Fintech Daily Digest

The token with the highest daily and monthly trading volume is Tether, whose market capitalization is more than 30 times smaller. Tether's volume surpassed that of Bitcoin's for the first time in April and has consistently exceeded it since early August at about $21 billion per day.

"The nature of fixed versus variable costs in robo-advising is likely to democratize access to financial services. Big data is likely to reduce the impact of negative prejudice in the credit market but it could reduce the effectiveness of existing policies aimed at protecting minorities.

"It's important to separate the genuine worries about Libra from the hyperbole. Facebook is a controversial company these days. But French monetary sovereignty is unlikely to fall at the hands of Libra. Let's not forget that the existing payments networks - the MasterCard and Visa networks as well as the international correspondent banking system - don't always provide consumers with low prices. Any new competition will help consumers get cheaper and better payments options."

Blockchain-based utility Swiss Digital Exchange has organized a global consortium of financial institutions to back its initial digital offering slated for the middle of next year on the SDX platform.

According to the IMF's Financial Access Survey, while mobile money continues to grow in its epicenter in Africa, it's also taking off in Asia. The survey also provides a wealth of information on the access to and use of basic financial services, including breakdowns by gender.

PayPal has become the first foreign company to acquire a payments licence in China, after buying a majority stake in a small Chinese online payments firm, Guofubao (NationPay).

The Revolut payment app plans to expand beyond Europe and Australia, where it built its primary markets, and into the USA, as well as Japan, Brazil, and Russia.

Crypto exchanges, including Coinbase and Kraken, have developed a system to rate which crypto-assets are likely to be securities. Crypto-assets are rated on a scale of 1 to 5, with the highest value signifying that a token is a security.

The Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) has authorised 28 banks operating in the Egyptian market to provide mobile payment services, according to the CBE's Governor Tarek Amer.

"Celo is an open blockchain-based platform for fast, stable, secure digital payments, Celo's mission is to enable a monetary system that creates the conditions for prosperity for all."

The Celo price stability protocol can be thought of as a hybrid crypto-collateralization/seigniorage-style model, designed in a way that we believe offers the best of all three approaches. The protocol supports an ecosystem of stable currencies, the first of which, the Celo Dollar, will be pegged to the US Dollar.

"[I]t seems that we have integrated the [Libra investment] token into the Libra coin in some way such as to produce a return, which would then deem it [the Libra coin] to be a security." (U.S. Rep. Al Green at a September 24 SEC oversight hearing)

In a June report, Gartner predicted that by 2021, more than 90% of current enterprise blockchain platform implementations will fail or need to be replaced in a 18 months period. This is due to a fragmented blockchain market and 'unrealistic expectations' by CIOs.

Custodial solutions are important for financial markets, whether traditional or innovative, and have been historically limited for Bitcoin. But why do institutional investors need custodial services, and what are the unique challenges of Bitcoin custody?

The US House of Representatives passed the "Advancing Innovation To Assist Law Enforcement Act" to require the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to conduct a study on the use of blockchain, AI, and other technologies by the agency and provide a report to the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee.

"We develop a general-equilibrium model of a cryptocurrency. We use the model to obtain a condition that rules out double spending and study the optimal design of cryptocurrencies. We also quantify the welfare costs of using a cryptocurrency as a payment instrument."

MintChip operates with many of the characteristics of cash in the online world. Not requiring a proprietary network or any network at all to authenticate and process the transaction, it is a direct transfer of value from consumers to business or person to person. The value is stored in secure integrated chips and uses a secure protocol that allows the transfer of value from one chip to another. Like cash, it operates without the need for personal identification, is instantaneous and does not have any age or credit requirements for use.

A Secure Element securely stores card/cardholder data and manages the reading of encrypted data. During a payment transaction it acts like a contactless payment card using industry standard technology to help authorize a transaction. The Secure Element could either be embedded in the phone or embedded in your SIM card.

This paper presents an overview to the field of bitmoney - a digital payment system. A digital payment system is an information technology system for transferring money between its users. This paper describes two European types of bitmoney Mondex and CAFE. In addition some other types are also presented.

This paper highlights the emerging supervisory practices that contribute to effective cybersecurity risk supervision, with an emphasis on how these practices can be adopted by those agencies that are at an early stage of developing a supervisory approach to strengthen cyber resilience.