Snippings

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Nubank is expanding the feature that rewards holders of the digital dollar USDC to all users of Nubank Cripto in Brazil. This expansion allows daily returns on a minimum balance of 10 USDC in their wallets at a fixed rate of 4% per year. The decision came after a pilot program that tested variable rates with a small group of users throughout the past year.
To start receiving rewards, customers must access their crypto wallet in the Nubank app and click on “I Want to Participate.” The feature can be deactivated or reactivated whenever the user wishes. Returns are credited automatically every day, and liquidity is immediate.
USDC is a stablecoin backed by the US dollar, supported by highly liquid assets, and can be redeemed at a 1:1 ratio for US dollars. The reserves are publicly verifiable. This feature makes this digital currency less volatile compared to other cryptocurrencies.
In 2024, the amount of USDC held by Nubank customers increased tenfold and now around 30% of them have this asset in their portfolios. More than 50% of new Nubank Cripto users chose USDC as their first digital asset.

From: Nubank expands USDC rewards program to all customers – Nu International.

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The interest is paid in USDC, presumably. This means that NuBank must be buying the USDC from somewhere, which is great news for USDC. But as per the point made on Twitter, USDC invest the money in treasuries and take a a cut so why doesn’t the Fed tokenise the treasuries and cut out the middleman?

 

In fact – another point that has been made before and I was thinking about today when one of my Consult Hyperion colleagues showed me the new Visa piece about tokenisation, why don’t funds tokenise directly. I can see why Brazilian customers might want dollars in the their savings accounts but other people might want electricity or water or Banksy paintings. Actually, if we could stack up a few Banksy paintings and then persuade the government that it is in the vital national interest to have a strategic reserve of Banksy paintings… 

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A French woman who was conned out of €830,000 (£700,000; $850,000) by scammers posing as actor Brad Pitt has faced a huge wave of mockery, leading French broadcaster TF1 to withdraw a programme about her.
The primetime programme, which aired on Sunday, attracted national attention on interior designer Anne, 53, who thought she was in a relationship with Pitt for a year and a half.

From: French woman duped by AI Brad Pitt faces mockery online – BBC News.

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When images appeared in gossip magazines showing the real Brad Pitt with his new girlfriend Ines de Ramon, awakening suspicions in Anne, the scammers sent her an fake news report in which the AI-generated anchor talked about Pitt’s “exclusive relationship with one special individual… who goes by the name of Anne.”

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I do genuinely think we will all have our own AI agents, and companies will have armies of them. And they will be worth trillions, since eventually (no time soon) they will do a huge fraction of all human knowledge work, and maybe physical labor too.

But not this year (or next, or the one after that, and probably not this decade, except in narrow use cases).

From: AI Agents: Hype versus Reality, redux – by Gary Marcus.

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Today, it is not gold or silver content that determines the intrinsic value of money, but laws and institutions that underpin it. At the same time, payments utility is determined by technological advances that can outpace changes to these laws and institutions. As a result, bad money often gets bundled with good payments. People are offered cheaper, faster, more convenient, more secure, and more accessible ways to send and receive money at the expense of the underlying money being less sound. In times of relative stability, bad money may offer a comparative advantage.

Awrey calls this Gresham’s New Law and lays out a blueprint to address it.

From: Gresham’s New Law – by Marc Rubinstein – Net Interest.

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There has been an interesting change to the rules (well, not rules, more like a code of conducr) around private car parks in this United Kingdom. It is all to do with the use of mobiel phones to pay for parking (which is how I pay for parking almost all of the time in almost all of the plaxces where I park). It comes about because people are being fined for non-payments after walking away from their cars in order to find phone reception to use the relevant parking app.

This is a perfect example of why a central bank digital currnecy, to be useful and to add to the happiness of the nation, must work offline. You should be able to pay to park your car, or to buy some milk or to get into national park or whatever else when there is no mobile signal and no internet connection.

