Fintech Daily Digest

An effort by the FBI to more aggressively monitor social media for threats sets up a clash with Facebook's privacy policies and possibly its attempts to comply with a record $5 billion settlement with the U.S. government reached last month.

Central banks around the world need to bridge the existing data gap on crypto assets to better contain future financial risks arising from them, according to research published today by the European Central Bank.

Grayscale Investments has published a case study on how BTC could be used as a hedge against financial instability. The firm used the case of trade tensions between the United States and China to make their point.

About 15 countries have plans to work with the FATF to create a new system to collect and share personal data on individuals who conduct cryptocurrency transactions.

The ECB says the "central banking community" will refine its monitoring of crypto transactions, both on- and off-chain. In an Aug. 7 report the ECB argues that "closing the data gaps associated with crypto-assets" continues to pose a significant challenge for regulators and financial institutions.

Centralization is a well-known problem of crypto markets. People often referred to as whales control a fifth of some markets and have the strength to promote manipulation whenever they want to. Tether, however, seems to be facing an even worse situation: only 318 crypto addresses actually control 80% of the circulating supply of Tether.

"By visiting this Mexico City bar, I was struck by how little things have changed since I started covering the technology in 2011. Over the last eight years, the bitcoin community-and bitcoin's price-has grown by orders of magnitude. The bitcoin economy has much more sophisticated infrastructure for storing and trading bitcoins. But practical applications for bitcoin-beyond trading it, holding it, and hoping to get rich-seem almost as elusive today as they were eight years ago."

Bitcoin's $700 intraday sell-off on the 6th was accompanied by the return of the always-unwelcome "Bart Simpson" technical pattern, which occurs when a cryptocurrency's price spikes, trades sideways with a series of higher lows, and then suddenly collapses back toward its original level.

Binance is investigating into the alleged leak of its customers' verification information. The leak could affect up to 60,000 individual users who sent KYC information to the company in 2018 and 2019.

With a market capitalization of just over $200 billion, Bitcoin is now larger than the money supply of South Korea, Australia, Canada, and Brazil. According to statistics it could soon enter the top ten outpacing Russia and India.

The report looks into Bitcoin market action in the wake of five macroeconomic developments, including the escalating U.S.-China trade tensions as well as how Bitcoin may perform over the course of both normal economic cycles and liquidity crises.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) today launched Sandbox Express to provide firms with a faster option to test innovative financial products and services in the market.

The US has several private real-time networks offered by payments providers and big banks. But the Fed says these alternatives have important limitations, like the lack of a universal infrastructure. "Most of these services rely on 'closed-loop' approaches, meaning that users signed up to one service cannot exchange payments with users signed up to other services," the Fed statement noted.

Ms. Brainard says the Fed must develop its own system because "no single private-sector provider of any U.S. payment system has ever achieved nationwide reach on its own." Perhaps that is because the Fed has undercut private systems with its regulatory and infrastructure advantage, as the Government Accountability Office reported in 2016.

The Bank of Lithuania has signed a contract for programming the world's first digital collector coin which, together with its physical version, is expected to be issued at the beginning of 2020.

Data privacy commissioners from Australia, Albania, Burkina Faso, Canada, the EU, the U.K., the U.S., shared concerns that "while Facebook and Calibra have made broad public statements about privacy, they have failed to specifically address the information handling practices that will be in place to secure and protect personal information.

Indonesia's Financial Services Authority (OJK) has said it has closed hundreds of fintech firms this year, after companies were found charging inflated fees and recovering money by threatening customers.

Indonesia's Financial Services Authority (OJK) has said it has closed hundreds of fintech firms this year, after companies were found charging inflated fees and recovering money by threatening customers.

The Federal Reserve Board has announced that the Federal Reserve Banks will build and operate the FedNowSM Service, a new interbank 24x7x365 real-time gross settlement (RTGS) service with integrated clearing functionality to support faster payments in the United States. The decision to develop the new RTGS service (Off-site) was based on an assessment of public input and policy criteria regarding the Federal Reserve's role in the payment system.

The Fed's offering, called FedNow, will challenge a competing service already offered by The Clearing House, a private company owned by many of the country's largest banks. The Fed, which expects to launch its service in 2023 or 2024, said a publicly run offering is needed to ensure the entire nation can reap the benefits of real-time payments.