Snippings

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Still, innovations in money do pose subtle risks. Central banks could be viewed as political agents if their visibility into payment transactions is used for law enforcement or surveillance purposes.

From Central banks must not be blind to the threats posed by CBDCs | Financial Times.

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A ZKP must fulfill three properties:

• Zero knowledge: A malicious5 verifier cannot extract any information except for the statement being true or not.

• Completeness: A prover can convince the verifier (who follows the protocol) of a true statement.

• Soundness: A malicious prover cannot convince the verifier of a false statement with a sufficiently high

probability.

Data Confidentiality

 

1. Berentsen A, Lenzi J, Nyffenegger R. An Introduction to Zero-Knowledge Proofs in Blockchains and Economics. Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Review. 2023;forthcoming.

 

Being private about personal characteristics is one example where ZKPs could be used for data confidentiality. As an example, Carlos wants to prove at the entrance of a nightclub that he is 18 without revealing his exact age or any other personal characteristic. Judy wants to enter a fancy club she has a membership to but does not want the doorman to know who she is. Both could create a ZKP to prove that they are allowed to enter. For both examples, we would need some kind of underlying cryptographic set-up. In the former case, the government might have provided a digital identity, whereas in the latter case the club owners could have issued a digital membership card that they signed. The doorman could verify that the proof includes the signature of the club owner and would let Judy in.

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Financial institutions can develop new payment methods for the metaverse, such as consumer-focused wallets similar to those used for e-commerce, but with blockchain security and payment options that include cryptocurrency as well as other forms of payment. This approach would make consumer transactions as well as peer-to-peer payments easier, while maintaining the security and lower transaction costs that drove blockchain’s initial popularity for bitcoin transactions.

From Metaverse Payment Rails: Opportunities for Financial Institutions:

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JPSS

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Bankers face a never-ending list of paradigm shifts, and Deloitte correctly identifies the metaverse as the next big wave to hit, and it’s a tsunami. (Post dedicated to Dr. Martha Boeckenfeld)

Not a day goes by without bankers being bombarded by some combination of new “paradigm shifting” tech or business models like open-banking, cloud, neobanks, and generative AI, among others, which will all rock their world. The list grows longer by the day.

Who can blame bankers for becoming increasingly numb to the onslaught of technologies that all threaten to disrupt their business?

So here is the good news for bankers out there. The metaverse is the end game for every new technology and business model banks have crammed down their throats.

From Metaverse banks are coming; The IMF is deluded; QR payments rule; Britcoin trial shows innovation; Can banks dance?:

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Large merchants can avoid getting locked into abusive vendor relationships by running payments in-house. Zalando Payments, owned by the German eCommerce retailer, reports excellent progress with €27bn processed in 2021. After charging its parent a chunky 2.7% processing fee, Zalando Payments generated revenues of €276m with a profit of €40m. Two thirds of its turnover comes from processing; the remainder from an in-house BNPL product.

From Business of Payments – July 2023 – by Geoffrey Barraclough.

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Stablecoins have potential advantages in speed, cost and programmability.  Tokenization could provide benefits that FedNow never can. Payments today involve separate movements of the payment information—name and account of payor and payee and amount—and the value. Each involves multiple steps and parties.  Stablecoins can combine messaging, reconciliation, and transfer of value all at once, instantly.

From: The U.S. Can Make the Rules on Stablecoins, or It Can Take Them | Barron’s.

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There is an interesting mimetic echo of the birth of the Eurodollar market here.

The Eurodollar market history is instructive.

That was also a market that grew quickly, outside the control of U.S. bank regulators, as Josh Younger of the New York Fed recounts in a recent podcast. Foreign banks that took in dollar deposits and created dollar liabilities were not constrained by U.S. reserve requirements or interest rate limits. U.S. policy makers started to worry about the risk of runs, the absence of a central bank liquidity backstop in dollars, and possible interference with monetary policy. Ultimately they realized they not only needed to engage with the market, including by providing swap lines, but that the market could help cement the dollar as the main currency for international commerce.

From: The U.S. Can Make the Rules on Stablecoins, or It Can Take Them | Barron’s.

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Eurodollar futures contracts are time deposits that are stored in banks outside the US, but denominated in US dollars. They are called Eurodollars because originally they were contracts held by European banks but they should more properly be called Xenodollars, as the terms refers to dolar time deposits stored in banks outside the United States, anywhere in the world. The Eurodollar futures contract (a cash-settled three month loan of $1m) rose to become the most traded interest rate-based product in the world until it was abandoned in April this year as part of the restructuring of financial markets away from the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) to the dollar-based Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR). The Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where almost all Eurodollar futures traded, converted all Eurodollar futures contracts into SOFR contracts.

From a sample of 141 potential suppliers in China and India, 100 were willing to supply our researchers with fentanyl precursor chemicals, pill presses and dies, paid for using crypto. All 100 suppliers were Chinese.

• Of those 100 suppliers, almost 20 were willing to supply fentanyl and one was shown to have previously supplied Alex Peijnenburg, a known fentanyl dealer who has been sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

• These dealers’ wallets show an income of over $32 million in cryptoassets – predominantly in Bitcoin and Tether – originating mostly from centralized exchanges.

From: .

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https://www.elliptic.co/hubfs/Elliptic_Report_Crypto%20and%20the%20Global%20Fentanyl%20Trade.pdf?utm_campaign=Typologies%202023&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=267079136&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–1rZFBUGYEUN3vWXrJmXq1ayYrXQ5jics91MB3WwqKz-3QFVy9MJyIvUndm_zW4or2qHqBcpyJe8wwCshvCmcJ9c5qsQ&utm_content=267079136&utm_source=hs_automation

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the digital dollar—even though it doesn’t exist and the Fed says it has no plans to issue one—has become political red meat. Tapping into voters’ widespread opposition to government surveillance, a group of anti-CBDC politicians has emerged with the message that the digital dollar is something to fear.

From: Is the digital dollar dead? | MIT Technology Review.

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Authorities believe there may be a connection between several robberies that have occurred in Canada involving thieves searching for private keys linked to crypto funds.

From: Canadians Are Having Crypto Stolen From Their Homes, Police Say – Decrypt.

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Web3 bug bounty platform Immunefi is being spammed with ChatGPT-generated reports that now account for 21% of accounts banned, as whitehat use of the tool grows.
Not a single genuine vulnerability wa

From: Immunefi spammed by ChatGPT-generated web3 bug bounty reports | The Block.

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