The ECB announced the results of their two year digital euro investigation. Many questions still stand. They have decided to move forward.
big techcentral bank / CBDCdecentralized financedigital lendingdigital securities / STOenterprise blockchainexchanges / cap mkts
·This week, we look at:
How the music industry needed The Pirate Bay and Napster
Why J.P.Morgan is paying $1B in fines for allegedly manipulating the precious metals market
Whether DeFi is flirting with self-dealing and veering towards apathy
Why QAnon and 8chan are a bad example for global governance
And how the European Commission’s proposed crypto-market rules are highly productive for blockchain-based capital markets infrastructure
In this conversation, we go through the essentials of Decentralized Finance with Kerman Kohli, who is a serial entrepreneur and the writer of the DeFi Weekly newsletter. We discuss the mechanics of issuing stablecoins, decentralized lending, decentralized exchange, automated market makers, and the increasing complexity of synthetic assets that have grown the sector to nearly $7 billion in August of 2020.
WhatsApp launches payments in Brazil and is unceremoniously shut down by the central bank a week later, MasterCard buys Finicity to protect itself against Visa’s recent acquisition of Plaid, Checkout.com continues its largely silent meteoric rise in payments, Softbank-backed and DAX 30 index component Wirecard “loses" $2 billion from its balance sheet and files for insolvency, Upgrade raises $40 million at a $1 billion valuation to extend its personal credit offering.
central bank / CBDCcivilization and politicsenterprise blockchainmacroeconomicsnarrative zeitgeistphilosophyregulation & complianceSocial / Communitystablecoinsthings that are not true
·We anchor our writing around the World Economic Forum 223 page report on CBDCs and stablecoins. The analysis highlights the key conclusions across several white papers in the report. We then add a layer of meta analysis around the language in the report, and question what it is trying to accomplish, and whether that will work with the Web3 revolution. This leads us to think about the tension between populism, as represented by crypto, and institutionalism, as represented by banking structures. We discuss theories of cultural and national DNA, and the rise of populism, as difficult problems to solve for any global alignment.
We look at a recent report from Protos that traces the issuance of USDT to the institutional players in the centralized crypto capital markets. The data reveals the market share of players like Alameda, Cumberland, Jump, and others in powering trading in exchanges. We try to contextualize this market structure with what exists both in (1) investment banking and (2) decentralized finance. The analogies are helpful to de-sensationalize the information and calculate some rough economics.
In this conversation, we chat with Richard Turrin – an award-winning executive, previously heading FinTech teams at IBM, following a twenty-year career, heading trading teams at global investment banks. He’s also the author of the number one international bestseller, Innovation Lab Excellence. One of his books is Cashless: China’s Digital Currency Revolution, which brings the story of China’s incredible new central bank digital currency to the west. He lives in Shanghai, China, where he’s had the privilege of living in China’s cashless revolution firsthand.
In the long take this week, I revisit decentralized finance, providing both an overview and 2019 update. The meat of the writing is the following long-range predictions for the space in the next decade -- (1) the role of Fintech champions like Revolut and Robinhood as it relates to DeFi, (2) increasing systemic correlation and self-reference in the space, which requires emerging metrics for risk and transparency, and (3) the potential for national services like Social Security and student lending to run on DeFi infrastucture, (4) the promise of pulling real assets into DeFi smart contracts and earning staking rewards, and (5) continued importance of trying to bridge into Bitcoin. Here's to an outlandish 2020!
In this conversation, we talk with Jon Helgi Egilsson about his incredible journey to becoming Chairman and a co-founder of Monerium.
Jon is a former chairman and vice-chairman of the supervisory board of the Icelandic Central Bank, a former adjunct professor in financial engineering and MBA lecturer at Reykjavik University, a visiting scholar at Columbia University, and co-founder of four software companies. Additionally, we explore the various concepts of digital money in the framework creating a competitive yet unified environment between fiat money, banking based on fractional-reserve, and the token economy.
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