If you're a developer that needs to keep up to date in order to support the new wave of blockchain technology/ICO's and wants to immerse yourself in learning how to build/code your own token or smart contract, come join us on December 9th at FinTech School's Ethereum - Solidity Programming Workshop. Classroom setting, but this time all virtual (provided by Shindig.com) and you can be located anywhere globally. You'll be learning live from Neeraj Srivastava and the DLT Labs team (Ethereum Alliance Member). Use Code “FTSLENDIT” For 50% Off Source
Longfin is a micro-cap company that is listed on the Nasdaq; the company offers foreign exchange as well as financing to small businesses; recently they acquired micro lender Ziddu.com which provides smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain; now the company is looking to make contracts available for p2p lending, warehouse finance, structured products and FX or OTC derivatives. Source
Users in California, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana and New Hampshire will now have access to trade bitcoin and ethereum commission free; Robinhood plans to open to most states by the middle of 2018; over 4 million people have signed up for accounts with Robinhood. Source
The payment company announced the news that they were launching a cryptocurrency yesterday; it aims to be the digital version...
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!
Every quarter we get together with three other families for a dinner party. While all professionals no one is in...
Only five days after announcing they would enable bitcoin and ethereum trading Robinhood saw more than one million signups; Robinhood has made its name on zero commission stock trading and plan to roll out the new feature in five states first; “We see millions of trades a day. In our brokerage industry there is no excuse for down time. We plan on bringing that mind-set to the crypto space,” said Robinhood Co-Founder Baiju Bhatt to Business Insider. Source.
Coinbase announced they will add support for ERC20 tokens, the technical standard behind ethereum blockchain tokens; they don’t have plans to add any new token yet but is building out their technology to do so; "This is an infrastructure upgrade that will enable us to support many more assets in the future," a Coinbase representative told Business Insider.; the company did caution that they will wait regulatory clarity before adding any assets. Source.
From a financial incumbent point of view, if you are going to mutualize infrastructure, you need to actually mutualize the infrastructure. This means solving the game theory problem of accidentally giving away the value of your back office systems to your biggest, best-funded bank competitor -- not a competitive equilibrium. To that end, technology companies are a natural place for maintaining crypto systems. However, note that public chains today already have the benefit of billions of dollars in cyber-security spending (i.e., mining) and the dedicated engineering of thousands of open source developers. By choosing to use a public chain, you get this out of the box. With a proprieraty solution, even if the end-results are open-sourced, community is impossible to replicate. Maybe this is why IBM bought Red Hat for $34 billion, and Microsoft bought GitHub for $7 billion.
I anchor around the issues Libra is seeing in trying to develop a money, and what alternate strategies are available. We also analyze elements of a JP Morgan 2020 blockchain report, which highlights the differences between running a financial products (like a money) and a financial software (like a payments processor). In light of this necessary pivot for the regulated Facebook, we look again at Ethereum's decentralized finance ecosystem and the types of challengers it has created for Jack Henry, Finastra, Envestnet, TradeWeb, and other infrastructure providers.