Fintech Daily Digest

Tencent is set to open a blockchain-based virtual bank after the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission approved a new license.

Löber posed several general questions in relation to the practical operation of digital assets, which require definitive answers: "Can you use these assets as collateral? Can you net a position in a digital asset with positions you have in traditional assets? How do you treat insolvency? How do you deal with liabilities and remedies? And, in conflicts of law, what is the relevant forum for settling disputes?"

"The SEC has put significant limits on Paxos's experiment. Only about 140 of the most actively traded, least volatile stocks, like Exxon Mobil Corp. and Bank of America Corp. , are eligible for the project. The number of trades Paxos can settle will also be capped at 1% of average daily trading volume of those stocks, according to the SEC's letter."

Paxos Trust, a blockchain company that caters to financial institutions, has been given the green light to settle stock trades in near real-time in a direct threat to the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.'s half-century equity market dominance.

MoneyGram processes 10% of its transactions between the U.S. and Mexican corridor via Ripple's payments solution On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) that leverages XRP cryptocurrency.

Digitalisation makes payments easier, but also creates risks that need to be managed. The Riksbank therefore needs to keep up with developments and modernise both the central bank money and the Riksbank's systems.

"The U.S. CFTC gave the green light to another Swap Execution Facility operated by crypto-asset startup Tassat, following SeedCX's and LedgerX's SEF registrations.

Ripple has surpassed 300 customers and announced On-Demand Liquidity (ODL, formerly known as xRapid), leveraging XRP to eliminate pre-funding in cross-border payments.

The Tunisia CBDC will be issued using a platform created by Russian developers - Universa Blockchain - who will receive a percentage from each electronic transaction.

Using algorithms to analyze blockchain data, we find that purchases with Tether are timed following market downturns and result in sizable increases in Bitcoin prices. The flow is attributable to one entity, clusters below round prices, induces asymmetric autocorrelations in Bitcoin, and suggests insufficient Tether reserves before month-ends.

To obtain publication, Griffin and Shams have released a weakened yet equally flawed version of their prior article. The revised paper is a watered-down and embarrassing walk-back of its predecessor that still suffers from the same methodological defects, coupled with the clumsy assertion that one lone whale may be responsible for the rise of bitcoin in 2017.

Beware, lots of inaccuracies here!

From November 7, 2 thousand kiosks will appear in Tunisia, where citizens can replenish their digital wallet. At the initial stage, they will pay via the browser on the smartphone, and later a mobile application will appear. You can send digital money or make a purchase by scanning a QR code.

In a joint statement with Shanghai's commerce commission, the city's branch of the People's Bank of China said blockchain can solve asymmetries in trade finance and provide authenticity for trades. Blockchain also lowers cost thresholds for trading institutions, particularly in the export/import markets, the regulators said.

The survey shows that from 2016 to 2018, both the share of Canadians who are aware of Bitcoin and who own bitcoin increased. But the share of past owners also increased, suggesting an influx of Bitcoin owners who sold their holdings after 2017. The main reason for owning Bitcoin continued to be for store of value or investment purposes, though this decreased slightly from 2017. Finally, Bitcoin owners differed from the overall population in two ways: they were less financially literate and more likely to say they plan to stop using cash.

The PBOC's Mu Changchun said that China's upcoming digital yuan is designed to substitute existing physical money. Its holders will not receive interest payments so that the digital currency will have no implications for inflation or monetary policy.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) published a final "Industrial Structure Adjustment Guidance Catalog" - a list of those industries the agency advises the country to encourage, restrict or eliminate - and the list does not mention crypto mining in the eliminate category anymore.

The Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME) has released a new paper which highlights the minimal use of the cloud among capital markets firms - with over two-thirds of AFME members questioned estimating that only 1 - 10% of their bank's current workload was using some level of public cloud.

What is laid bare for the world to see is an architecturally schizophrenic code artifact claiming to be a new reliable platform for global payment infrastructure. Yet the actual implementation diverges from this goal in bizarre ways when one actually dives into the codebase. I'm sure there is an interesting story about the internal corporate politics of this project and as such I thought it apt to do some diligence on what I see as a truly strange set of architectural choices that break the entire system and put consumers at risk.

"Our findings show that tether grants were potentially timed to follow bitcoin downturns and subsequent bitcoin/tether trading volumes increased … However, the impact of tether grants on bitcoin returns were not statistically significant, and therefore tether issuances cannot be an effective tool for moving bitcoin prices."