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Smart contracts are not “smart”, as they are merely computer codes that execute tasks upon the fulfilment of preconditions, in which the preconditions pertaining to the terms of the contract may be inputted by humans (Mik, 2017; Grimmelmann, 2019); the smart contract cannot “think for itself” so to speak. The inclusion of the term “contract” in smart contract is also misleading, since smart contracts are not contracts in the legal sense (Bacon et al, 2018). Finally, the term “smart contract” is also somewhat redundant, as the term is used to bring across a concept which is analogous to that of “programmability”. Indeed, the notion of programmability and thus programmable means of payments/payments is not something that is necessarily exclusive to the crypto-verse or crypto-verse technologies/innovations. In other words, the notion that “programmability” is synonymous with forms of DLT is misguided.

From: SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum.

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AI enhances risk assessment by using predictive analytics to foresee potential financial threats. These insights can help in proactive planning, allowing financial regulators to better shield the system from unforeseen risks. With AI’s capability to analyse large datasets quickly, risk modelling becomes more precise and timely. The Atlanta Fed published an interesting perspective AI’s role in future risk evaluation and management and it seems to me that, rather as computers seem to be better at driving cars than people are, they may be better than people at minimising systemic risks.

Maria Lucia Passador — Department of Law, Bocconi University; Harvard Law School and European Banking Institute — wrote a paper about this called “AI in the Vault: AI Act’s Impact on Financial Regulation” in which she advances that view that AI haas the potential to improve banking supervision by enhancing the efficiency, effectiveness and consistency of practices and tools. Across a rapdily evolving financial landscape, AI can overcome some of the challenges to, and constraints of, the existing supervisory framework by streamlining processes such as data collection, analysis, and reporting. Furthermore, AI can enhance the effectiveness of supervision by improving the quality of risk assessment and monitoring helping to proactively detect (and, hopefully, prevent) risks and misconduct.

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Across all scam types reported by Barclays customers, the majority – 75 per cent – originated on social media and tech platforms.

From: One-in-five consumers lost money to scammers in 2024.

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The issue of digital credentials, which I see as being central to the evolution of fintech, is not solely about improving interactions in the online economy. It is also about trust and accountability throughout society. He is an example to show what I mean: the BBC report the sad story of woman who is suffering after botched aesthetic facial work carried out by an unqualifed person. It should be easy, in a world of smartphones and digital signatures, for people to check anyone’s professional qualifications.

The unfortunate woman was quoted saying that she did “all the right things” to check the reputation of the clinic, which on it’s website reported that it had won “Best Aesthetics Clinic in Yorkshire” at the England Business Awards in 2022. The person who administered the treatment was certainly a doctor, but unfortunately his doctorate is an honorary one. And it’s in business consultancy and he bought it online.

 

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But the gallery’s owner has revealed how her livelihood and reputation were ‘ruined’ after the Pierce Brosnan with whom she spent months negotiating the exhibition of a lifetime turned out not to be the Bond star but a ‘deepfake’.

Simone Simms has spoken for the first time about how she fell for the elaborate artificial intelligence (AI) scam which resulted in her losing her £30,000 Long Eaton gallery.

From: Revealed: The sinister story of how an AI deepfake of 007 star Pierce Brosnan has left an art gallery owner’s world in tatters | Daily Mail Online.

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A tenant, who stole the identity of a woman called ‘Poonam Grover’, then paid a deposit and was able to pass the reference report with a forged driver’s licence.

From: I watched in horror as my tenant from hell sublet my flat on Airbnb before turning it into party pad and stealing my furniture… police said I had a ‘clear’ case but STILL took no action | Daily Mail Online.

This sort of nonsense goes on all the time. Showing a fake driving licence to someone who has no idea how to check whether a driving licence is real or not is a form of security theatre, not actual security.

 

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A 61-year-old woman has been arrested after allegedly dressing up in a series of wigs and disguises to take Life in the UK tests on behalf of others.
Immigration enforcement investigators arrested the woman at an address in Enfield on Monday on suspicion of fraudulently completing the citizenship tests for at least 14 applicants, both male and female.
She is alleged to have completed the tests across multiple test centres in the UK, disguising herself and doctoring ID documents to evade detection.

From: Enfield: Woman held for taking Life in the UK tests ‘in disguise’ – BBC News.

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Even if the stablecoins are in USD for now, retailers and sellers in these continents will be more than happy to accept USD stablecoins if it is easy to do so and without needing to open a USD bank account, especially if it exposes their online businesses to a global customer base.

From: Stablecoin to Heaven – by Jeremy Light – Agenda: Payments.

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