Snippings

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Understanding Crypto Custodians: Proliferation Continues, a new from Javelin Strategy & Research, explores how the new wave of custodians has introduced a series of innovations to the industry. Joel Hugentobler, Cryptocurrency Analyst at Javelin and lead author of the study, lays out the considerations that financial institutions should consider when selecting a custodian, including storage methods, insurance coverage, and the full range of product offerings.

From: Crypto Custodians Could Bring a Revolution in Holding Assets – PaymentsJournal.

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For example, state DMVs largely favor the “mobile driver’s license” family of digital credential standards (ISO/IEC 18013-5 mDL), and OEM wallets also privilege the mDL standard. But many educational institutions, for example, prefer the OpenBadges standard by the 1EdTech educational consortium, an alternative format built on the W3C’s Verifiable Credentials. Numerous other use cases are built using W3C Verifiable Credentials, such as Microsoft’s Entra Verified ID product, C2PA for content authenticity (a specification supported by Adobe, OpenAI, and Google), and GS1’s digital supply chain integrity efforts. Further, the EU Digital Identity efforts include SD-JWTs.

From: Who Should Build a Digital Wallet?.

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Tesco

The supermarket said the technology will give customers more information on each garment in its F&F fashion collection, including where the materials in each product have been sourced from, The Telegraph has reported.

The European Union is rolling out new rules, designed to boost supply chain transparency, that require companies across the EU to introduce digital product passports (DPPs).

DPPs are set to be rolled out over different industries over the next eight years, and will enable companies to give shoppers detailed information on the materials used in their goods, as well as their environmental impact.

From: Tesco launches digital passports for clothes.

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We like to call this the “trust nothing, verify everything” era, where nothing can be perceived as real until it’s authenticated.

From: Identity’s role in the deepfake dilemma | Biometric Update.

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a large swath of the public lacks the critical thinking to discern the real from the fake

From: Welcome to Fakesville: Inside an AI Nightmare That Tore Apart a School — The Information.

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Since, as Patrick Harding, Chief Architect at Ping Identity points out, research shows that less than half of Americans even know what a deepfake is, there’s a long way to go if education is the solution.

I’ve actually send a few different groups propose using the Internet’s Domain Name Service (DNS) as the basis for identity discovery. The idea essentially, is to use fields in the DNS record to act as a pointer to an associared identity so that when you go to the DNS and lookup dgwbirch.substack.com there is a field that will give (essentially) the public key for the user dgwbirch in the domain substack.com (with the implication that that there are other credentials that can be discovered this way, such is IS-OVER-18 or whatever).

There is a proposal for “High Assurance DIDs with DNS” to do this for decentralised identities. WIth the “did:web” method there is a link between the DID document and the domain where there relelvant DNS records are located. This means that the domain specified by the did:web identifier (for example, did:web:dgwbirch.substack.com) is also the location where you can find the supporting DNS records such as a TLSA, a resource record in DNS used to specify how a client should authenticate a service’s certificate. The record includes information that can help the client verify the service is legitimate and not an impostor..

 

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UK SME bank Cashplus has this week officially rebranded as Zempler Bank, in a brand overhaul which the bank says has cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and was two years in the making. The bank made the change, because the name Cashplus, launched in 2005, had become outdated for a digital bank in an increasingly cashless age.

From: UK SME digital bank Zempler Bank says rebrand costs hundreds of thousands of pounds – Tech.eu.

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Among the 2024 bond issues on DLT, the World Bank’s CHF 200 million digital bond stands out as a significant milestone for several reasons.
– It is the first time an international issuer has issued a digital bond in Swiss Francs.
– This bond settles using the Swiss National Bank’s wCBDC, marking a significant step in integrating central bank digital currencies into capital markets.
– The issuance involved collaboration with the Swiss National Bank and the SIX Digital Exchange.

From: From VOC to Blockchain: The Evolution of Bond Markets | by Efi Pylarinou | Jul, 2024 | Medium.

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The head of Britain’s National Health Service recently said that it is seeing more people turn up in their specialised gambling clinics having become hooked on crypto trading. and British politicians some time ago urged the government to treat retail investment in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin as a form of gambling. Whether cryptocurreny trading is best characterised as a financial market, gambling or a new form of e-sport, it is undoubtedly causing problems.

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Writing in the Colombia Law School blog on capital markets, Todd Baker challenges the view that cryptocurrencies are financial assets, saying that this risks luring policymakers into a “potentially catastrophic category error” because their markets are not economically related to the financial system and do not serve the productive purposes of the financial system. He regards cryptocurrency players as finance LARPers* and calls their activities “gambling emulating finance”. Frankly, he has a point. In many ways, the cryptocurrency markets have more in common with electronic sports than e-finance.

From: Let’s Not Throw The Crypto Baby Out With The Crypto Bathwater.

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I remember hearing someone at an event (I can’t remember who was talking or whar the event was, unfortunately) say that buying cryptocurrency was just like playing roulette, which I suppose is sort of true if like playing a form of roulette where the richest players are controlling the wheel and have a stake in the casino.

In many ways, cryptocurrency investing (at the retail level) is much worse for individuals that gamling is. After all, if you go to Las Vegas for the weekend, you know exactly what is going on. The rules are clear. The odds are fixed. In Vegas, you know that you will have a fun time playing roulette with your friends, but you also know that you will lose because the house has 5.26% edge. My favourite casino game is blackjack, and I have enjoyed many late night sessions with friends, a few drinks and split eights. Blackjack happens to have the best odds of all of the casino games with a 0.5% edge to the house. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. But overall I lose, as does everyone else, and I’m happy to pay the half-a-percent fun tax down Fremont street.

In comparison, cryptocurrency markets are thin, opaque and manipulated. No-one knows what’s going on, especially as more and more trading heads into dark markets.

 

 

 

 

Nathan Davies and Simon Ferris from the University of Nottingham Medical School, writing in The Lancet, make a rather interesting (and to me, at least, rather compelling) argument that cryptocurrency trading harms public health in a similar way to gambling.

 

Although gambling harm is increasingly appraised through a public health lens, researchers and policy makers should also consider new financial instruments that have features of gamblification when seeking to research or reduce the burden of harm of gambling. Otherwise, new harmful products might fill the space left by public health and regulatory measures taken against traditional gambling products.

 

 Public Health England estimates societal gambling- related harm in England exceeds £1·27 billion. Australian research estimates that the years lost to disability from gambling exceeds that of diabetes.1 

 

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ECB board member Fabio Panneta says trading in unbacked digital assets should be treated by regulators like gambling.

In a blog post, Panetta describes crypto investments as a gamble disguised as an investment asset.

“They do not perform any socially or economically useful function,” he says. “They are rarely used for payments and do not fund consumption or investment. As a form of investment, unbacked cryptos lack any intrinsic value, too. They are speculative assets.”

From ECB executive says gambling rules should be applied to curb crypto speculation:

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I agree with David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, who talks about using “smart” “contracts” with trade terms and settlement instructions written directly into the code to reduce risks and build confidence in the financial system. His view is that this new technology is about making the financial system more transparent and I think that is actually the core to a workable regulatory environment. In fact, as I have written before, a market built up from “glass banks” trading with each other, serving their customers, working with regulators in entirely new ways, is an attractive prospect and suggests that a new financial market infrastructure (FMI) may be on the horizon.

From: Let’s Not Throw The Crypto Baby Out With The Crypto Bathwater.

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