Fintech Daily Digest

The International Financial Reporting Interpretations Committee has ruled that crypto-assets are "not cash nor an equity instrument of another entity," but rather "intangible assets" - defined as "identifiable non-monetary assets without physical substance."

According to the Blockchain Transparency Institute's 5th market surveillance report the cleanest exchanges are Kraken, Coinbase, Poloniex, and Upbit. Since the start of 2019, global wash trading has reduced by 35.7% among the real Top-40 exchanges.

The country that is first to introduce a digital currency that is more easily stored and used abroad than its physical counterpart will have "a first-mover advantage to greater currency use, though not necessarily to reserve currency use," says the IMF's Tommaso Mancini Griffoli.

In August, BTC/USDT represented 71.23% of total volume traded into both fiat and stablecoin. Despite controversies, USDT continues to be the most popular stablecoin for Bitcoin trading, followed by USDC, PAX, and TUSD. Bitmax, a trans-fee mining exchange, constituted roughly half of all USDT trading volume across all exchanges. Unlike regular cryptocurrency exchanges, trans-fee mining exchanges refund the fees paid by traders in the form of the exchange's native token. While popular with traders, these exchanges have faced criticism from industry experts and were often compared to Ponzi schemes. These exchanges also incentivize wash trading.

Nice overview of the current cross-border payments systems landscape.

US SEC Chairman Jay Clayton said they better regulation is needed around bitcoin markets before they can be traded on major exchanges, and that investors are "sorely mistaken" if they think that cryptos undergo the same price discovery practices as products on top exchanges.

Stablecoins can be broken down into 3 categories: asset-backed, crypto-backed, and non-backed. To this we need to include 3 additional dimensions; pegged, collateralized and redeemable.

Tibado is a fiat-backed stablecoin micropayment system based on an Autonomous Finite State Machine (AFSM) which controls a live coin ledger. The transactions are not known to the cash box which means there are no transaction fees and the user's privacy is preserved.

The Algorand team explicitly designed the platform with the idea of catering to large scale payment processing, enterprise uses, mainstream user adoption, and a vision of a "borderless economy" from scratch.

The Algorand platform is explicitly designed with the idea of catering to large scale payment processing, enterprise uses, mainstream user adoption, and a vision of a "borderless economy" from scratch.

Wells Fargo says its blockchain for internal cross-border money transfers is faster and more efficient than SWIFT, the global messaging system used by over 11,000 financial institutions.

According to a calendar notice on the House of Representatives' website, the committee will hold a one-panel hearing with SEC Chairman Jay Clayton, as well as Commissioners Robert Jackson, Elad Roisman, Allison Lee and "Crypto Mom" Hester Pierce on Sept. 24 in the Rayburn House Office Building."

In a letter responding to a question from German legislator Fabio De Masi, Facebook said the dollar would make up 50% of the basket, followed by the euro with 18%, the yen with 14%, the British pound with 11% and the Singapore dollar with 7%, according to German news magazine Der Spiegel.

Derivatives marketplace CME Group has announced that it will offer options on its bitcoin futures contracts starting in the first quarter of next year.

Bank of America has joined Marco Polo, a consortium working to bring efficiencies to international trade using blockchain technology. Founded by R3 and TradeIX, Marco Polo is built on R3's Corda blockchain platform. "

Stablecoins thus present as many conundrums as they do potential benefits-and policymakers would be wise to envision far-sighted regulatory regimes that will meet the challenge. The policies adopted today will mold the world of tomorrow. We explore one such avenue in our next blog.

Privacy coins such as Monero, Zcash and Dash are making it harder for exchanges and custodians to comply with new FATF guidelines. Some exchanges are finding it easier to delist the coins rather than figure out how to adhere to the additional risk management requirements.

America's unbanked need payments services. How to serve them? New products like postal banking, CBDC, or FedAccounts are one option. But good ol' fashioned prepaid debit cards (ie Walmart's MoneyCard) are still the best bet.

Chile's central bank governor, Mario Marcel, says central bank digital currencies (CBDC) can provide additional flexibility at a time of unconventional monetary policies.

VanEck and SolidX have withdrawn their request to the SEC for a rule change that would have allowed the Cboe BZX Exchange to list retail shares issued by the VanEck SolidX Bitcoin Trust.