On July 9, 2020, a criminal complaint was filed against Joshua Thomas Argires, a Houston business owner, for submitting materially false loan applications to obtain and misuse funds from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Around May 2020, Mr. Argires opened an account in the name of Texas Barbecue at Coinbase and began trading crypto, ultimately… Read More »
Text-based artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as GPT-4 enable tech-savvy laypeople to conduct tasks in complex domains with little prior experience. The financial sector, dealing with vast amounts of data daily, is among the industries most eagerly working on AI solutions. For example, Morgan Stanley’s asset management division was one of GPT-4’s first customers and… Read More »
While Bitcoin is still the largest cryptocurrency in the world by market capitalization, the Ethereum blockchain maintains the unique ability to tokenize assets and execute smart contracts. These benefits for businesses and investors also come with additional opportunities for cybercriminals, such as when a company simply runs away with the money after tokenizing its assets. … Read More »
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) represents a growing set of financial services that attempt to replicate key functions of the conventional financial system in an open and decentralized way using blockchain technology. This emerging form of capital markets has become economically meaningful; the Federal Reserve estimated the total value of digital contracts locked in DeFi applications exceeded… Read More »
Markets built on public, permissionless blockchains like Ethereum are radically transparent. While pending transactions in traditional finance are considered private information, viewable only by brokers or corporate insiders, transactions submitted to Ethereum’s public mempool—where they wait to be included on the blockchain—are publicly known. This creates profit opportunities and trading strategies that are rarely, if… Read More »
Crypto assets and crypto-related financial activities are generating considerable discourse among global regulators and financial supervisors. As key actors in the emerging alternative finance ecosystems, crypto and its market actors have drawn increasing attention to their potential policy implications, particularly on financial integrity, consumer protection and financial stability. This is primarily because crypto ecosystems remain… Read More »
Decentralized Finance (“DeFi”) has grown in popularity due to its promise that it will, as its name suggests, disintermediate traditional finance structures. Total Value Locked, which represents all deposits in various DeFi platforms, grew from $1 billion in June 2020 to a peak of almost $200 billion in November 2021. As of April 2023, almost… Read More »
In this blog post, we analyse tokenized deposits in terms of financial motivation, regulation, technological implementation, and interaction with retail and wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), with particular attention to the European perspective. We conclude that the tokenization of deposits is a crucial enabler for the success of future CBDCs and needs to enter… Read More »
In our digital age, cybersecurity plays a crucial role in resolving consumer concerns regarding data breaches. Nevertheless, United States copyright laws prohibit the effective use of cybersecurity tools that disrupt malicious hackers from accessing personal (and sensitive) information. One law that is especially detrimental to defending against malicious attackers is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act… Read More »
Back in 2014, the Hong Kong-based venture capital group Deep Knowledge Ventures announced that it had successfully appointed an algorithm named “VITAL” to its board of directors. This system of artificial intelligence (AI) was purportedly given the right to vote on whether the firm needed to invest in a specific company or not, similar to… Read More »
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