Fintech Daily Digest

The United Arab Emirates Securities and Commodities Authority has drafted a resolution on regulating crypto-assets to provide greater clarity for crypto-related projects.

This paper identifies four challenges created by cryptocurrency forks and other blockchain-based assets and provide evidence of their severity and pervasiveness. It considers three existing taxation approaches, and how they cope with the challenges above. While no option is perfect, the paper's conclusions are that the Japan's "calving" approach is the least burdensome, while the U.S. "treasure trove" approach is the least appropriate.

The regulatory control that most governments seek is generally related to money laundering and illegal activity. While cryptocurrency creators have no desire to foster such practices, many nevertheless hope to move away from the sorts of regulatory controls that are seen as centralized, less cost-efficient and often domineering.

Big corporations and regulators don't like the unsupervised free-for-all of Bitcoin. They like to control things. And that's exactly why Bitcoin was invented - to escape the control of a central authority but still have a system that works. It's a brilliant concept, and Bitcoin's success shows that it works.

"Let governments issue CBDC and compete for the attention of the fixed-price floating-rate investor, just like they already compete for the attention of the 30-year bond investor. This would remove an inefficient distortion, namely a subsidy to banks and a penalty on non-banks."

Accenture, SAP and R3 will work together to build a real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system that will allow for integration and interoperability between DLT-based and classic government-issued payments and settlements. The prototype design uses currency tokens to facilitate end-to-end settlement.

The New York State Department of Financial Services has joined the Global Financial Innovation Network. Launched by the U.K.'s Financial Conduct Authority, GFIN is a network of 50 international organizations committed to supporting financial innovation in the best interests of consumers.

According to a 2014 survey of Latin American countries, 80% of Haitians din't have a bank account. However, mobile phone ownership in Haiti has increased rapidly in the past decade, culminating in just under 60% of its citizens owning cell phones. Thanks to mobile money apps that can be accessed with a phone, many bankless Haitians have become more financially stable.

Tencent and Alibaba's Ant Financial expanded into financial services like lending and asset management only after online payments were well entrenched. One key lesson from China's experience is that these changes do not occur overnight. It took years to develop this infrastructure and for enough consumers to trust Internet companies with aspects of their financial lives. But perhaps most importantly, fintech innovation came about because a few companies would not accept missing pieces of their environment as a given. They built new, more efficient systems rather than waiting for incumbents to do it for them.

Bitfinex claimed Friday that it was the "victim of a fraud" at the hands of Crypto Capital, a payment processor that allegedly lost $880 million of Bitfinex's money. Crypto Capital's president, Ivan Manuel Molina Lee, was arrested Thursday by Polish police on charges of money laundering.

"It's an extract from one of his books written in 1930 about the origins of The Bank for International Settlements, the so-called central bankers' bank set up in the same year to manage reparations payments in the aftermath of World War One. You know what they say about what's under the sun..."

"In a presentation entitled "The Future of Money: The Impact of Digitization" Tommaso Mancini-Griffoli, Deputy Division Chief in the Monetary and Capital Markets Department from the IMF pitched the concept of a "synthetic CBDC" (Central Bank Digital Currency)."

P2P lending is a booming sector in Indonesia's rapidly growing fintech industry, representing 43% of the country's fintech companies, according to a paper by the Asian Development Bank Institute.

Bakkt announced on Oct. 24 that it will be launching the first regulated options contract for Bitcoin (BTC) futures on Dec. 9.

London based fintech Revolut officially announced the launch of its services in Singapore.

The "the average lifespan of a fiat currency is 27 years" idea has been showing up around the sillier corners of the internet for several years now. Economist and blogger JP Koning has done a brilliant job of finding exactly where this meme originally came from, and debunking it, in a comprehensive blog post last month.

One of the untold stories of the past few years is that the CFTC, the Treasury, the SEC and the [National Economic Council] director at the time, Gary Cohn, believed that the launch of bitcoin futures would have the impact of popping the bitcoin bubble. And it worked.

"Libra will be backed mostly by dollars and I believe it will extend America's financial leadership... As well as our democratic values and oversight around the world. If America doesn't innovate, our financial leadership is not guaranteed."

Zuckerberg reassured that Libra would operate under a coalition of partners and independently from Facebook, but he also made clear that Facebook will not help launch the payments system anywhere in the world until U.S. regulators approve.

"The future in five years, if we don't have a good answer, is basically China re-wiring" a large part of the world "with a digital renminbi running on their controlled blockchain," Marcus said. He warned about the prospect of "having a whole part of the world completely blocked from U.S. sanctions and protected from U.S. sanctions and having a new digital reserve currency" with no alternative.