Courtesy of Vanessa Villanueva Collao and Verity Winship Distrust in traditional intermediaries after the financial crisis incentivized the crypto community to develop private coinage and to allow different applications (software platforms) to function as a vehicle for funding startups through the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) process. The self-executing nature of smart-contracts enabled decentralization and promised… Read More »
Courtesy of Katarina Weessies In March of 2018, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss proposed the Virtual Commodity Association (VCA), a self-regulatory organization, or SRO, meant to make the cryptocurrency industry more “safe and secure.” An SRO is “a nongovernmental organization that is statutorily empowered to regulate its members by adopting and enforcing rules of conduct.” The… Read More »
Courtesy of J.S. Nelson As Facebook’s Libra, despite hiccups, may have 2.4 billion users a month transacting for goods and services by later this year, the question of how cryptocurrencies should be regulated is taking on pressing importance. My forthcoming article, “Cryptocommunity Currencies,” argues—first, that cryptocurrencies should be regulated; second, that they should be regulated… Read More »
Courtesy of Lindsay Martin Founded in 2012, Ripple sought to revolutionize global payments using blockchain technology and digital assets. Members of the Ripple network can quickly transfer funds to other members of the network in a secure, real-time settlement process. Ripple’s native currency is XRP, and members of the Ripple network can transfer XRP to… Read More »
Courtesy of Joseph Caputo and Lee Reiners The emergence of fintech lending – also called marketplace lending or peer-to-peer lending – and its interplay with the United States’ fragmented financial regulatory system, has given rise to a niche market of mid-size banks that cater to nonbank fintech lenders. While these banks may provide their fintech… Read More »
Courtesy of Michele Benedetto Neitz Blockchain technology is not as decentralized as we think. From the outset, the original innovators of blockchain viewed the technology as an opportunity to solve the “problem” of government oversight over economic activities. A truly decentralized, immutable ledger, would remove the potential for human shortcomings and state control, impacting everything… Read More »
Fintech developers and financial institutions[1] have presented the benefits of using smart contracts to facilitate securities/interests transfers (trading) on distributed ledger technology (DLT) platforms. The benefits are DLT’s technological ability to bring about decentralization and disintermediation which are the main characteristics of peer-to-peer (P2P) trading platforms and reduction of transaction costs for users and financial… Read More »
Courtesy of Yan Chen and Cristiano Bellavitis Over the last few years, blockchain and its applications – such as Bitcoin – have gone through a cycle of high promise and setback. In September 2017, some commentators argued that blockchain was the most important invention since the internet and electricity. Then, a few months later, governments… Read More »
Courtesy of Christian Pfister* In 2018, the Bank for International Settlements conducted a survey to which 63 central banks responded. According to the results, 70% of the central banks were then (or planned to be soon) engaged in central bank digital currency (CBDC) work. However, only three central banks reported that they were likely to… Read More »
Courtesy of Cameron Harwick and James Caton The Bitcoin blockchain was launched in 2009, providing for the first time a secure, decentralized, and electronic platform for monetary exchange. It was not purely anonymous – public account information was available – but users did not have to know or trust each other in order to participate in “money”… Read More »
