptocurrency.