Fintech Daily Digest

Blockchain validation platform VeriBlock produced almost 25% of on-chain Bitcoin (BTC) transactions in 24 hours July 14, the company confirmed on social media

The U.K. government has drawn up an action plan aimed to combat financial crimes that it says will include "action on cryptoassets." The new Economic Crime Plan from H.M. Treasury and the Home Office is aimed to overhaul the the way economic crime is tackled, building better cooperation between government, law enforcement and the private sector.

Japanese crypto exchange Bitpoint has become the latest exchange to suffer a major loss of funds. Its loss of $32 million-in five cryptocurrencies.

Ireland-based cryptocurrency exchange Bitsane disappeared without a trace last week, likely taking hundreds of thousands of users' assets with it. Account holders told Forbes that attempts to withdraw bitcoin, XRP and other cryptocurrencies began failing in May, with Bitsane's support team writing in emails that withdrawals were "temporarily disabled due to technical reasons." By June 17, Bitsane's website was offline and its Twitter and Facebook accounts were deleted.

Here are some of the laws and regulations for cryptocurrency in several emerging and developed markets.

Trump Fed nominee Judy Shelton: "An approach that permits the issuance of virtual currencies in tandem with government-issued currencies, adapting legal tender laws to permit healthy currency competition-should be put forward."

A draft bill entitled "Keep Big Tech out of Finance" has surfaced online, allegedly deriving from within the United States House of Representatives Financial Services Committee. The document's metadata dates it July 12.

Memo to the Members of the House Committee on Financial Services regarding the July 17, 2019 hearing entitled "Examining Facebook's Proposed Cryptocurrency and Its Impact on Consumers, Investors, and the American Financial System."

The gold industry is perhaps unrivaled in its wastefulness. A producer has to dig up about 20 tonnes of ore for enough gold to make a wedding ring.

Washington insiders and Waters' memo: Here's what Congress wants to know about Facebook's Libra next week

Staff at the US SEC are looking at whether Libra's structure effectively makes it an exchange-traded fund, according to people familiar with the matter. If the SEC decided that Libra's design makes it an ETF, Facebook would need the regulator's approval to launch the project.

The SEC's approval of live streaming platform YouNow's Props token offering falls under Reg A+, which allows startups to raise up to $50 million in a public offering with fewer disclosures than a full IPO requires. Blockstack, a decentralized web platform for DApps, was the first blockchain firm approved under Reg A+.

For a definitive answer on whether the hash rate follows the price or vice-versa, we will likely need to wait another ten years to have a large enough data set to accurately analyze the correlation.

"The move from $4k-$10k was based on a confluence of real factors (Yuan depreciating, the Fed, etc), but the move from $10k to $14k, and back to $10k and back to $13k, and back to $11k was all based on leverage."

An urgent priority for the Fed and other central banks is to move ahead with the provision of digital cash as a means of mitigating the effective lower bound. This approach will ensure that monetary policy will be systematic, transparent, and effective during normal times and in responding to severe adverse shocks.

The BoJ is continuing to examine CBDC. Recent intiatives include continuing DLT research (eg Project Stella with the ECB) and an internal study group on potential legal issues around BoJ CBDC issuance (a report will be released in due course).

CBDC can leverage the decentralized and secure advantages of blockchain. This enables P2P transactions, offers a more resilient payment infrastructure, reduces transaction costs, enhances information sharing capabilities and facilitates data reconciliation. Blockchain enabled payment solutions have been rigorously tested by central banks across North America, Europe and Asia.

Libra's future remains murky. Facebook is months away-at least-from actually launching a network. The documents Facebook released in June left a lot of unanswered questions about how the network will actually work-and in particular, how the network will deal with the wide range of legal and regulatory requirements that apply to payment networks.

Facebook is seeking a professional researcher with a PhD degree in economics to "initiate and execute projects around topics such as auction design, economic incentives in consensus protocols, market concentration, and macroeconomic aspects of the Libra currency,"

Former Banque de France deputy governor Jean-Pierre Landau argues that the network effects created by the aggregation of a vast range of activities in financial "platforms" create externalities very similar to those that underlie the creation of money. The report highlights three implications. First, the financial system could become "payment centric" - with bank deposits no longer the dominant form of private money. Second, digital interconnectedness may create around such networks digital currency areas, a development that could fragment some monetary systems. Third, national borders may not constrain such digital currency areas, and the currencies of those countries where digitalisation proceeds fastest (and where networks become the biggest) may become more widely used internationally - "digital dollarisation".