🟩 BlackRock ❤️ bitcoin
U.S., Hong Kong both seek stablecoin clarity by end of 2024... and is China sourcing a crypto embrace through Hong Kong?
The New Money Brief covers the global revolution underway in our shared financial infrastructure, brought on by the rise of digital currencies.
Delivered several times a week. Created and edited by Marc Andrew.
The bitcoin industry has been suffering through a bear market for the last 18 months. The long-term holders have a deeply held belief that the price of bitcoin will eventually recover, but there will have to be a catalyst. Something will have to inject optimism and new capital inflows into the market.
One idea for this catalyst has been the entrance into the market by a major Wall Street asset management firm. These large, heavily-regulated organizations move slowly, but can command large pools of capital when they decide to enter an asset class.
Yesterday, the bitcoin proponents got their wish granted. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, officially filed for a publicly-traded bitcoin trust. If approved, this fund would allow public market investors to gain exposure to physical bitcoin.
Source: The Pomp Letter
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has completed a public consultation on stablecoin regulations and aims to introduce clear regulatory guidelines for the stablecoin market by the end of 2024.
Joseph Chan Ho-Lim, Under Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury of the government of Hong Kong, said that over the past five years, Hong Kong has emerged as a growing destination for fintech firms. Chan added that authorities are actively working to promote the Web3 ecosystem with a focus on investor protection.
Hong Kong started discussions on its stablecoin regulations in January 2022, with the HKMA sharing a list of eight questions about policy-related recommendations and citing five possible regulatory outcomes: 1) no action; 2) an opt-in regime; 3) a risk-based regime; 4) a catch-all regime; and 5) a blanket ban. In January 2023, the outcome of regulatory discussions outright prohibited the incorporation of algorithmic stablecoins in its stablecoin framework, with the HKMA demanding all stablecoin issuers back up their values with underlying reserve assets at all times.
Source: Cointelegraph
A team behind the decentralized social messaging app Damus, which is backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, warned on Tuesday that Apple could remove the app from its App Store within 14 days. Apple later reneged on its threat, but only if Damus agreed to remove certain payments functionality.
The move could stall one plan to ease the use of bitcoin and turn it into a more convenient transnational digital currency.
Damus originally said in a tweet that Apple is considering the ban because of the messaging app’s integration with the Lightning Network, a payment protocol that lets users exchange bitcoin directly over the network without needing another app. On Nostr — the underlying platform Damus runs on — these types of payments are known as “zaps.”
In its tweet, Damus said that Apple was worried that zaps could be used by content creators to sell digital content on its platform. Apple has a long history of prohibiting app makers from using in-app payments to sell additional content or add-ons, unless those payments go through Apple, which takes a 30% cut.
Source: CNBC
Hong Kong's banking regulator said on Thursday it had, in April, asked lenders operating in the region to try and meet the business needs of licensed crypto exchanges, responding to a report saying banks were under pressure to take such exchanges on as clients.
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority's (HKMA) comments were in response to a Financial Times report which said lenders including HSBC and Standard Chartered were facing pressure from Hong Kong's central bank to take on crypto exchanges as clients.
In its bid to emerge as a global crypto hub, Hong Kong has been pulling out all stops, from courting mainland China crypto firms to floating plans of testing a digital dollar in its mortgage market…
Source: Reuters
Foreign ministers from the Brics countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – met in June along with ministers from other countries, including Iran, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. On the agenda was the possibility of expanding membership of the group to include these countries, and Russia added urgency to the proceedings because of the impact of western sanctions.
But the main topic of discussion was the creation of a common Brics currency. The New Development Bank, rather than the International Monetary Fund, was tasked with finding ideas for how to achieve this. It was hailed by some as a major step towards the demise of the dollar.
Russia, Brazil and China are already using their own currencies for bilateral trade payment settlement. However, such a payments system runs into problems once imbalances arise. The comments by Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov that the country is sitting on billions of Indian rupees which it cannot use is a case in point. Brics countries have to find a solution to the perennial problem: how to move from bilateral to multilateral clearing and to a common currency.
Source: OMFIF
Payments made by a digital version of the U.K. pound will be private but with certain conditions, according to the Bank of England’s deputy governor.
Privacy and anonymity are two different things, Jon Cunliffe said during POLITICO’s Global Tech Day — a principle that’s enshrined in today's payment systems and which will be no different for central bank-backed digital currencies (CBDC).
“Every transaction you make with your credit card, with your phone, using your bank account, is recorded and stored,” he said. “Under certain circumstances, the authorities, law enforcement, tax ... can have access to the records of all of your transactions in your bank accounts.”
Source: POLITICO
Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) have infiltrated the agenda of countless innovation meetings at the world’s central banks.
In light of the ongoing shift to digitalisation, these and many other interested organisations have been actively investigating the potential impact that these digital currencies can have in trade and supply chain finance.
And those potentials are immense.
In this article, we will delve into the significance of CBDCs in international trade and supply chain finance, and scratch the surface of their potential to revolutionise the transactional landscape in the digital era.
Source: Trade Finance Global
Barely seven months after the launch of India’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot, the nation’s banking regulator is keen on onboarding 1 million users by the end of June.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) stated that preliminary studies had yielded positive results, laying the foundation for more extensive experiments. The expansion is designed to mirror the real-world application of the proposed digital rupee and will target more cities.
In addition to onboarding more users, RBI Deputy Governor T. Rabi Sankar said the central bank would explore integrating the united payments interface (UPI) with the CBDC via QR codes. Sankar remarks that the interoperability between both systems could present the benefits of increased CBDC adoption upon its launch.
Source: COINGEEK
Bitcoin’s share of total crypto market value is the highest in about 20 months, a sign of the cautious mood in digital assets.
The token wavered near $25,000 on Thursday, giving it a capitalization of $484 billion — or 45.8% of the value of the more than 10,000 coins tracked by CoinGecko. That’s the highest percentage since October 2021.
The US Securities & Exchange Commission in lawsuits against Binance. and Coinbase . last week deemed a raft of smaller tokens to be unregistered securities. That designation led to a selloff in such coins as they could become harder to trade.
In contrast, US officials view Bitcoin as a commodity, helping it to weather the worst of the wider slide caused by the SEC spotlight on so-called altcoins such as Binance’s BNB, Cardano’s ADA and Solana’s SOL.