Fintech Daily Digest

Last year, JP Morgan began using machine learning to hedge a portion of its vanilla index options flow book. Next year, the bank plans to roll out similar technology for hedging single stocks, baskets and light exotics.

Between Citbank, Westpac, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) there are plenty of compliance-related problems to solve, and each company is looking at regtech solutions to make it happen.

Big banks are fighting a likely U.S. Fed effort to speed up how money moves through its payments system, arguing this could derail a private network they have developed.

In an August 2 statement, the PBoC indicated that it has suggested to the Party Central Committee and the State Council that it should accelerate the research and development of its digital currency.

Stablecoin issuers including Coinbase, Paxos and Terra are planning to change directions as a result of consumer interest in using stablecoins as a mean of payment rather than simply for trading. St

MoneyGram to utilize Ripple's xRapid blockchain product, as well as XRP, Ripple's cryptocurrency, to facilitate cross-border settlement.

US Senate Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo: "if the United States were to decide we don't want cryptocurrency to happen in the United States and tried to ban it, I'm pretty confident we couldn't succeed in doing that because this is a global innovation."

Elliptic collaborated with MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab researchers using machine learning software to analyze 203,769 bitcoin node transactions worth roughly $6 billion in total. They found that only 2% of the 200,000 bitcoin transactions in the data set were deemed illicit, although roughly 77 percent remained unclassified.

The Federal Reserve is still weighing up the possibility of launching a round-the-clock real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system, but will reach a decision "soon", chair Jerome Powell said.

Grayscale Investments has tapped Coinbase Custody to act as the custodian for Grayscale's single-asset and diversified investment products. Coinbase qlrready holds $1b in assets, and Grayscale holds $2.7b in total assets under management.

"Governments need to ensure that central banks' monopoly over coins and notes is not replaced by private monopolies over digital money, and they should maintain banks' obligation to keep customer information private, so that the plumbing remains anonymous. Digital firms that use this plumbing to offer services should be free to monetize transaction data, through, for example, advertising, so long as their business model is made explicit to users. The phase-out of cash should be gradual. For a period of ten years, banks should be obliged to accept and distribute cash in populated areas. This will buy governments time to help the poor open bank accounts, educate the elderly and beef up internet access in rural areas."

LedgerX admitted Thursday that it has not launched bitcoin futures, as the firm had previously claimed, after the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) said it had not approved the exchange to do so.

A recently published document reveals that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has plans to hire contractors to run specific cryptocurrency full nodes for the government agency. According to the SEC documentation, the regulator wants third-party contractors to run nodes for Bitcoin Core (BTC), Ripple (XRP) and Ethereum (ETH) in order to monitor compliance risks.

To be fair, there isn't much legal precedence to build off of here-but when something goes wrong in the cryptosphere, who is legally liable? And what's more-who can users turn to for help? Should they call the police? The FBI? A lawyer? Or should they be able to rely on the service's operators or the coin's creators?

A new patent filing suggests that US retail giant Walmart may be developing a U.S. dollar-backed digital currency-based ecosystem similar to Facebook's Libra's.

Pooling intelligence on cyber trespassing is the future of digital defence - at least, that's what many in the op risk camp are saying. Platforms to disseminate that information are being set up by consortia of banks, sometimes even with government involvement. Yet despite their avowals, it's not clear how much banks want to share. Beyond the most rudimentary details of a breach attempt, banks may hold back for fear of ending up in the crosshairs of regulators - or of actually helping cyber thieves.

This sorry tale involves digital platforms, and the whizzy sounding innovative finance Isa (IF Isa). Yet the demise of Lendy is a new take on an old story - one of mispriced risk, misleading marketing and complacent regulation.

The United States Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has confirmed that LedgerX has not yet been approved by the agency to offer physically-settled Bitcoin futures, in a statement obtained by CoinDesk.

This paper explores the recent applications of blockchain technology in financial services and outlines regulatory responses, to set the scene for future work in this area on corporate governance.

In Facebook's vision, the actual end-to-end encryption client itself such as WhatsApp will include embedded content moderation and blacklist filtering algorithms. These algorithms will be continually updated from a central cloud service, but will run locally on the user's device, scanning each cleartext message before it is sent and each encrypted message after it is decrypted... Of course alternatives like Signal will exist for those who don't want to be subject to Facebook's content moderation, but what happens when this filtering technology is built into operating systems?